Forget left or right, it’s national identity Labour just doesn’t get

Patriotism and the left are uneasy bedfellows. For the party of devolution, it seems odd that this should be the case. Yet, if Labour’s bungled response to the rise of UKIP and Scottish nationalism betrays anything, it’s the Westminster prejudice that questions of national identity need be placated with legislation alone.

Labour’s routing in Scotland was never retribution for Gordon Brown’s brave defence of both his Scottish and British identities. But it almost certainly was a comprehensive two fingers to Ed Miliband who having had nothing to say to the “45 percent” in September 2014, came looking for their support eight months hence. Brown’s genius was his insight that adding the prefix ‘civic’ doesn’t change the essential quality of nationalism; that to be a patriot, one need not buy into lazy jingoism. But more still, his was an understanding of patriotism, so apparently lacking during his brief tenure, that it is, fundamentally, a socialist value.

The argument need not be counterintuitive. Faced with mobile capital on a scale unimaginable forty years ago, the “forces of conservatism” once decried by Tony Blair have swiftly become anything but. As markets leapfrog over national governments and the EU’s TTIP further weakens Britain’s standing in the face of “free” trade tyranny, it is today’s ‘Conservative’ voices throwing caution to the wind in their attempts to open up our proud cultural heritage for compulsory tender. Be it the National Health Service or the future of Aunty Beeb, the task of conserving what we know to be worthwhile and organic social institutions falls to socialists.

Labour’s immediate challenge is daunting. With the EU referendum approaching, never again must our party repeat the mistakes of Scotland and refuse to speak to the losing side of such polarising issues in the arrogant assumption that their votes will be ready to meet us at the other end. For all that the SNP may talk-the-talk when it comes to ‘austerity’, it was the arrogance of our party north of the border that delivered them their landslide in May.

Yet the affliction is far from a universal one. For a lesson in how to build the kind of politics that pairs an embrace of complex national identities with a radical approach to public services, Wales, where a Labour administration has been in power for some 18 years, is a case in point. Welsh Labour’s embrace of language and a populist sense of what it means to hail from the other side of Offa’s Dyke have shot the nationalists’ fox. Though Jeremy Corbyn recently addressed a public meeting in Cardiff brandishing a copy of Nick Davies’ and Darren Williams’ “Clear Red Water”, it was ex-First Minister, Rhodri Morgan who coined the phrase, not so much out of committed radicalism (though it played a part), but a determination to see that Welsh politics, and Welsh Labour politics in particular wouldn’t be crowded out by a Westminster Blairism that demanded unstinting deference in return for devolution.

Going into next year’s devolved and local elections, Labour across the United Kingdom can learn from this example. The question of how we combine a recognition that social injustice knows no borders with a respect for complex, and yes, separate national identities must hold the key to our party’s survival. For all that our central campaign let us down in May, our strength lies in our local and respective national movements. With the chances of our leadership crisis having resolved itself by May 2016 appearing slimmer by the day, it is only at these levels that our party can speak honestly and humanly to our sense of place, patriotism and rootedness in our communities that still determines how we see our lives and the world around us.