by Michael Kenny
The
government’s plans for a significant devolution of powers to Greater Manchester
continue to generate considerable debate. Critics have focused on their
implications for policy in key areas such as health provision, on the model of
executive leadership that Osborne favours in the form of the directly elected
mayor (Talbot, 2015) and on the question of whether this represents a top-down,
enclosed form of governance, or one that might permit a revival of the wider
civic culture. Equally, the merits and limitations of the Northern Powerhouse
have also generated division, not least about whether it will make a difference
to the economic prospects of some of the most disadvantaged communities in the
UK (Cox and Raikes, 2015).
Amidst this
swirl of comment and debate, much less attention has been paid to the question
of what these projects mean for one of the most powerful and destabilising
trends in British politics – political tensions around national identity and
territory. The government’s much trumpeted ambition to bring greater
self-government, increased investment and sustainable growth to the Northern
economy brings a multi-faceted set of challenges for Labour. And these include –
but also spill beyond – questions such as whether the party tries to mould a
more radical, decentralising alternative (Raikes, 2015), or sticks to a
familiar line about Tory plans to pass responsibility for cuts to beleaguered
Labour authorities.
A broader issue
at stake here is whether the party can supply a coherent answer to the
political question which inform these reforms. Does it accept the case made by
the Conservatives for English devolution, or not? Where political authority
should lie within England, and how the largest territory within the UK should
be governed, are undoubtedly uncomfortable questions for Labour to deal with.
Yet they are now also unavoidable.
Whichever way
the party turns, tensions over territory lie ahead. Rather than dismissing its
Scottish cataclysm as a one-off, progressives should see it as a warning about
what can happen to parties that are on the wrong side of the powerful currents
of national sentiment and cultural attachment. Yet the Labour leadership’s lack
of feel for these issues is notable. Amidst all the politicking over Jeremy
Corbyn’s reshuffle of his Shadow Cabinet in January 2016, his team were
strikingly inattentive to the territorial implications of their decisions, as
two representatives of Northern seats and one from the Midlands were removed,
and more London MPs promoted (Dathan, 2016).
The attachments
that have become most important to people across the UK range from the very
local, up to the town or city, to counties, and, for a minority, the region.
But the single, most notable, identity trend of the last two decades is the
rising salience and strength of an attachment to English, rather than British,
nationhood (Kenny, 2014). And while this does not mean that most people reject
an affiliation to the multi-national UK, there is evidence to suggest that for
a growing number, this spills over into a desire for a much greater
institutional recognition of England and its perceived interests (Wyn Jones et al, 2012).
These feelings
have come to the fore, in part, as a consequence of the devolution settlement
introduced by the first Labour government. Intended as a bulwark against the
rise of nationalist sentiment in Scotland especially, the on-going award of
greater powers for Scotland and Wales has boosted the development of more
distinct and nationally self-conscious political cultures and debates in the
non-English parts of the UK. And it has, over time, rendered the question of
the constitutional position of the English a more politically resonant one.
More recently,
following the dramatic rise to prominence of the SNP in Scotland, and the
strengthened position of a Conservative Party that is almost entirely English
in its parliamentary representation, a powerful, territorially rooted dynamic
has come to the fore in British politics. This runs between a mainly Southern,
English Conservative Party, on the one hand, and an unchallenged SNP. And
unless the UK’s progressives make themselves relevant to, and offer potential
solutions to, this conflict, they face the risk of being pushed to the margins
of political life.
Labour’s
current woes therefore have a clear territorial, as well as ideological,
dimension. Scotland is lost for the
foreseeable future. There are new challenges in Wales in the form of the
Conservative Party which polled strongly in the General Election (BBC News,
2015). And the party is a long way from being in a position to challenge in
swathes of Eastern, South-Eastern and Southern England (Diamond and Radice,
2015).
One tempting
response to these challenges is to assume that it should seek refuge in its
remaining heartlands – the North of England and London. The idea of a renewal
premised upon Northern identity and its accompanying traditions is both
powerful and appealing. It speaks to those who still hold a candle for the
ambition that has, in recent years, fallen into disrepute in Labour circles –
the idea of developing a system of regional government. This idea was pursued
in highly technocratic form by the Blair governments, and was mainly driven by
concerns about imbalances in regional economic fortunes and performance (Diamond
and Radice, 2015). Some hoped for the development of more democratic systems at
the regional level, but this ambition never came close to realisation. The
regionalist project was shattered by the No vote registered in the North East
Referendum of 2004. Prominent figures from Northern Labour, such as John
Prescott, were architects of this vision, and it was nurtured thereafter by
various Brownites, most notably Ed Balls. Similar assumptions and ambitions
inform current assertions of Northern regionalism.
Yet there have
always been Northern Labour figures – for instance David Blunkett (2005) and
Frank Field – who have instead argued for England as the natural companion to
the pride that many feel in cities like Sheffield and Liverpool.
More generally,
the notion of a Labour revival based upon the politics of any single region –
be it London or regions in the North – suffers from a number of limitations. In
political terms, it is unlikely that Osborne would have pursued the Powerhouse
strategy had he not become convinced of the potential for his own party to win
more voters in parts of the North. This judgment reflects an appreciation that
Labour's position, though strong, has been weakening markedly over the last few
decades, as signalled by the loss of local government in cities like Newcastle
(2004) and Sheffield (2008) to the Lib Dems. Labour is also badly affected by
the rise in non-voting among working-class citizens in the North. Indeed,
across the country, while the turnout gap before the mid 2000s by social class
was fairly small, at the last election the difference in the proportion of
people in manual jobs who did not vote compared to people in professional and
managerial jobs was nearly 20 per cent (Tilley, 2016). The rise of UKIP, now
the most working-class party in British politics, represents a particularly
acute challenge for Labour; there are few signs that Corbyn’s brand of metropolitan
leftism will stem the flow of working-class voters from Labour.
A further
reason for caution about the idea of a Labour revival founded upon regional
identity is that such an idea serves to lock Labour into a particular cultural
idiom and a sub-national focus at a point when, like its competitors, it needs
to contemplate building alliances and making connections across differences of
class, geography and ethnicity. But seeking to stick to a UK-wide patriotism
looks increasingly like flogging a dead horse, as the depth of attachment
associated with Britishness has declined so markedly. A state-wide national
focus and a strongly regionalist ‘offer’, which many in the party favour,
represents a pitch that is both too broad and too narrow. It is perhaps no
coincidence that in Wales, the only territory where Labour is the leading
force, the party takes the lead in telling a progressive national story, and is
entirely comfortable within a progressively patriotic frame of reference (Deans,
2015).
This does not
mean neglecting the task of developing an alternative model of devolution to
that on offer from the current government. Labour needs to explain its belief
that devolution requires greater voice and recognition for the English within
the political system, and also signal that it supports the dispersal of the
powers hoarded within the central state.
It also needs
to face up to the complex cross-currents of public attitudes on issues of
identity and governance. While there is undoubtedly a growing feel for the idea
of self-government and empowerment in different parts of the UK, support for a
radical programme of local devolution remains fairly shallow (Gash, Randall and
Sims, 2014). This may well alter once devolved models are established and if
their benefits become clear, but any project for local or regional devolution
has to live within these parameters. The Englishness that is re-emerging is
not, for most people, separate from, or a rival to, attachments to their own
area or town. It is through the lived experience of different places, towns and
cities that a feeling of nationhood is learned and shaped. Territorial
identities work in more complicated, joined up ways than progressive thinking
tends to allow. A recent series of annual surveys on this score show that a
sense of Englishness had grown at a roughly similar rate in all regions of
England – from Durham to Devon, and Cheltenham to Clacton (Wyn Jones et al, 2012). The only significant
outlier to this trend is Greater London and the South East, where a much larger
proportion of people continue to identity as British.
Appropriating
feelings of local solidarity and pride, while connecting to a wider progressive
and patriotic story, looks increasingly like the right kind of response to these
challenges. And, as various commentators have noted, Labour now has a
successful template to ponder in the form of Jim McMahon’s impressive campaign
in the Oldham by-election of November 2015. This illustrates well how such a
focus can create the opening for politicians of the left to offer a more rooted
and compelling alternative to the shrill discourse of populist nationalism.
Clearly people
do not live or express their sense of Englishness in the same way in this
extraordinarily diverse land. But is it misleading to assume that these
differences are mainly structured along a North-South divide. Multiple
differences, not the ‘two nations’ of Victorian England, should be the
watchword of progressives seeking to engage with the contemporary politics of identity.
In key
respects, English national identity is still defined by an indefinability which
has fascinated and disappointed commentators for centuries (Kumar, 2003). This
gives it an imaginative range, an adaptability, and a lived, rather than stipulated,
quality (a ‘behavioural grammar’ as Kate Fox (2004) puts it). And it also means
that there is plenty of room for different visions, ideas and experiences of
Englishness to be promoted and celebrated in the public culture.
It is certainly
true that the playing field is far from being level when it comes to how
different parts of the country figure within the national story. George Orwell
was one of a swathe of Southern English writers who journeyed north in the last
century, and reported on an England that seemed to exist outside the ambit of
familiar ideas of Englishness. This was the England of the industrial
revolution soiled by the sweat’ land which many writers assumed to be located
somewhere between the Cotswolds and the South Downs.
The North has
undoubtedly been hugely disadvantaged by patterns of cultural representation,
as well as by its systemic economic marginalisation. But there is a risk that
current assertions of the uniqueness, and progressive potential, of Northern
identity tacitly accept the dominant notion that its identities, manners and
cultures place it outside the English nation.
Englishness is
best understood as a layered set of representations, selected memories and
cultural performances. Some of the standard references through which these are
evoked – the twee village, the thatched roof, the sanitised songs of the folk
tradition invented by Cecil Sharp, and the genteel landscapes of Southern
England (as opposed to the wild and dark moors of the North) – have long
conveyed the imprint of England as the ‘Southern Country’. But these
influential and instantly recognisable versions of the homeland have always
been shadowed, and occasionally challenged, by other Englands. These have been
drawn from its industrial heritage, the rich history of its local civic
cultures, the spirit of economic innovation and commerce associated with cities
like Leeds and Manchester, and the cultural ‘cool’ attached to various iconic
artists (Harris, 2010).
In this
undoubtedly imbalanced context, a turn away the ‘identity space’ (to borrow
Charles Taylor’s phrase) that is coalescing, in messy and disparate ways,
around a more strongly felt Englishness, would be self-defeating. The left
needs to champion a more diverse, locally rooted and regionally ranging set of
impressions and ideas about England, and its peoples. If it does not start
telling a progressive story of nationhood to those audiences still prepared to
give it a hearing, there is every chance that Tory Englishness will become a
self-fulfilling prophecy.
This essay was first published as part of the WRCN e-book
The Politics of the North: Governance, territory and identity in Northern England edited by Richard Hayton, Arianna Giovannini and Craig Berry.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Nick
Pearce for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.
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Gash, T., Randall, J., and Sims, S. (2014) Achieving Political Decentralisation. Lessons from 30years of Attempting to Devolve Political Power in the UK. Institute for Government.
Retrieved from: http://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/DecentralisationPaper%20-%20FINAL_0.pdf
Harris, J. (2010). The Last Party: Britpop, Blair and the Demise of English Rock. London: Harper Perennial.
Kenny, M. (2014). The Politics of English Nationhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kumar, K. (2003). The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Raikes, L. (2015, February 25). Devo Manc? It’s the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread. New Statesman. Retrieved from: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/02/devo-manc-its-best-thing-sliced-bread
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Retrieved from: http://www.policynetwork.net/pno_detail.aspx?ID=5038&title=How+can+Labour+assemble+a+winning+coalition+of+voters%3f
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