How and why the idea of a national economy is radical

Being explicit and creative about the nation is a way of making Labour’s whole programme credible, different, and popular, as well as being true to its history.   While it carries dangers, it is a way of developing a politics, and an underpinning narrative, directed at making the country more democratic, fairer and more equal.  However, the time is past when one could just assume the nation was ‘Britain’ or more properly the United Kingdom. The brief age of the British nation is over, with the legitimacy of the central state strongly challenged in the peripheries, and not only there.

The Anglo-British Left has a problem understanding its own nationalism.   Nationalism is in its view a bad thing, the antithesis of a proper British internationalism. The British Left are descendants of British liberalism and imperialism which saw, correctly, that nationalism was its enemy, and cannot see there can be any such thing as British nationalism except on the right-wing xenophobic fringe. To complicate matters, today’s British left (wrongly) sees imperialism as the purest manifestation of this British nationalism, and is blind to non-imperial British nationalism, not least that of the Left.[1] 

As  in so many other parts of the world, British socialism and social democracy, at least after 1945,  were also nationalist.  From Bevan to Benn, and from Attlee to Wilson the idea of a national economy and a policy of national reconstruction were central.  In the 1970s and early 1980s the Labour left was nationalist and Brexiter, seeking in effect a return to the Labour policies, and British practices, of the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.  Today’s Lexiters stand in a grand tradition.

Labour was the party of the national critique of the Tories for being the party of property and self-interest rather than the nation, and of the ruling class for having interests different from that of the nation. The nationalism, indeed patriotism,  of the left was a critical one which called out chauvinism; attacked, elite special interests; and challenged, those who misused the idea of the nation.  This was not an anti-foreigner, but rather an anti-British-elite nationalism.

Indeed, the core historical-political-economic theses of the broader Left have long been a nationalist critique of  British imperialism, the City, and the globally-oriented elite associated with both. The power of this elite, it is argued, made national economic reconstruction impossible, or at least difficult, with negative consequences for the British economy and working class. Scottish and Welsh nationalism owes much to this critique not least in attacking the nature of power in Whitehall/Westminster.  

CONTINUED in Renewal 29.2 (2021)

[1] David Edgerton, ‘Britain’s persistent racism cannot simply be explained by its imperial history’, Guardian 24 June 2020.  See also David Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A twentieth-century History (Penguin, 2019), and the essential Anthony Barnett,  The Lure of Greatness: England's Brexit & America's Trump (London: Unbound, 2017).