The British left only succeeds at times of national hope

By Sunder Katwala

“It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box”, wrote George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn.

Orwell enjoyed caricaturing elements of the intellectual left, yet his observation endures. A range of objections can be offered to the national anthem – from republican and secular perspectives too – but Orwell’s purpose was to ask a difficult question of the English left: why did it risk being suckers for anybody else’s nationalism, yet somehow contemptuous of any patriotism of its own?

The question seems to return every time the country enjoys, however briefly, a World Cup summer. No doubt many on the left simply enjoy it, and others who are not interested simply get on with doing something else. What is curious is how much we seem to hear from those who find so much to worry about. Why so many flags? Are nationalism and xenophobia on the march? Why are so many people wasting their lives on such trivia: don’t they know there are serious issues to discuss, and public spending cuts to oppose? Doesn’t the hope and hype which precedes English defeat demonstrate a post-imperial reflex, and our failure to come to terms with our place in the world? Shouldn’t we, in the 21st century, have got beyond national identity as we evolve towards the brotherhood and sisterhood of mankind?

All of this seems curiously selective. Few voices have condemned the national pride of South Africa in hosting the global tournament, or the support across a continent for Ghana their team’s attempt to break new ground. Indeed, the type of civic patriotism which Germany demonstrated as host nation in 2006, and how the country now responds with pride to its “multi-culti” team representing a new Germany, is both the opposite and the antidote to the xenophobic exploitation of sport which worried even Orwell, who warned that international sport was “war minus the shooting”. Given how much the mistaken conflation annoys the non-English Brits, why not be pleased that that the English have at least had the right flags on their cars since 1996?

Of course, internationalism is a positive goal for the left. But it is simply a mistake to think that we will achieve it by demanding that people should become internationalist by rejecting their local and national identities to evolve into a higher consciousness. One part of the secular cultural left has been consistently surprised by the post-1989 world, having confidently expected both national identity and religious faith to melt away into a happy cosmopolitan universalism. Europe’s experience after 1989 surely demonstrates that, as Michael Ignatieff wrote in Blood and Belonging, that “cosmopolitanism is surely the privilege of those who can take a secure nation state for granted”. Securing human rights depends on embedding them in our domestic politics: that means entering into the contest of who we are and want to be as a nation, drawing on our deep, if politically contested, national traditions of outward-looking internationalism.

If we want to remain British – as I do – then we have to sustain majorities for British identity in each of the British nations. The idea that this is best done by suppressing other national identities is wrong-headed, and denies the history of Britain and Britishness too. As a civic identity for a multi-national state, Britishness was inherently plural from the start. Just as, after Thatcherism, devolution to Scotland and Wales was necessary to save the Union so is demonstrating that British identity has plenty of room for Englishness too.

The British left should have more confidence in its engagement in our national conversations. If some on the left have had an apparent allergy to expressions of national identity, that has never been universally true. From the Levellers to Blake’s Jerusalem to the Beveridge settlement as the way to “win the peace” after 1945, so establishing the NHS as a national symbolic as revered as the Monarchy or the BBC, radical visions about what fairness and justice have frequently staked a patriotic claim on the national consciousness. No political party or tradition should ever claim exclusive ownership of national pride or national symbols. Yet the British left has only ever been politically successful at moments of national hope, able to offer a positive vision about the type of society we want to be. If that is the essence of a democratic patriotism, it has been more important to the democratic left than many realise.