How to challenge UKIP’s vision of England

I’d love to see a head-to head debate between Ed Miliband and Nigel Farage. Forget the Tories, with their incoherent and opportunist brand of soundbite politics. Forget the LibDems, riven by their possibly terminal identity crisis. The argument should be a battle between two possible futures for our country and our society, each of which is based on a different story about our past.

As Nigel Farage continually stresses, UKIP’s big idea is national self-determination. There’s is a politics about the relationship between identity and power. It is rooted in a conception of Britain as a once powerful nation populated by a people who share the same culture. In their story, Britain declined because we handed power over own own society to others. But power, for UKIP, is a simple matter. It exists in one place, in Parliament.

UKIP’s version of British history is Enoch Powell’s without the explicit racism. Powell’s most important concept was not race but sovereignty. His was a strange kind of post-imperial politics. Powell responded to the dismembering of the complex, polyglot, confederal system of states which the Crown presided over through the early twentieth century by retreating behind starkly drawn national boundaries. Powell’s story was about unity and homogeneity. It conjured an oddly abstract idea of what it meant to belong to any place. There were no local loyalties, no towns or cities, only duty to the nation. Powell, wrongly, believed that Britain’s difference from Europe lay in its uniquely absolutist yet democratic constitution.

Similarly, UKIP’s idea of the nation is very thin and abstract. It’s patriotism is about a single undifferentiated mass of people represented in a single parliament. UKIP has nothing to say about devolution to our towns and cities, no account of the plurality of English civic life, no story about the fact that people have different interests which need to be reconciled, no real understanding of the way global forces (including immigration) affect particular places and how they can be channelled and resisted. The only history they are interested in are those moments of war (Farage is obsessed by World War One) when Britain acted with unitary force overseas. In fact, they have virtually nothing to say about England at all. They usually blur Britain and England, only lately jumping on the ‘English votes for English laws’ bandwagon.

There is a paradox, of course. UKIP claims to be hostile to the ‘Westminster elite’, and sounds like it is offering an alternative story which connects to peoples’ sense of disenfranchisement. In fact, they believe in nothing more than parliamentary sovereignty, in other words in the absolute authority of those self-same MPs elected to Westminster. They only manage to pull off the contradiction because of their charismatic leader, a man who looks different from the dry, dull hacks who populate parliament. But in fact, Farage’s revolt against the political establishment is designed to give Westminster more power.

In the debate I imagine happening, the leader of the Labour Party would harry, tease and ridicule UKIPs leader for his narrow ideas about politics and power. He would present an alternative story of British history, in which the dominant theme has been the sharing of sovereignty and the dispersal of power, within our country and beyond. He’d show how the idea that Parliament really has absolute infinite power was a fiction created in the 1970s, when Enoch Powell and his colleagues were trying to invent reasons to oppose Britain’s accession to the European Union and discovered the unitary nation state. Before and after, British history has been dominated by treaties and alliances, by its presence within networks of other state. Britain’s empire worked when Westminster relinquished control (as in the ‘self-governing’ dominions). It was a catastrophic disaster when it tried to retain power (India).

Our alternative story would be rooted in an idea of England in which power is dispersed across towns, cities and counties. It would begin not with the nation-state. It would start instead with the places where people live and work. Immigration would be an issue. But it would not be a question about abstract statistics which Labour can never win, but instead as an argument about the effect which the movement of people has on the fabric of life, for good or ill, in our towns and cities. No glib championing of migration as a permanently positive benefit, but instead a series of real stories about the way migration can nurture local life.

Our leader would offer a kind of patriotism which didn’t jump straight from the individual to the nation. Instead, he would link upwards and outwards, from our street to our city up and out, seeing no tension between Liverpool or London and England. He would tell a story about the creation of participatory institutions in our cities and regions to nurture economic growth, get people into work, build houses and develop skills – all the things UKIP cannot and does not have anything to say about.

Above all it, he would speak in a funny and distinctively English idiom about the question which Farage is obsessed about – freedom. UKIP’s success comes from its ability to tap into a deep-rooted emphasis on self-determination in our politics. But, here, Farage is a classical liberal stranded in the world of the big corporation, defining freedom simply as the removal of nasty forces which restrain us from doing what we want. Farage’s version of freedom allows the banks to get bigger and more irresponsible, and avoid the blame for the financial crash. He is happy for big business to do whatever it wants, however that leads to superprofits and squeezed living standards. UKIP’s story about freedom is (again) something abstract and theoretical, but we don’t notice because Nigel’s such a good chap. Against this, we need to return to an older idea of freedom as participation, as the capacity to have our say in the institutions which affect our lives – our workplacesm our neighbourhoods, our public services.

The paradox of British politics right now is this: our most popular politician stands up week in week out in the European parliament, to defend our most unpopular institution, financial institutions. It’s a paradox we on the left have let happen. We need to do more than attack, but challenge with a different vision of England.