Nationalism, Unionism and Englishness

David Miliband’s article on England and English identity in this week’s New Statesman was unremarkable in its content, but was worth noting because of the rarity of a senior Labour politician addressing the so-called English question at all, the last occasion being a speech by Frank Field in 2008.

The paradox is that Labour’s devolution of power to the Scottish parliament and Welsh Assembly, and the settlement brought about by the Good Friday Agreement in Ireland, have created profound changes to the constitution, but the party has not come to grips with the forces that inspired those changes.

The results of the general election revealed a gulf in attitude between how SNP and Plaid supporters saw the possibility of a rainbow coalition, and the disdain that many Labour members felt for any deal that included the nationalists, that came from both left and right of the Labour Party.

Plaid MP for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr, Jonathan Edwards, was scathing that Labour had seemingly rejected a potential coalition that would have protected working class communities from the Tories. Of course any such coalition would have needed the Lib Dems, and it looks like they were always going to prefer the Tories, but the charge that the Labour Party simply doesn’t understand the mindset of the Plaid and SNP has some weight.

There is a subsidiary point that many Labour Party supporters in Britain assume that the various Unionist Parties of Northern Ireland are natural allies for the Tories, while the opposite is probably true.

Support for, or opposition to Unionism dominates the political landscape in Northern Ireland, and increasingly so in Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland is perhaps a special case, but the primordial unionism that dominates there, (the belief that the institutions and unity of the United Kingdom is a positive good in its own right), is important to understand in its own right, but also because during the pre-modern era this form of unionism was dominant in Britain as well. Bonar Law was the last British Prime Minister to be such a primordial unionist, and this was bound up with the high Imperialism which bound the nations of Britain together in a tryst of blood.

With the decline of Empire, a more instrumental Unionism has developed, which has regarded the marriage of Scotland, Wales and England, and sometimes Northern Ireland, not as a positive virtue to be celebrated for its own sake, but as a fortunate circumstance which allows wider goals of social justice to be achieved. Aneurin Bevan was a great instrumental unionist, who saw the union as an opportunity for a socialist government sitting in Westminster to extend the scope of its progressive reforms to more people.

However, by the 1960s a more defensive instrumental unionism grew, expounded by Harold Wilson and his secretary of State for Scotland, Willie Ross, who believed that the reservoirs of Labour support in Wales and Scotland were a necessary precondition to any progressive British government; consequently they were great supporters of maintaining a disproportionate number of parliamentary seats from Scotland.

It is worth pointing out that in fact Labour received more votes than the Conservatives in English parliamentary constituencies in 1945, 1950, 1951, 1964, 1966, Oct 1974, 1997 and 2001, and only received 0.25% less than the Tories in England in 2005. So the myth of a naturally and permanently Tory England is false. When Labour has inspired English voters, then Labour has won in England.

The constitutional reforms towards devolution were pragmatic responses to the rising threat to Labour in Wales and Scotland. In 1966 Plaid Cymru won a by-election in Carmarthen, and in 1967 the SNP won Hamilton, losing it at the next election but gaining the Western Isles. The instinctive instrumental unionism of Labour gave way to an instrumental approach to constitutional reform. Devolution was supported because it was thought it would be just enough to conserve the Union. As government minister, Douglas Alexander, who ran Labour’s campaign for the 2007 Scottish Parliament said:

The great outcome of devolution is it allows people to demonstrate their identity within the United Kingdom and, at the same time, not break up the United Kingdom.”

Mainstream opinion in the Labour Party has never been able to understand what motivates the Plaid and SNP. Former Labour minister, Ron Davies, who has now joined Plaid Cyrmu, explains:

they believe … that the solutions to the problems of Wales [and Scotland] are to be found in exactly the same mechanism as the problems of the North of England or wherever. The answer is a strong Labour government in Westminster who will legislate all these problems away.”

In fact, the nationalist parties are broadly social democratic, and their successes have been based upon two combined strengths. One has been using devolved power to limit the scope of regressive legislation from Westminster; the second has been using popular national traditions of Welsh and Scottish culture to reinforce progressive politics.

Michael Keating, Professor of Scottish Politics at the University of Aberdeen, has examined the growing policy differences between England, Scotland and Wales:

The Labour Party may be the dominant political force in London, Edinburgh and Cardiff. But Scotland and Wales have stuck more to the traditional social democratic model of public service delivery. This has led them to stress non-selectivity, professionalism and uniformity, while rejecting foundation hospitals, star-rated hospitals, school league tables, beacon councils, elite universities and selective schools. Scotland also scrapped up-front university tuition fees and rejected top-up fees. At the same time, free care for the elderly has been introduced north of the border.”

In Wales, there are no NHS prescription charges. The One Wales agreement between the Welsh Labour Party and Plaid Cymru, which underpins their coalition government, is designed in the words of former First Minister Rhodri Morgan, to put “thick red water” between Cardiff and London, and it includes a commitment that:

We firmly reject the privatisation of NHS services or the organisation of such services on market models. We will guarantee public ownership, public funding and public control of this vital public service.”

The Scottish labour historian Gregor Gall writes that the existence of a Scottish national consciousness reinforces a culture of greater militancy – the Scottish working class believes it is more radical than the English, and may therefore act more radically. To this degree Gregor sees Scottish national consciousness as progressive, as an ideological reservoir for retaining the memory of past struggles, even in periods when collective class consciousness is weak. “Red Clydeside and John Maclean have become part of the heroic iconography on the left in Scotland, not only in terms of image … but also as history. [During] the Tories years of office (1979-1997) … – the most sustained offensive by the ruling class since the 1920s – those on the left looked back to the past to help inform their present.”

The common sense belief that Scotland is more egalitarian than England played an important role in strengthening the resolve to resist Thatcherism in the 1980s, which was seen as essentially English and alien. The vehicle of Scottish national identity expressed the ideological rejection of the Poll Tax. Of course it was also a class based rebellion, but that class consciousness was mediated through ideological expression in terms of national identity.

The dynamic of devolution in Wales is weaker, but still potent bound up with issues of language and regional identity, as Ron Davies explains

In Wales that sense of national identity was never that strong, we had never had our own parliament, and there were many people n the Labour party, and there still are, who find it very hard to reconcile their patriotism, their love for Wales, with their commitment to socialism, or to the Labour party I should say. It doesn’t understand that there are issues about patriotism, of identity, of wanting to do things differently in Wales, of nation building if you like. To free up the initiatives we have in Wales, because our scale is different, because we do have different values, there is a greater sense of community, we do have distinctive policy issues of our own we do have issues about language and so on. And there is a large part of the Labour Party that is entirely uncomfortable with that agenda.”

There is no going back on the constitutional reforms that gave Scotland a parliament and Wales an Assembly, and the dynamic of Empire and Monarchy which originally glued the nations of Britain together are today spent or weakened forces. The pragmatic and instrumental approach of the Labour Party to devolution has actually been relatively successful, but it has inevitably reinforced the structural foundations of Plaid Cymru and the SNP: having a Tory government in Westminster can only strengthen further the sense of difference between Cardiff, Edinburgh and Westminster.

The Labour Party will continue to be the largest progressive party in British politics, but in Scotland and Wales  at least, it can no longer assume that it is the sole, mainstream pole of attraction for social democratic voters. Consequently, it is necessary to understand the degree of overlap and shared aspiration, as well as differences, between the Labour Party and its rivals in the SNP and Plaid.