In a recent Guardian piece, Alex Niven highlights the oddly vaporous nature of support for English identity, sovereignty or independence. While the same demographics that determined the last two national plebiscites to favour the right - the rump of property-owning older people in Britain’s suburbs and exurbs - seem to feel in favour of some form of English self-determination, it isn’t, in the absence of any existing English state or cultural institutions, clear what that means. The periodic reappearance on the centre-left of programmes for “progressive patriotism” - Billy Bragg’s, though focused on Britain rather than England, is probably the least offensive - is an attempt to capture what were only ever tenuously or temporarily Labour voting blocs or, since, Corbyn, to secure the fealty of the non-urban Labour constituencies that Stephen Kinnock branded with the slogan of Vichy France. Such a conception of national belonging was always part of New Labour’s imagined building of its coalition, even if its confused nature - at once Cool Britannia and the central piece of a patchwork that left Welsh and Scottish identities to develop themselves - was indicative that class was the overriding factor in its electoral calculus. The impotence of actually-existing “progressive patriotism”, which boasts no fans outside of thinktanks and their operatives in broadsheet comment pages, is evident in the fact that its desired voters now go straight for the uncut closed-borders nationalism of UKIP and the Tory Party’s right fringes. (Decca Aitkenhead’s review of Bragg’s book suggests the major problem, especially as it stood 10 years into the Blair experiment: left-liberals supposedly have to “rise to this challenge” of using nationalism because in their absence it’s been colonised by “the Daily Mail and BNP”. As if that weren’t a giveaway that they were dealing with damaged goods.) As Alex points out, there’s no especially compelling reason as to why social liberalism and its potential economic counterparts should be delivered through English nationalism “in a context where English statehood remains a far-flung historical memory”.
I say this as one of the guilty parties in Alex’s polemic, having worked on a long project in the last decade about English traditions of social radicalism and their eruption in aesthetics as a form of historical memory. All the usual suspects were rounded up: the Levellers, John Ball, the Luddites and Bill Douglas’ Comrades. Although I tried numerous times to reconceptualise it, in the end in its most plausible form it didn’t make sense to keep the framing device of English identity. This was, in part, because of the problems Alex points out that distinguish inchoate English nationalism from the nationalisms that had such an overwhelming political effect from the 19th century onwards. The “imagined communities” of post-Romantic Europe could invest themselves in the recovery of purportedly national languages, to be distributed by a globally spreading print capitalism. These prefigured official national cultures - the new national library always accompanied the new parliament. With modern English already the de facto language of the advanced capitalist world, nationalism turns antiquarian, alighting on the Norman yoke, forests, “freemen on the land” and so on in turn. The descending staircase of retrospect, hunting for the locus of the national golden age, is combined with the sort of shallow historical sense possessed by psychogeographers and dads devoted to BBC Four documentaries, where the mores of communities settled for only a few generations take on the immutability of nature. This twin movement - the intertwining of the oldest and the very recent past, the fantasy-general and the particular - leaves out, of course, the 18th and 19th centuries, in which England was at once absorbed in the Act of Union and expanded into the powerhouse of the emerging capitalist world-system, the period that, as Alex writes in last year’s New Model Island, “really killed off Englishness once and for all, and gave rise to a denuded hulk nation in the middle of the islands”.
Englishness, particularly the “purist, postmodern Englishness” that Alex sees arising as Blairism declines, is thus the archetypal political commodity of a country that, as Tom Nairn and Perry Anderson claimed, remained in the state of political backwardness created by the lack of a bourgeois revolution even as its forces of production outpaced the world. As Walter Benjamin noted of the commodity-form, the new presents itself as the ever-same and the ever-same - the persistence of class domination in the form of deadened labour-power - presents itself as the latest thing (multicultural, pluralistic English democracy). It’s precisely this commodification - as Alex writes, “[m]orbid nostalgia is the evil twin of industrial modernity” - that makes Englishness vaporous: all that is solid melts into air, and the simulacra of English identity make perfect sale items, emerging into their proper being only as the nation itself ceases to exist, as copies without originals. And yet, as mental phantoms go, the very difficulty of exorcising English identity is indicative of something. Whilst Alex turns, particularly in New Model Island, to other modern forms of identity emergent within “the early, experimental phase of Blairism”, particularly regionalism - an approach that’s drawn some perhaps misguided criticism - I think it’s worth dwelling with the infernal problem of English identity’s trinkets.
This is especially the case as Corbynism, which might have contended over identity on behalf of a modernist socialism, is in abeyance. I suggested, in an essay published last February, that some of Corbynism’s limits lay not so much in its purported inability to reckon with existing working-class identities - its supposed metropolitan disdain for a fantasised pure fealty to home, family and hard work - but its lack of attention to the social and economic ground of such wispy belongings. The dull and substanceless fantasies of the political forces most invested in English identity arise from the destruction of the world that the working-class made for itself from the inferno of capitalist dispossession. EP Thompson observes in The Making of the English Working Class (1963) the curious productive effect that fables about “freemen on the land” and “the English love of liberty” had for the heroic period of the workers’ movement, at least in the absence of the ideals the French Revolution had produced. In the moment of that class’s historic defeat, those notions persist, but now animated by a social void at their heart. The wet dreams of Observer columnists about Gareth Southgate or Anglo-Saxon folkmoots are the twin of the racist street violence of statue connoisseurs, giving the appearance of meaningful form to the negation of social meaning. (It was in just this way that Mark Fisher suggested ISIS was a kind of grotesque counterpart to the “boring nihilism” of 21st-century capitalism, “an existential poverty that accompanies the material poverty into which capital plunges so many.”) At its best, Corbynism sought to circumvent the futile culture wars that arise when the partisans of such static, non-dialectical concepts debate, although its policies around rebuilding social infrastructure, most obviously through a “green industrial revolution”, didn’t go far enough. (That limitation wasn’t responsible for Labour’s fall at the final post in the last general election, though it was precisely the historical disaster of neoliberalism that made electoral success such an uphill struggle.)
In the absence of a historic bloc able at present to struggle over these questions in the realm of official politics, it may be useful to turn back for a moment to one of the points of class contestation within English identity itself. William Morris has been one of the key figures in the odd progressive rehabilitation of Englishness, both for his design work which combined attention to natural detail with a complicated impulse to democratise radical design, and for his odd utopian medievalism, which posited the English craft guilds as the template for labour organisation in an ideal future society. He inherited and attempted to turn on its head a whole historical set of associations - nothing so solid as a national tradition - of the sort that Peter Ackroyd describes at windy length in Albion.
As Thompson notes in his somewhat tendentious biography, Morris was particularly given to nostalgia and sentimentalism when, as an organiser in the Socialist League, he felt the tide was turning against the working-class, retreating into fantasies that drew on his childhood memories of Epping Forest as a kind of unspoiled fragment of England. Morris’s political-aesthetic challenge condensed and revived a century’s worth of class struggle over putatively English nature, as enclosure had formed the countryside that the national tradition of landscape painting celebrated and the dispossessed working-class that came to labour in mills and factories. His designs, with their flat elaboration of plants’ growth into pattern, revolt against the corralling of nature in its particularity into the moneyed schemas of easel painting. But his politics also register the English condition as a state of damage, a psychic complex arising from the capitalist domination of nature in tandem with the persistence of aristocratic backwardness. The liberation of nature’s particularity can only be achieved through the universality of the class struggle against imperialism and what Engels called “the anarchy of production”. But in this England turns against its own potential freedom, the phantom image of Merrie England or the pseudo-Norse past of Morris’s prose sagas rising up as the result of this same void or wound: the commodity or simulation of identity as the natural product of bad ecology. This is, in part, why Morris is unable to narratively imagine the transition to a just and ecologically sound society, to the redemption of English medievalism, in News From Nowhere. Instead he obliges his narrator to fall asleep by the Thames and wake up amid socialism, with the revolutionary assault on unemployment and imperial plunder glimpsed only retrospectively. The imagined community of Morris’s Nowhere can’t emerge pristine into the modernity of its identity, but had to come into being through reckoning with the wounds of a past it has forgotten, absorbed into the history of a natural world to which it has been reconciled.
In this sense, the culture war over identity in the absence of institutions is really just the anti-dialectical aftereffect of a deeper struggle over whether people have power over their own lives, one whose horizon is communism and whose substance is that of our collective relationship with nature. The world in which we could collectively make real identities doesn’t exist, but the conflict over the goods that could produce it will inevitably involve prising open the appearances of our falsified national past.