The Labour leader has called on the left to "embrace a positive, outward-looking version of English identity". He is not the first. From the "progressive patriotism" of Billy Bragg, to the "Blue Labour" patriotism of Maurice Glasman and friends, there is a view among many that the left has to capture the flag for leftist ideas.
This is a long-standing argument on the left. In the 1980s, many Labour-supporting intellectuals, particularly those affiliated to the Communist party, argued that the left had lost to Thatcherism in part because it misunderstood the long traditions of patriotism in parts of the British working class. It was argued that the Thatcherites had effectively appropriate the symbols of nationality for a "national popular" ideology of the right. In response, they argued, the left should not reject patriotism, but rather attempt to occupy the terrain with their own symbols.
In fact, for those who pay attention to such arcanum, those arguments in turn derive from the Popular Fronts of the 1930s. In response to the rise of fascism, the Comintern argued that as the fascists were busily appropriating and distorting national histories for their own deadly ends, socialists should rescue the revolutionary and radical traditions of the nation, particularly of its working and oppressed majorities. Consequently, Popular Fronts in, for example, France and the US, were profoundly patriotic. In this same vein many "people's histories" were written. For leftists educated in this tradition, a Popular Front linking the widest possible coalition of interests in a "national popular" politics of the left, was the best recourse against Thatcherism.
For Ed Miliband, of course, the dilemma is quite different. The fascist threat is far less grave, unless one takes seriously Maurice Glasman's suggestion that EDL members should be made to feel at home in the Labour party. Thatcherism is no longer an emerging threat – it is a fully institutionalised statecraft to which Labour has adapted. Rather, there is a crisis of British unionism, and an exhausted rhetoric of "British values", which both of Miliband's predecessors struggled to breathe life into.
Simultaneously, there is a crisis of representation, as the major parties have become increasingly detached from their social base. Labour has struggled to recompose itself in its working-class heartlands, offering only half-hearted resistance to the Tories' austerity agenda. Its most serious problem is in Scotland, where the SNP has a record in government, delivering social democratic reforms where Labour adhered strictly to neoliberal orthodoxy. The SNP's landslide in May last year has made Scottish secession from the UK a realistic possibility. If this happens, it will be to a considerable extent because of the politics of austerity, and the failures of Labour as an opposition. And it may constitute a serious long-term blow to Labourism.
Miliband knows this. This is why his speech acknowledged the reforms delivered by Welsh and Scottish parliaments, and why he sought to connect British patriotism to the defence of social reforms such as the NHS. He also knows that unionism in any strong sense has begun to lose its purchase, which is why he has tried to make the case for the union not as a nation, but as a multinational state compatible with a reformed English nationalism.
But the burden of Miliband's speech is pure "Blue Labour", and its problems are manifold. First of all, like all attempts to articulate a sense of "country", his evocation of Englishness suffers from rhetorical pneumatism: "values" claimed for England that are either meaningless soufflé, or just as applicable to any other country, yet certainly far from universal in England itself. The modes of life within any nation are not merely diverse, but also often antagonistic. How does one reconcile homophobic England to gay England? Spouse-beating England to feminist England? The England of bankers and fatcats to the England of unemployment and service cuts? Nationalist discourse necessarily "mentions" certain modes of life in it, while excluding others.
Second, as a result of the above, politicians who play with patriotism cannot help sounding vapid, unless and until there is a specific threat to be evoked, against which the people can be defined, if only negatively. While Scottish nationalists have successfully linked nationalism to anti-Tory sentiment, the same is hard to pull off in England. This is why the symbols of English patriotism tend to be linked to a politics of domination, and exclusion. Rightist politicians in the more powerful states tend to sound more convincing as nationalists; they are able to see immigration as a threat tantamount to invasion.
Miliband attempts to situate his position in a tradition of English socialism, appropriating the revolutionary patriotism of Orwell and Morris. Whatever you think of this as a tradition, Miliband is no revolutionary: too timid to even speak of class, he wants to cherish Britain's institutions, including the ancient regime of the monarchy. As such, his attempt at a progressive patriotism appears as smug, deferential, and rather conservative.
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