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England and the 'National-Popular' (Part 2)

eddie — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:36:49 +0000

Click here for Part 1 of this article

Where is England?

Well, I think I live in it. So, for me, it’s the earth beneath my feet and the landscape I walk through with my dog. Green and pleasant, temperate and mild, most of the time anyway. It’s the slightly scruffy streets of the fine city I live in; the cafes and theatres, the galleries and libraries and museums, the gyms and jogging routes that give me culinary, aesthetic, intellectual and athletic sustenance. It’s the semi-darkness of the urban evening, the encounters with the familiar unknown and the safely dangerous, which as a man I feel securely entitled to. Then, venturing further afield for work and research, it’s the overheated, creaking railway line that takes me to London and Essex, where I make my living as an expert of sorts in the social care of people with HIV/AIDS. As I speed past the fields and woods, back yards and warehouses of East Anglia, I often wonder what kinds of lives are led there and whether they are anything like mine. Then, at the end of a working day, I speed back to Norwich and Norfolk and a decent night’s sleep in this ‘city of silence’. This was the poet D’Annunzio’s term for ancient, pre-industrial cities, cited respectfully in the Selections from Prison Notebooks: ‘all had glorious pasts but are now of secondary importance, some little more than villages with magnificent monumental centres as a relic of their bygone splendour’. So this, in rough summary, is my England. Of course this is my personal corner of the country, but the interesting question is how to link this into a wider narrative.

England has more often defined itself by what it is not: black, Jewish, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Asian, African, Spanish, French, German, European of any sort really. This ‘negative identity’ is characteristic of national-popular cultures shaped by militaristic adventure and imperial dominion. So maybe I should also say what the England I live in is not. First off, it is no longer ‘British’, at any rate since Scottish and Welsh devolution, which had the (surely unintended but wholly predictable) effect of making some of the English feel as if these other people of the British land mass really didn’t want to live with us any more. (Northern Ireland is a more complex question which I don’t have the space to go into here.) One of my own recent weekend breaks was to Edinburgh, the beautiful, sensibly vibrant, deeply cultured and obviously prosperous capital city of Scotland, where it really does feel like the separate country it plainly aspires to be.

Secondly, the England I live in is not (for all its best intentions) multi-cultural, in the sense of a diverse but essentially unitary community. Let’s be clear: the ethnic groups of England (where they have to) live and work politely alongside each other, but there is precious little real, voluntary inter-connection. And what there is often takes the form of slightly broader ‘exclusive alliances’, based on new ‘negative identities’, such as underclass white and black youth united in ‘chav/gangsta’ culture against both Asian youth and the wider ‘respectable’ society. Paul Gilroy wrote in the 1980s that ‘there ain’t no black in the union jack’. Well, there’s plenty of black in the St George Cross in 2008, but very little brown (and certainly no tartan or taff).

I am conscious that in this last paragraph I have finally introduced some real live people into my account of the English, even if only to argue that many of them don’t seem to want to have much to do with anyone else. And this, it seems to me, is another currently defining ‘negative identity’ of the English, coming ever closer to home: that, as I and others have argued in the pamphlet Feelbad Britain, ‘we are a society of people who don’t appear to like themselves and each other very much’. The white people I commute with once or twice a week to Essex and London, on crowded, uncomfortable, often malfunctioning and surprisingly slow trains, barely exchange a glance let alone a word. For much of the year they are yellow and grey with fatigue and ill health. Unless they’ve just been on their holidays, when they briefly turn a lightly toasted colour. The comfortably unhappy.

Two other of our current social categories deserve a mention, because of what they represent in English society: the ‘grumpy old’, and then back to ‘chav’. We are well used to being told that our aging population is a problem, primarily because of the burden it will place on the welfare state and on the working-age people whose taxes pay for it. This is real enough – leaving aside the question of whether increased longevity is actually a problem – but like so much of our current political discourse, it casts the issue within a narrowly economistic framework. Far more immediate and apparent is what Gramsci would have called the ‘moral crisis’ of longer lives: a general loss of purpose, often amounting to a sense of utter futility, amongst this growing sector of the population. Faced with redundancy from jobs and industries that no longer exist, early retirement on questionable ill health grounds, or even statutory retirement decades before they can expect to die – and deprived of (or excused from) any sustained involvement in childcare by the dispersal of family networks – older people now have loads of time and (mostly) money, with little idea what to do with it all.

There are two general options for this growing segment of the population. The first is the positive ‘active elderly’ route, keeping physically fit and mentally engaged and flexible, and living happily and well – a historically unprecedented experience that requires a degree of personal resourcefulness, family and social support, and simple good luck in avoiding chronic illness and disability. The second, in many ways easier but obviously far more problematic for the individual and for society, is the negative ‘grumpy old’ option, ossifying into your grievances and prejudices, bathing in outrage and disgust. In an English context, this pretty much sums up the hard-core Daily Mail readership and the people who still bother to vote in local elections; and it casts a wider, ever darker pall over our public life.

As for chav – the Burberry cap and sportswear-clad, shaved or scraped-scalp, gold-bedecked look and lifestyle that has overrun much of what’s left of the English working class – well, it’s a genuine social phenomenon deserving far more serious scrutiny than the kind of for/against discourse of tabloid press and TV, or than I have space for here. Basically, chav is what happens when a working class is left culturally defenceless, exposed to a low-grade diet of American cultural imperialism, especially the gangsta-rap and porno-R&B that passes for pop culture in the age of MTV, the shopping mall, fast food and freely available strong lager and C-class drugs. Is chav a new way of being English? Or just a weird hybrid of commercial/‘globalisation’-era cultural styles, that will fade away as quickly as it arose, and make way for some new garb and patois for the lumpen proletariat, the white trash made not so poor in the lower reaches of the neo-liberal informal economy? We shall see…

Finally, one other thing England is not: London. Our supposedly capital city is now a quite separate entity, a member of the international network of mega-cities, which has turned its back wilfully and consciously on the country of England. As Doreen Massey has recently established in her book World City, London has its own wholly distinctive patterns of interaction and division, engagement and exploitation, quite different from the rest of England, while having distinct (and often damaging) repercussions for it. I regularly commute between the two, and spend time in both, and they are now in reality wholly separate places. To be specific, the concerns and perspectives of the metropolitan liberal left (in that lovely term, ‘the chattering classes’) are shared by very, very few people outside London. I know it comes as an occasional, very nasty surprise to be reminded of this by such phenomena as the Countryside Alliance, periodic fuel protests, or the recurring rumble of irritation about ‘political correctness’, but the middle and upper class liberal intelligentsia who
staff the political and media and cultural industries of London have really very little idea of what’s going on in the separate country of England. They might occasionally venture out into it, for the purposes of rest and recreation (more weekend breaks), but this is little more than internal tourism. Especially when it’s to weekend and summer holiday villages consisting almost wholly of second homes, dead in the week and the winter.

London’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence is a key element in the failure of the traditional English national-popular settlement. It has been gathering pace for decades, if not centuries, and its effect is now evident in the attitudes of non-Londoners towards our notional national capital. Popular reactions in the rest of England to exclusively London phenomena – from the Millennium Dome to the 7/7 bombings and the 2012 Olympics – are at best ambivalent and at worst downright contemptuous.

So, this England is not London, it is not Scotland or Wales or Europe, and large parts of it subsist on an emotional diet of aggravation and disquiet which could, if we’re not very careful, turn seriously nasty. Even parts of the Southeast, London’s own hinterland, are getting seriously pissed off. If I were a displaced white East Ender, living in the modern post-industrial slums of the ‘Thames Gateway’ towns of Dagenham, Thurrock or Basildon, with an extended family in inter-generational multiple deprivation, I would be seriously tempted to vote BNP, just for the sheer two-fingered hell of it. And if you find that shocking, I would respectfully suggest that you are lacking in political imagination, and offer to accompany you there on my next fortnightly visit.

So what might a national-popular England be like?

I am well aware that mine is not the first attempt to flesh out a ‘progressive patriotism’. E.P. Thompson harked back somewhat sentimentally to ‘the freeborn Englishman’, and the Communist Party in its immediate post-war heyday had a stab at a patriotic national ‘story’, taking in the various waves of peasant and proletarian rebellion and martyrdom. It seems to have consisted mostly of pageants and paeans, a kind of misty-eyed romanticism, and it didn’t survive the onset of Cold War. Most famously, the old Cold Warrior George Orwell attempted it in some of his rightly celebrated essays, especially ‘England your England’, written in late 1940, as ‘highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me’. Orwell was a vastly overrated writer, a much better essayist than novelist. As for his politics, I’ve always thought Isaac Deutscher pinned him down as ‘a simple-minded anarchist’, which explains why Orwell lends himself so readily to reactionary purposes, like so many self-styled ‘libertarians’. But in his wartime essays, Orwell came close to identifying the quality of defiant reserve in the English that thumbed its nose at ’itler and the Jerries and pretty much everyone else too, and might just yet make the kernel of a national-popular ‘positive identity’. Orwell called it ‘national loyalty… as a positive force’. But his observation that ‘in moments of supreme crisis, the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone though never formulated’ is deeply if unconsciously Gramscian in its grasp of the political and ideological function of national-popular ‘common sense’.

Towards the end of my own last bout of ‘democratic left’ activism, in the mid-1980s, people associated with Marxism Today attempted to ‘reclaim the union jack’ for the left. This reached its ultimate absurdity, I recall, in a version of that tawdry, blood-stained rag in Rastafarian colours. More recently another old acquaintance, Mark Perryman, has been heavily involved in what he calls ‘football activism’, with the aim of turning the England football team into a Gramscian ‘national-popular’ cause. A bit of a lost one, I would say, given the abject performances of that bunch of overpaid, over-hyped, overgrown infants. Billy Bragg and Tessa Jowell have argued that the football-related mass sproutings of the St George’s Cross can be seen as, variously, an expression of national pride or ‘just a bit of fun’. Well…

It may be because I am so bloody English, and defiantly anti-postmodern, but I’m getting increasingly impatient with the symbolism of it all: the various flags, principles and abstract values and causes we are supposed to espouse as our ‘national identity’. It’s all just too easily switched on and off, manipulated and repackaged, usually for the commercial interests of various media and leisure corporations (to be unfashionably anti-postmarxist about it) and sometimes for blatantly manipulative political purposes. As such, it sums up neatly our bourgeoisie’s failure (back to Nairn-Anderson) to construct a national-popular consensus that goes beyond commerce, recreation and showbiz: fan-dom and spectating, which is pretty much all it requires of our masses. And it has no relationship with the real place of England, the land of fields and woods, towns and cities that we all of us actually if reluctantly spend our lives in. As Orwell put it in 1940, and I would love to think it still holds, ‘In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the “Rule Britannia stuff”, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious’.

So let’s shove all that to one side, and dig a bit deeper into our past and present for a democratic (possibly left) English national-popular. To begin with, we can just about discern some sparks of resistance, and embryonic Gramscian popular hegemony, within what Gareth Stedman Jones called the English proletarian ‘culture of consolation’. It’s there in elements of the music hall and folk tradition: the mocking and the cheeky, rather than the maudlin and sentimental. It’s there among the 1950s ‘angry young men’ (and women), especially the ‘social-realist’ wing of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or A Taste of Honey. It’s there in 1960s mod culture, that extraordinary appropriation by white working class youth of black American and Caribbean music and ‘cool’, of European elegance and fashion, and avant-garde pop-art stylings. It’s there in the consciously popular-democratic ‘folk-rock’ of early Fairport Convention, whose recently re-issued, magnificent Liege and Lief was hailed at the time as an English masterpiece. It’s there in the DIY, democratic wing of punk, especially in the Northwest, which was much more explicitly cultural-political than the showy, bin-liner and safety pin London variety. It’s there now in the TV show Shameless, which at its best assembles story-lines and characters from the writer Paul Abbot’s own childhood on a council estate into a prototype for new, reconstituted proletarian living. Joyful as well as shameless; resiliently female as well as fecklessly male; sexy and polysexual; and yes, naturally if wishfully multicultural.

There is something in all of this that is enduringly ‘down to earth’; what Orwell called our ‘horror of abstract thought’. This seems to me the central feature of the English national-popular identity, and happily resonates with my earlier call ‘back to the land’ of this real, mucky place. It locates us firmly where we need to be, in our material existence rather than a fog of tacky symbols. And let’s be honest: it exposes the complete dead-end we on the left have allowed ourselves to be shunted into, of ‘political correctness’. How on earth (that word again) did we allow otherwise progressive demands, about equality and freedom and fairness, to be turned into a new moral code for language and behaviour that the majority of the population finds utterly bewildering and alienating? What we have done with ‘political correctness’ is set about imposing upon the national discourse a new form of the traditional middle-class sensibility of politeness and nice-ness and ‘good manners’, which itself arose as a trusty guide for social climbers through the otherwise hazardous,
tumultuous social landscape of the nineteenth century. This was where Gramsci’s ‘separate entity’, the English bourgeoisie, found its moral purpose, keeping the silly, licentious aristocracy in check, and policing the rude manners of the unruly masses. But instead of not eating off your knife or saying ‘bloody’, only doing the washing on Monday and never discussing personal feelings, we now censure the white, generally powerless lower orders for using terms of ethnic or sexual designation that are in everyday, colloquial use among minority ethnic (nigger and paki) and sexual communities (queer and dyke) themselves! Whatever possessed us? Probably the same malign spirit that made us think we could construct a progressive – even socialist! – politics around every other aspect of ‘individual identity’ than nation and class, the central categories within Gramsci’s thinking.

But then, as Stedman Jones reminds us, there are plenty of historical antecedents for this kind of thing within the social relations of our country. Sometimes they have played a key role in the adaptation of bourgeois hegemony, as in the ‘affinity of outlook between the “top and bottom drawer” against the “killjoys in between”’ during middle-class attempts to impose a restrictive moral order on pleasure-taking in the late nineteenth century (after a loosening of moral restraints that had generated new commercial possibilities within the consumption of leisure). This was a time when Conservatism put down its deep roots amongst the English working class, because you could drink alcohol freely in the ‘Conny club’, sing along with gusto at the Conservative-protected music hall, and cheer on the boxers and football teams sponsored by your Conservative employer. Conservatism was fun, well out of reach of the finger-wagging zealots of non-conformism, Liberalism and Labourism. For the nineteenth-century temperance movements, Humanitarian League or anti-Gambling League of Stedman Jones’s account, ‘all acting on the same principle, trying to interfere with the enjoyments and pleasures of the people’, read twenty-first century ‘political correctness gone mad’ or moral panic over drugs and binge-drinking.

Much of the theorising about culture and identity of the last twenty years has followed a trajectory from ‘communities of identity’ (people drawn together by a common ethnicity or sexuality), through ‘communities of interest’ (people with shared hobbies or pastimes) to ‘communities of affect’ (people united by taste or sensation in music, art, sport or other spectacle). What we have ended up with is a society of ‘virtual enclaves’ or self-selecting ghettoes, mutually exclusive sets of PLUs (People Like Us) living alongside but not with each other, the reductio ad absurdum of a process of social retreat first identified in the late-1980s by Michael Rustin and others. I propose, in pursuit of the English national-popular – the Scottish and Welsh are welcome to join in too, by the way, but it seems to me that they’re a fair way down their own road already – that we seek to rediscover ‘communities of place’.

That is, real geographical material places you can put your finger and foot on, like Norwich and Norfolk or anywhere else that takes your English fancy. A quaint notion, I know, but the fact is that while we’ve been busily setting up communities of identity/interest/affect, most real people have continued living in such real geographical material places. We need to re-establish political contact with them, as is already happening, in small, localized, sometimes contradictory ways, in the ‘greening’ of municipal politics. My own local Green Party group of Norwich city councillors is now in double figures, with a realistic chance of an MP and an MEP in the next few years. They have still to extend their electoral reach much beyond the disaffected urban intelligentsia, and to develop a fully modern, urban progressive politics, but at its best greenery connects to people’s real, troubled experience of their land and lives: a crucial ingredient in any emergent democratic left England.

Maybe, once we’ve embraced our core-Englishness, we can begin happily and comfortably being other things too – men, women, black, white, brown, gay, straight, young, old, whatever constitutes our own unique personalities – and articulating our nationality with all our other identities. Maybe as a nation we could start to like each other again, and just maybe start to creep out from under the shadow of failed, partial bourgeois hegemony and its contemporary ideological twists of Thatcherism and its neo-liberal, New Labour adaptation. As the socialist visionary Edward Carpenter wrote in his eponymous ‘national-popular’ hymn of the 1900s, ‘England Arise!’ Or, as one of the foremost English visionaries of our own time, Ian Dury, put it, ‘There ain’t half been some clever bastards…’

England and the 'National-Popular' (Part 1)

eddie — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:33:57 +0000

What does it mean to be English? Let’s start with the fashionably confessional/genealogical. I am about the most English person I know. As far back as I can go – admittedly, like most ordinary English people, not very far – my forebears were unquestionably English. My mother’s family came from the old market town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, and my father’s from rural Cambridgeshire. I have never traced either branch back beyond my great-grandparents, who were tradesmen and clerks. But, given the relatively fixed family and community patterns of the southern English midlands, with relatively little outward or inward migration until recently, and my family’s decidedly non-exalted social status, I can safely assume that they all came from the solid, steady heart of England. Nothing Celtic, continental or colonial in there, though a bit of TV celebrity-style digging or a DNA test might unearth some surprises.

So, if I’m so bloody English, why do I find myself so generally embarrassed and often downright ashamed of it? Why have I, throughout my adult life, felt drawn to other countries and cultures, and carried inside me an elaborate (almost wholly unrealistic) ‘escape-plan’ for when life here becomes finally unbearable? Why, whenever I find myself amongst the English abroad – the tattooed, bloated, around-the-clock pissed, football shirt-wearing variety, or their complacent, condescending, wine-quaffing, socks-and-sandals superiors – do I insist on marching my family a further half-mile down the beach? Why do I start thinking in O-level French, German or Italian to convince myself I’m not one of them? Why do the English towns and cities where most of us live seem so mean and dull by comparison to the vibrant, civilized places in continental Europe Easyjet and Ryanair are so eager and ready to whisk us away to? Is it only a matter of lousy weather? And why do we persist, in our petty fog of regional rivalries, in thinking that everywhere else in England is even worse? Is there some general tendency in the English towards self-loathing, and if so, what are its specific contemporary triggers?

Blimey; a whole paragraph of questions. I’d better start providing some answers. In this essay, I want to begin thinking a way out of this distinctively English mess. I’m particularly interested in what I might call a ‘democratic left’ Englishness, as opposed to the boorish, braying, occasionally terrifying and essentially terrified Englishness we see all around (and, if we’re honest, inside) us. I plan to use the thinking of the great twentieth century libertarian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (an Italian with a recurring, somewhat puzzled fascination with England), and specifically his concept of the ‘national-popular’, to illuminate elements of our English ‘national identity’. That’s in both its negative connotations, what we have to feel ashamed of; and the more positive, what we might incorporate into a more intelligent, expansive and generous outlook on our own country and the rest of the world.

I’ve spent much of the last few years ruminating on this stuff, often while out walking with my dog in the real, physical English places I live in: the urban pockets, green wildernesses, long beaches and more managed rural landscapes of northern East Anglia, mainly Norfolk and Suffolk. This most English of the English regions, or at least those further parts that remain outside daily commuting reach of London, seems to me to represent the best and the worst of our country. Its largest and most important settlement, the ‘fine city’ of Norwich where I reside, really is closer in ‘feel’ and layout to the vibrant, civilized, manageable and easily walkable places explored on short breaks to Europe than to other comparable English cities. It is also closer, as both the proverbial crow and its contemporary low-cost airline equivalent fly, to Amsterdam than London. At the same time, it was once famously (and accurately still) referred to by the National Front as ‘the last white city in England’.

Gramsci and the national-popular

I have no idea whether Antonio Gramsci did much walking as an adult. For the last ten years of his life, during which he produced his extraordinary Prison Notebooks, he was only ever able to walk around his cell, prison yard and hospital ward. As a child, however, he spent much of his time roaming the Sardinian hills and fields, and recalls it regularly in his letters from prison as an obvious highlight in a troubled, poverty-stricken childhood. What shines through all his writings, in freedom or incarceration, is a deep appreciation for the feelings, traditions and perspectives of ordinary people, both in his native Sardinia and recently unified, mainland Italy. But his affection was fiercely realistic and wholly unsentimental. He was acutely aware of the contradictory impulses at work among the nascent Italian masses: from women like his mother holding together fractured families and communities, and the self-taught, determined and heroic activists of the 1919/20 Turin factory occupations, to ‘the scum of society’ he remembered hanging around the squares and bars of Cagliari and the ‘monkey people’ who embraced fascism.

Gramsci was always preoccupied with the social, cultural and regional tensions amongst the Italian people, from a ‘Sardist’ schoolboy composition calling for ‘the mainlanders to be thrown into the sea’ to his final essay as a free man, ‘The Southern Question’. This scrutinized the supposedly ‘scientific basis for regional prejudice’ propagated by the Italian Socialist Party among the northern industrial proletariat, as against the ‘backward south’. The Prison Notebooks make repeated reference to the processes whereby the Italian people are brought together and pulled apart. For Gramsci, the national-popular is a key element within the process of hegemony, whereby a particular social group represents its own interests as those of the whole nation. The success of this hegemonic project is measured by the extent to which other subordinate or ‘subaltern’ social groups accept this new ‘settlement’, more or less voluntarily, and are drawn into a ‘historic bloc’ around the dominant elite. We might call this, a little cheekily, ‘a coalition of the willing’, but note that in Gramsci it is a wholly real rather than rhetorical device. Together, these new social allies forge a national-popular identity and purpose, which becomes the new ‘common sense’ of the epoch, a ‘collective will as operative awareness of-historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and effective historical drama’. A further condition of the continued hegemony of the national-popular historic bloc is that it is constantly refreshed with new personnel, energies and insights, especially from subaltern groups’ own elites and intellectuals.

Gramsci sought to understand the attempts made over centuries to awaken this national-popular ‘collective will’, and the struggles to form a distinctive national-popular culture, alongside the mythology and iconography required to construct a national ‘story’. He was always especially sensitive to the question of language within a national-popular project: a common language is one of the primary sites wherein a nation coheres, and literally learns to talk and listen to itself. In our own time, this perhaps explains the extraordinary sensitivity over the uses and abuses of English, especially amongst certain sectors (Radio 4 listeners spring to mind) who rush to its defence at the slightest provocation, especially over suspected Americanisms. (This linguistic protectionism is even more evident in France, which Gramsci felt displayed a more pronounced ‘national-popular culture’ than any other nation, largely because of its thorough-going bourgeois revolution and because its intellectuals ‘tend to guide the population ideologically and keep it linked with the
leading group’.)

Gramsci attributes the relative historic failure of some countries’ attempts to forge a national-popular primarily to limitations within the ‘leading’ class of the society – in particular to an inability or unwillingness to represent its own sectional interests as the interests of the nation. The examples he cites are mostly drawn from Italian history, but he was also intrigued by the similarly untypical and conditional English ‘bourgeois revolution’. He suggests that the English bourgeoisie were never especially interested in forging a national-popular consensus: ‘instead of the bourgeoisie leading the people and winning their support to abolish feudal privileges, the nobility (or a fraction of it) formed the national-popular bloc against the industrial bourgeoisie’. (An elaboration of this idea formed one of the famous ‘Nairn-Anderson theses’ of the early 1960s, which basically issued a vote of no-confidence in the British ruling class.) It seems to me that the ramifications of this analysis for the formation of our society are immense, not least (as Gramsci goes on to note) in explaining the English tradition of popular Toryism, and the predominance of financial over industrial capitalism. Not to mention a divide between north and south, which is hardly less marked in England than it is in Italy.

British Labourism offers an equally resonant case study. When Gramsci says of the Italian Risorgimento ‘an effective Jacobin force was always missing’, he might just as well be indicating the recurrent failures of political leadership within the British labour movement. In particular, the lack of a ‘Modern Prince’ – by which Gramsci meant a coherent, consciously revolutionary party with a wide, deep mass base, such as only his own PCI ever came close to, certainly in Europe – points to the utter historic failure of the ‘militant’ wing of Labourism, the Communist Party of Great Britain. And the ‘British problem’ is not simply one of leadership, but equally to do with those who allow themselves to be led. As labour historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Gareth Stedman Jones have established, the class-consciousness of the oldest and proportionately largest proletariat in the world was formed and expressed primarily through lifestyle, recreational pursuits and appearance, manners and ethos, rather than political action, intellectual formation or deep-seated ideological affiliation. As Stedman Jones puts it: ‘Its dominant cultural institutions were not the school, the evening class, the library, the friendly society, the church or the chapel, but the pub, the sporting paper, the racecourse and the music hall … both impermeable to outsiders and yet predominantly conservative’. What political agencies have emerged from the British working class, in the various forms of the labour and trade union movement, have tended to be shallow and ineffectual, imbued with a quasi-religious mythology and iconography and a narrowly electoral or sectional approach. There has been little sense of a class that seeks to represent itself as the leading actor in a new national story.

Gramsci insists that what is required of a political party is a conscious and systematic programme of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ conducted by ‘intellectuals who are conscious of being organically linked to a national-popular mass’. While this notion of party leadership is not as vanguardist as some notable twentieth-century models, it still seems far enough from populism, in our own deep-dyed ‘anti-elitist’ time and culture, to make me at least feel deeply uncomfortable, and apprehensive at the prospect of such a programme of reform. Geoffrey Nowell Smith and Quintin Hoare, the editors of the Selections from the Prison Notebooks published in 1971, plainly also feel uncomfortable with ‘the national popular’ and add a note of their own on the concept, which they describe as ‘one of the most interesting and also widely criticized ideas in Gramsci’s thought’. They argue that it is important to stress that it is a ‘cultural concept, relating to the position of the masses within the culture of the nation, and radically alien to any form of populism or national socialism’.

Hoare and Nowell Smith’s clear unease with the term betrays their underlying allegiance to the New Left Review end of British Gramscianism, which, amongst other things, was severely critical of PCI leader Togliatti’s application of the Gramscian legacy to post-war Italian politics. But it also serves the useful purpose of demonstrating much of the British left’s traditional discomfort with the ‘nation’ and pretty much any aspect of the ‘national’, especially when applied to the geographical and social entity of England. There are some good reasons for this. We are still haunted by fascism and Nazism, embarrassed by their socialist origins; and during the twentieth century socialism was linked to nationalism in dangerous ways in many countries. Furthermore, the history of the English nation-state is generally one of military aggression, conquest and violent dominion over other peoples. From the Holy Land of the Crusades to Cromwell in Ireland and the clearance of the Scottish Highlands; the colonization of the New World and Australasia; the enslavement, imperial occupation and exploitation of large parts of Africa and Asia; to more recent military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, we English lefties have much to feel deeply uncomfortable about. Even Tony Blair, our furthest outrider, recently felt moved to apologize for some of it. The anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist, ‘internationalist’ and solidaristic currents of the British left run deep and close. And, while many other of our traditional stances have been jettisoned in the last twenty or thirty years, this one has if anything been re-invigorated by its coupling with anti-racism and more recently anti-globalisation.

A contemporary variant on this latter theme – what we might call a social-democratic anti-globalisation – argues that the nation-state is redundant in an era of unchecked global capitalism and that we must shift our attention and efforts to supra-national institutions and their requirements of our population. This could be seen as a generous interpretation of the ‘Third Way’, especially in its Brownite version. But it seems to me to be an approach based on an economism of just the kind Gramsci railed against in early twentieth-century social democracy, and in the ‘orthodox’ positivism of pre first world war marxism. Both are fixated on the economy and the state, with no sense for the separate, ‘relatively autonomous’ arenas of society; not to mention the cultural or ideological or the politically contingent. Yet the national-popular has become, if anything, more important in this latest phase of globalisation, not least as a form of cultural and ideological protectionism for groups who feel threatened and marginalised.

This is surely why the rhetoric and symbolism of national identity has become so evident across the globe – sometimes to murderous effect – as an expression of popular grievance and resentment at the effects of the neo-liberal agenda. Like all subaltern cultural forms, it ultimately serves the purposes of consolation and adjustment to new hegemonic realities, but it is still a major part of daily material reality. Thus, within the still vigorous ideological corpus of Thatcherism, the patriotic heart of Englishness still strongly beats, even as the world status of the English nation-state continues to decline. This is one of the ramifications of the ideology of Thatcherism that the British left has found it difficult to understand, not least because our latest political ‘project’ (New Labour) is turning out to be an embarrassing ‘transformist’ adaptation and deepening of it. Nevertheless, any politics that seeks – as Thatcher and Blair did – to create a hegemonic sense of what a country means to its inhabitants must grapple with this question.

We might argue that it’s all right for Gramsci and the Italians to talk about the ‘national popular’. They don’t have quite so much, by way of imperial conquest and dominion, to feel ashamed of. And what they have had, in North and East Africa, can easily be blamed on Mussolini and the fascists, who were no less rapacious in their treatment of parts of Italy itself. Gramsci himself was amongst the first to identify, in his writing on ‘the Southern Question’ and elsewhere, the colonial relationship between the industrial/ financial capitalism of the Italian north and the peasant, agrarian south. But then hang on a minute. What about the relationship between the wealthy South east of England and large parts of the rest of the country, especially the industrial north of England where I was born? Wasn’t that, and isn’t it still in some ways, oppressive and exploitative? (It is even more so, according to a recent IPPR report, after ten years of New Labour government.) And Italian fascism was not outside Italian culture: it was, and still is, deeply rooted in the oppressed, ‘subaltern’ south, and is still a vigorous current in the rest of its ‘modern advanced democracy’, just as conservatism, xenophobia and racism are deeply rooted in the British proletariat and most of its post-industrial fragments.

So, as Gramsci might ask us, is there something specific and peculiar in the British left’s discomfort and occasional loathing of the national, and in particular the English? And might it go some way towards explaining, or at least illustrating, the almost total disappearance of the communist, socialist or even social-democratic currents from our country’s political system and culture? Perhaps we should start by asking exactly what is ‘our country’?

Follow the links on the right for Part 2…

England, Britain and multiculturalism

tim — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 11:46:23 +0000

* Paul Kingsnorth: A clouded vision (a review of Ware’s Who Cares about Britishness)

* Vron Ware: A contested reality (a reply that assesses Kingsnorth’s Real England)

* Paul Kingsnorth: The heart of the problem

* Vron Ware: The climate and the choice

Paul Kingsnorth: A clouded vision

Ware lays her cards on the table in the first few pages. Britain, she writes, “may be a country, but it is not really a place”. When you come through the Channel tunnel, you are informed that you have arrived in England, and the signs at Heathrow welcome you to London. Britain is not a nation at all, but a composite of four nations. It has, she observes, “a standing army but not a football team. It has an anthem, a flag and a queen”, but no patron saint and no constitution. These are all good points, but Ware goes further. Britain, she reckons, is essentially rubbish. The most noticeable things about the Brits are their “flaws”: ‘they drink too much, swear too much, blame the government for everything and laugh at themselves when things get rough.” Pretty much the only good thing about this poor bloody country, in fact, is “its record of functioning multiculturalism.” In other words, the best thing about Britain is the bits that aren’t British.

What is it, then, apart from the political determination of its governing classes, which holds this messy historical accident of a nation together? What makes it what it is? This is the question that Ware is supposed to be answering, and to be fair to her it is a hard, perhaps an impossible, one. Just look at Gordon Brown’s floundering attempts to make “Britishness” sing in our hearts. Or, come to that, the words of his fellow-Celtic British nationalist Neil Kinnock (and chair of the British Council) who, in the book’s foreword, makes the usual liberal case for the historical illegitimacy of Britain (we’re a “mongrel nation”, the empire was bad, etc) but then flinches from the obvious conclusion and decides that, after all, Britishness is a good and necessary thing which just needs to be “re-invented” – perhaps, the reader may mischievously think, to get his beloved Labour Party out of a tricky political fix.

Ware has chosen to try and make her project work by using the device of asking foreigners – many of them from countries formerly colonised by Britain – what “Britishness” means. This is an intriguing idea and, in the right hands, could have yielded some fascinating results. And there are some intriguing nuggets in this book, gleaned from many conversations with immigrants now living in Britain and from people in other countries whose perspective on this hoary old debate can be refreshing.

Some of them are intriguingly counterintuitive. Ware interviews Tariq, a student from Lahore, Pakistan, who is studying for a PhD at Leeds University. He is astonished to see people wearing veils on the streets of Britain. Expecting to arrive in Brontë country he was surprised to see the city of Bradford’s council estates, and even more surprised to see Bradford itself. Tariq would prefer the Britain of the past – a Victorian nation of hard work and self-discipline, not the “benefit culture” he thinks it has become. He is astonished that British mosques are employing “crazy” imams from rural Pakistan who “would never get a job over there.” His British-Pakistani barber tells him to pray for his wife who is having trouble conceiving because he doesn’t trust doctors. “They are living in the Stone Age”, he says, shocked. He wants to go back to Pakistan because “it seems so primitive” in Britain. “This country”, he declares, “has a problem on its hands”.

The book could do with more of this kind of insight, from all sides of the debate. There are other examples – a man from Britain’s Chinese community, for example, complains to a Muslim friend that Muslims are getting all the media attention and the Chinese are being ignored. His friend tells him to be thankful. Roxana from Colombia observes that “London is a place for lonely people.” Ware asks Bano, a young Muslim woman from Blackburn, whether “a strongly defined national identity is a useful device for protecting and supporting minorities”. “Not if you keep calling us minorities”, Bano shoots back. Such ghettoisation, she insists, makes it much harder for anyone who isn’t white to ever feel British.

Bano’s objection to Ware’s question gets to the heart of the problem with this book: it is suffocatingly politically-correct (PC). So much so that it sometimes seems to have fallen through a wormhole in space in 1986 and emerged in the present day. Ware’s background is in writing anti-racist and feminist literature, and her reference-points – as she points out ad nauseam throughout the book – are in battles against the National Front circa 1979 and the strenuous defence of a very 1980s version of “multiculturalism”. Every few pages, it seems, we are treated to an anecdote in which she bravely stands up to fascists as a teenager in Buckinghamshire, or soapboxes about white western imperialism and the prejudice of the pasty-faced natives. Ware is not just agnostic about Britain and Britishness; she openly dislikes it. To her, Britain’s only saving grace is its population of foreigners. Not only that, but she seems to know very little about Britain as a place, as distinct from an idea (neither do most of her interviewees but they, unlike the author, have a pretty good excuse), save for a few London boroughs and a couple of northern industrial cities. Most of Britain, and most of its people, don’t even make an appearance.

The problem with this is twofold. First, Ware utterly fails to answer – or even, in most cases, ask – the question which the book’s title poses. Second, she is forced to skate over the many cracks which are currently appearing in Britain’s multicultural ideology – cracks which, ironically, are highlighted again and again throughout the book not by foaming, white-skinned Daily Mail columnists but by the very “minorities” who she is so convinced have been its beneficiaries.

Bano, in Blackburn, explains the problem well. Growing up in Sheffield, Bano – though aware of her Muslim and Asian heritage – always felt British. She went to an ethnically mixed school where people rubbed along. Then she moved to Blackburn aged fourteen and started at a school whose intake was 95% Asian. Suddenly, she says, she didn’t feel British anymore.

Bano’s point is clear to the reader, and painful to read: attending an “Asian” school, in which the teachers focused on her “Asian” identity, she felt immediately different to the rest of the country. She had been ghettoised. She was now a “minority” rather than just another British citizen. At this point, her friend Amar joins the conversation. “People live in an Asian ghetto, they go to the state school which is mostly Asian, they have their mosques … The system is designed like that”, he says. “In my day there were no ‘minority’ teachers, but I had a better experience … If you have to give up your identity as British, you will never belong.”

Bano and Amar have highlighted the painful paradox at the heart of the multicultural experiment: the act of defining people as “minorities” in order to better defend their rights also ghettoises them; sets them apart from the mainstream. A generation of this has led to areas of Britain in which ethnic and racial segregation are now a reality. Multiculturalism has led to less, not more, integration and more, not less, communal tension.

Yet Ware cannot see it. She is “surprised” by Bano’s story, and she doesn’t really take it anywhere. Instead, she falls back into her comfort-zone: “multiculturalism” (which she never, incidentally, defines) is a good thing because – well, because it just is. The unacknowledged contradictions are highlighted again when Peray, a Turkish Muslim woman, tells her of a “safer schools” conference she had attended. A member of the audience suggested that some young men needed to be told it was wrong to sexually harass women. Peray takes this as an “Islamophobic” slight and retorts that such things simply never happen in Muslim culture. Ware reports this approvingly: but who does she think she is helping by doing so? Some Muslim women in Britain suffer terribly at the hands of men whose actions are, whether Peray wants to admit it or not, tacitly or openly sanctioned by their communities in the name of culture or religion or both. Women’s refuges are full of them. For Peray, and Ware, to suggest that this is not the case does no-one any favours – least of all the most vulnerable people in society.

There were a number of books that could have been written here: a genuine inquiry into the nature of “Britishness”, perhaps; a spirited defence (starting with a definition) of multiculturalism; or an honest exploration of the pros and cons of life in multi-ethnic Britain. Ware seems to have tried to combine all three, and has ended up succeeding in none of them. By the end, all we are a left with is a frustrating series of questions.

If this is what Britain has come to, Gordon Brown is in even more trouble than we thought.

Vron Ware: A contested reality

I bought Paul Kingsnorth’s book Real England: the Battle Against the Bland (Portobello, 2008) a few weeks ago after reading a positive review of it. I was enthusiastic about his project of bringing an anti-globalisation perspective to the destruction of England’s distinctive environments as I also feel passionately about this. I have been writing about a particular English locality for ten years now, tracking the impact of global forces on every area of life. I’ve also been working on and against racism and nationalism, attentive to the past and future relationships between Britain and England. When I read him I realised that there are differences between us.

Now, Kingsnorth’s mean-spirited and inaccurate review of my book commissioned by the British Council, Who Cares About Britishness? A Global View of the National Identity (Arcadia, 2007) suggests that there is little common ground between us. Rather than just respond to his attack I’d like to assess his whole approach.

Kingsnorth employs the well-worn method of identifying the “real England” by travelling around the country to document a tale of damage, decline and neglect. The portrait of Englishness that he paints conveys a lament for better times, coupled with a reluctance to protest effectively at the destruction of “ways of life” and institutions that once developed out of local, English culture. I thought the book would also bring an added dimension, especially since George Monbiot’s recommendation on the front cover announces that the book “helps to shape our view of who we are and who we want to be”.

In particular, given his knowledge of the movement inspired by the World Social Forum I hoped he would combine an environmentalist rage with a critique of the racially coded nationalism which is often implicit in this genre of writing about England. Instead, he does not really address the question of who counts as English, and who the “we” are, talking vaguely of people “of all backgrounds”. The fact that he is prepared to define himself as a nationalist indicates that he is not interested in connecting his position to a discussion about the future of England as a post-colonial country at ease with itself and alive to the value of a cosmopolitan future.

The project of my book was entirely different, not least because Britishness is not an ethnic or cultural category that functions in the same manner as Englishness. Britishness is a construct with deep historical roots in the country’s imperial past, one that has left profound legacies in many parts of the world in the form of institutions, language, land ownership, and hierarchies of power. It made sense to travel outside Britain as well as within it, to see what could be learned about Britishness as a residual global concept.

I had two objectives in this project. First, I wanted to talk to young people in Britain whose opinions are rarely sought – those who had been migrants themselves or whose parents had migrated to Britain before they were born – to learn about and report on their experience and perspective. It was never my mission to go round to identify and learn about Britain itself “as a country”. I made this clear in the introduction, that Kingsnorth chooses to cite selectively to suit his own prejudices.

Second, I felt that it was important to learn from debates in other societies that had been marked by British rule – particularly debates about national identity. I was especially interested in how young people in those countries negotiated identities, whether political, cultural, sexual, religious or ethnic, often in situations far more difficult and dangerous than faced by their equivalents in Britain. A large part of the book entails listening to young women and men – in Bangladesh, Kenya, Pakistan, India and Ireland – struggling to define themselves within and beyond their nation-states. The signs are that there is a converging generation of young people in different parts of the world who are wary of nationalism in all its forms, having witnessed the catastrophic damage that it does to social and political life.

Kingsnorth wilfully misunderstands the scope of the book, and does not even attempt to discuss the second half. Very surprisingly for an anti-globalisation activist, for his own part he seems to have little interest in the idea of a global conversation. He is offended by my ironic summary of Britain’s shortcomings in my introduction, and misquotes me as saying that “Britain’s only saving grace is its population of foreigners”.

I find it significant that in his review he refers to people born and raised in the United Kingdom as “immigrants”. This suggests that he does not understand the stakes involved in interrogating terms like British or English. For example, he is so phobic about being seen to be anti-racist that he makes it clear he agrees with the “immigrant” view of what’s gone wrong with “multiculturalism”. For my part, I am not interested in defining this term because it means so many different things to different constituencies. The word is routinely used to denounce a range of past mistakes made precisely because there was no coherent governmental strategy to address racism and cultural diversity in the UK. By recounting a series of conversations with young British people I hoped to offer a glimpse of what it felt like to grow up in a society shaped by this confusion, representing a range of experiences that were unremarkable, positive, frustrating or difficult.

Kingsnorth is particularly irritated by one one of my interviewees, Peray, who dismisses a social worker who implied casually that Muslim culture endorsed the harassment of women by men. He is even more scornful of my failure to correct Peray by reminding her that “women’s refuges are full of Muslim women who suffer terribly at the hands of men”. Happily, in Britain violence against women is a crime whoever commits it. More important in this context, there is no evidence that Muslim women are disproportionately affected. Using culture as a stick to beat Muslims with is a familiar tactic among those who question their right to belong, whether in England or the whole of the UK – or in Europe for that matter.

Finally, for someone who claims to be an expert on England, Kingsnorth should know that Andover is in Hampshire, not Buckinghamshire (he should have heard of the campaign to block the siting of the Tesco mega-shed on the A303). And in damning my account of my run-in with the National Front on my home ground he betrays his impatience with a writing style not unlike his own: a mixture of polemic, dialogue, observation and reflection. The reason I traced the contours of anti-racist politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s is that I wanted to anchor the current discussions of Britishness within a historical context that is often forgotten and increasingly misrepresented.

Kingsnorth’s review clarifies what is so different about our respective efforts to engage in a political debate about Britain’s future. He finds my avowedly feminist and anti-racist perspective “suffocatingly politically correct”, which says more about his perspective than mine. He attempts to articulate a purified form of English nationalism, paying scant attention to the untidy, complex and contested history of racism. In my view this makes his enthusiasm to identify “the real England” appear opportunistic and shallow.

Paul Kingsnorth: The heart of the problem

My review of Vron Ware’s book Who Cares About Britishness? has evidently upset the author. I can’t deny a twinge of guilt: as a fellow-writer, I know the frustration of a bad review, and the things it can make you say. So I’m not surprised to read Vron’s retaliation about me, my review and indeed my own book, Real England, on OurKingdom.

I don’t respond from pique, but because this is, at heart, a crucial debate about the future of England and Britain, and about two competing understandings of what constitutes “belonging”. More than anything else, perhaps, it is about how that dread term “multiculturalism” has, in my view, undermined a shared sense of community in both England and Britain, and continues to do so.

Let’s start at the beginning. Vron Ware has managed the remarkable feat, as I pointed out in my review, of writing an entire book about multiculturalism without once defining it. Her response, when this is pointed out, is to say “I am not interested in defining this term because it means so many different things to different constituencies.” Er … well, yes it does. Which is precisely why a writer’s job is to define it for us, the readers; pin it down. Particularly if you are then going to spend 300 pages eulogising it.

But if Vron won’t do it, let me try. In my view, there are two distinct things we might mean when we talk about living in a “multicultural” society. First, there’s the on-the-ground reality of a nation in which a substantial minority of people – 8% in the 2001 census, and doubtless more now – define themselves as from “ethnic minorities”. Many are descended from – or indeed are – Commonwealth immigrants who arrived in Britain from the second world war onwards, and many more have arrived from east-central Europe more recently. For the most part we all rub along with each other pretty well, in that very British way that requires no fancy intellectualising about our “identity”. This is the reality of contemporary Britain: it contains many cultures and ethnicities, and I personally have very good reasons (which I’ll come to in a while) for believing that this is a good thing.

Then there’s the second definition: the “ism”. “Multiculturalism”, in this context, is an ideology; a theory; a political agenda which has existed in various forms since the 1960s and is now the dominant narrative about Britain in official circles, from education authorities to government ministers. It decrees that Britain – and especially England – is a post-colonial tabula rasa, onto which many distinct cultures have been dropped. There is no longer such a thing as a unifying or indigenous British or English culture – indeed, the very terms are “problematic”.

Britain now is a “cosmopolitan” society in which no one cultural identity has pre-eminence, and in which Englishness, Polishness and Bangladeshiness must compete on equal terms. The nation’s many “minorities” are not to be integrated into mainstream society (“integrated” is such a problematic word; and anyway, what is the mainstream?) but fenced off, theoretically if not physically: defined as “BMEs” [Black and Minority Ethnic], afforded “protection”, treated as victims, spoken for. Descended from Pakistani immigrants but born in England? Sorry, you’re still “Pakistani”, or “Asian” or “minority ethnic”. You can be British, if you like, because Britishness has been stripped of meaning and is therefore “inclusive” – but you can never be English (or, presumably, Scottish or Welsh, though this gets less attention) because Englishness is “racially coded”. Attempts to define it are thus potentially racist; it’s best if the English just shut up about it and get on with “celebrating diversity” instead.

This is the reality of the “multiculturalism” which Vron Ware hymns. It is a divisive ideology, divorced from place and history and largely meaningless to most people in today’s Britain, whatever their ethnic group. But it is also all-pervasive, and this is what I picked up on in Vron’s book. Throughout, she comes across people from ethnic-minority groups in Britain who reject this vision: who don’t want to be seen as “minorities” or patronised by pressure- groups; who want to be British or, hell, even English.

Yet when I mentioned this in my review, I was accused of being “phobic about being seen to be anti-racist”. This is pretty breathtaking – not least because it seems to be, quite literally, a meaningless sentence. I think Vron is trying to say that I’m not anti-racist. By which she presumably means that I am a racist of some kind. It’s a curious way to react to a reviewer who highlights quotations from your own book.

But perhaps this is also what she means when she accuses me of beating British Muslims with metaphorical sticks. In my review, I highlighted a section of Vron’s book in which the author attempts to deny that there is any problem within south Asian communities in Britain as regards the position of women. This is a good example of where the whole multicultural house of cards comes tumbling down. Desperate (or should I say “phobic”?) not to appear racist, Vron needs to pretend that there are no real negatives to living in “BME” communities in Britain. So there is, for example, no problem with violence towards women in south Asian communities; after all, white men hit their wives as well, right?

Right, of course – but there are few honour killings within the Polish community as far as I know. It’s well known, especially by British women of Asian origin, that male domination within the more traditional elements of this community is a real problem. A true feminist, surely, would want to acknowledge this? But not Vron: anyone who brings its up is apparently questioning Muslims’ “right to belong, whether in England or the whole of the UK – or in Europe for that matter”’ Got that? Mention the culturally-specific incidences of male violence within some Muslim communities and you’re with Enoch Powell, the Conservative politician whose “rivers of blood” speech in 1968 was a racist landmark. And who suffers from this stance? The victims of that violence – powerless Muslim women. How do we square this circle? We don’t: we pretend it doesn’t exist, and call anyone who mentions it a racist.

And it gets to the heart of the problem: utter confusion. Vron seems to assume that all critics of multiculturalism come from the political right. Well, here’s the shocker: I’m an anti-racist, feminist, anti-capitalist environmentalist – all “isms” that should surely meet with Vron’s approval. And I think that multiculturalism – the official “ism”, as distinct from the on-the-ground reality – is bad for absolutely everyone.

Perhaps I should come clean about my personal investment in this argument. Not only was my grandmother an immigrant – meaning that my own “racial coding” would probably not meet British National Party (BNP) requirements for true Englishness – but my parents-in-law were immigrants from India in the 1970s. This makes my wife, in the charming PC terms of which Vron is so fond, a “BME”, and my daughter of “mixed ethnicity”. It also means, according to both the BNP and Vron Ware, that neither of them can be truly English for, apparently, Englishness is “racially coded” – only for white people.

This would be news to my wife, who considers herself as English as me. But it is not news to me, for I have heard it many times before, and it angers me. I’ll confess that Vron’s book made me angry too. Angry because I want to live in an England – and a Britain – whose people, of all ethnicities, are united by place and a common purpose, not divided by race and mutual suspicion. Vron says that I “(do) not really address the question of who counts as English”, and that “this makes [my] enthusiasm to identify ‘the real England’ appear opportunistic and shallow”. I’m not sure what opportunity I’m supposed to be seizing (certainly not the opportunity for a decent book advance) but the “real England” I attempt to identify in my book is anything but shallow. It is, in fact, deep-rooted: in place, landscape and the cultures which spring from it.

And that’s the real point: culture springs from place, and “Britishness” or “Englishness”, as concepts divorced from the physical reality of Britain or England, are meaningless. My book explores the deep connection that many in England feel to their places; how this forges their identity and why they fight for it. Some of those people are from ethnic minorities. They are also English, because they were born and live and work and fight in England; because it is their home and they are changing it and it is changing them. They are not ghettoised, reduced to statistics, treated like foreigners in their own land. They are English because they choose to belong here.

Vron wraps up her response to me by asserting that I “attempt to articulate a purified form of English nationalism, paying scant attention to the untidy, complex and contested history of racism”. I have no idea what a “purified form of English nationalism” is (what would an impure form look like? Cloudier?) but I can tell Vron this for free: I am more than aware of the history of racism, and I think that the multiculturalist project perpetuates it. The England I would like to see, is one in which we all have a part in forging English cultural and institutional identity; an identity which unites us around our locations and our aspirations for the future, whilst being aware of our pasts – and paying scant attention to our ethnicity.

This, at the end of it all, seems to be the key difference between Vron and I. I am aware that an identity, a culture, needs to spring from and be nourished by a place. England is such a place, and so is Britain – they are not academic concepts, they are landscapes, urban and rural: the present woven from the past, the cultural from the literal and material. The English people are the people of England, whatever their colour or religion. My “nationalism” is intended to be a forward-looking, unifying project which brings them together; Vron’s multiculturalism, by contrast, is backward-looking, guilt-ridden, race-obsessed and divisive. And I’d rather look to the future than stay marooned in the politics of the past.

Vron Ware: The climate and the choice

For those who may be reading this, who perhaps haven’t come across my work before, I will say the following, simply and clearly, without any accusations of who is racist, race-obsessed, stuck in the past and guilt-ridden.

My book on Britishness begins with an exploration of what makes people feel at home in this country. It starts with a scene of ordinary life, in a café in Leytonstone, drinking tea with two young-ish British community workers with family origins in Somalia and India. We talk about shops, bars, housing, school and other mundane topics, including their experiences of growing up in the neighbourhood. Although it is debatable whether London fits into this discussion, since it is a world city with about one in three born outside the country, I wanted the conversation to illustrate the complex mixture of ingredients that allow individuals to feel a sense of belonging and connection to any particular place. I was intrigued by what Leytonstone had to offer as it was a part of London with which I was unfamiliar. When someone says they take being British for granted, but are proud to be from Leytonstone, it makes you curious.

Later in the same chapter I describe how I asked a young woman whose parents were from Pakistan whether she preferred Oxford, where she had been born, to Banbury, where she moved as a child. I listened to her talking about her experiences of growing up in Banbury, a very English place to which she was very attached partly because her parents still lived there. The fact that we had this conversation in Pakistan, where she was visiting relatives (including a cousin who had grown up in the UK and gone back to live in Rawalpindi) was largely incidental. I included it in my book as I thought it reflected a confident, transnational identification with two countries, strongly rooted in a particular place, but strengthened by an awareness of the family history outside it that had taken her there.

I could go on, but I hope I have made it clear that Paul and I agree that identity and culture have a dynamic relationship with place, landscape and locality. In this section I included an episode from my own experience in order to show that I too, English born and bred, had come from somewhere local but had not always felt at home there. I also wanted to include an insight I learned from writers such as VS Naipaul and Zygmunt Bauman: we can gain a better perspective on what is familiar if we deliberately allow ourselves to become estranged from it. For some this happens with exile and displacement. For others it needs conscious work and a readiness to listen to strangers.

Identity is often both simple and complicated at the same time. It is also about choice not just fate and here too Paul and I agree. For him, people from ethnic minorities are free to choose to belong here, and that’s enough to make them English. Of course it’s right to affirm that they can make a deliberate choice to identify themselves as English. This does not alter the fact that many people, whose Englishness is not in question, are not prepared to recognise that ethnic minorities are eligible to make that claim. It is not me who is saying, as Kingsnorth alleges, that Englishness is “only for white people” and I simply can’t understand why he doesn’t get this point. Fortunately there are signs that this rigid alignment of colour, culture and national identity is beginning to shift. As Mark Perryman and others have argued elsewhere, spectator sport is one area where England is revealed as a remarkably affable and open-minded community. Note that this is because of concerted efforts to eradicate racism from football. It did not happen organically.

But Paul blames multiculturalism for making minorities feel as though they don’t belong. He liked that part of my book where I quote young people from Lancashire saying how they hated their monocultural, segregated schools. But rather than caricature his views as crudely as he has done mine, I will carefully reiterate my own position. I have to say that when he says that my book is “a hymn to multiculturalism”, I wonder if he has read the same one that I wrote.

Who Cares About Britishness? is an exploration of the global relevance of national identity, rooted in the history and geography of Britishness. After the first chapter on home and belonging, the book I wrote takes the form of a travel narrative in which I interweave some of these local voices with episodes and conversations from my journey to cities in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Kenya and Ireland. The final chapter is called “organise, don’t agonise” and it explores some of the ways that young people in these different countries, including England and Northern Ireland, are actively trying to intervene to work for social justice. The word “cares” is deliberately intended to have a double meaning, clearly lost on Paul.

I will set aside the fact that the book was partly an attempt to draw attention to Britain’s relationship with the rest of the world. I realise from reading subsequent comments on this forum that this aspect is not – at least yet – of great interest to OurKingdom participants. But it should be.

My position is this: to be anti-racist means identifying and opposing the corrosive forms of racism that continue to diminish all our lives in this country. It is no more about treating people differently according to colour, ethnicity and faith than it is an excuse to denounce all white people as racist. It means being alert to expressions of race-hatred, xenophobia and supremacism (not just of race and ethnicity but also culture and civilisation) wherever they are found, and making an effort to demonstrate why and how they poison our public and communal lives. To me, anti-racism is a form of political practice, with its own genealogy and ideological influences, that is entirely separate from the doctrine that Paul characterises as multiculturalism. I think this has become a straw figure which is why I said above that I was not in a hurry to define it. But first Paul insists that my “entire book” is a eulogy to something he loathes, and then he obsesses about the fact that I did not “pin it down”.

After 2001 it became fashionable to blame “multiculturalism” for the way that life in some northern mill-towns had become virtually segregated. All the problems caused by neglect, default, ineptitude, bad planning, well-meaning initiatives, and the impact of de-industrialisation were attributed to what seemed in retrospect a faulty but coherent national ideology developed in the 1960s and foisted on the British public with no consultation. I believe it is essential to understand the local histories of post-1945 immigration if we are to deal with the consequences now.

In my book I recounted a episode from the 1960s campaign by Sikhs to wear turbans on the buses in order to remind younger people of the complex struggles of earlier eras. I tried to show that what happened in Wolverhampton was very different from events in Manchester, Bradford, London and other cities where it became an issue. I wanted to argue that each centre of settlement has its own history of negotiating immigration, and this has had lasting impact on patterns of housing, education, political representation and so on.

In recent years government policy has developed a focus on social cohesion in an attempt to distance itself from what has happened before, and even the adjective “multicultural” has become derided. It has become tainted with the charge of advocating separation, “special treatment” for minorities and advocating cultural relativism (particularly with regard to gender relations). The term “multiculturalism” has also become confused with the language of anti-racism which was apparently devalued by its fixation on diversity and minority rights.

This, by the way, is what I meant when I said that Paul was phobic about not being seen to be anti-racist. It would seem that it is no longer acceptable to speak about racism since it is “divisive” and smacks of “political correctness”. If I thought he was being racist I would say so, but it is a serious charge and I don’t for a minute think he is, and I have read his work carefully. I didn’t need to know those details about his family. His decision to personalise the argument in that way is symptomatic of his inability to understand anti-racism as politics.

In this climate it is more important than ever not to delude ourselves that we have moved beyond the need to talk about racism openly. The vociferous commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech in the mainstream media this past year is evidence of a real ambivalence on the question of what it means to be English and who can rightfully belong.

A comment on OurKingdom is an indication of how this current not only survives but is being amplified in the present: “It simply hasn’t been possible to integrate the number of newcomers that have arrived, and their arrival (combined with a native population that didn’t want, or ask, to be multicultural) has displaced or destroyed urban, white, mostly working class, communities (see Billy Bragg [who now lives in Dorset] or Michael Collins).” This statement, which ventriloquises the resentment of the white working class rather than expressing openly the views of the author, gives voice to an old lament. Countless writers have shown how English nationalism has long been entwined with a strong sense of grievance that it is foreigners who are damaging this country, and that it is “real” English natives (and now landscapes) who are being injured as a result. Breaking that causal connection requires sustained, sensitive and imaginative labour.

It is not enough to wish away the connections between racism, xenophobia and nationalism and to pretend that the politics of belonging involves nothing more than an immigrant’s decision to make a commitment to her or his adopted country. Let there be no misunderstanding. It is naïve beyond belief to advocate a renewed English nationalism in 2008 without addressing the way that immigration has resurfaced on the national political agenda once more. Let’s not kid ourselves that the BNP is the only organisation either to take advantage of the growing inequality, poverty and powerlessness that tend to push people towards racism, or to speak on behalf of whole sections of society (like the “white working class”) in order to make a populist appeal.

Those of us who glimpse a more inclusive, non-racist and non-racial vision of life in England have to make our own choices to reject any form of nationalism that is complicit with racism.