If you say you believe in One Nation, aren't you a nationalist?

‘Conservativism should be broad, not narrow; open, not closed; forward-looking, not yearning for a mythical past. .... We should seek to unite, not divide. In short, One Nation Conservatism.’

So says David Gauke MP in an address to Onward, the latest pet think tank for Tory MPs (Onward does sound like the motto of a not very good prep school though). My botheration with this is that it manages to be, in one short sentence, patronising, self-contradictory and divisive. So much for 'one nation'.

That a successful political party in the UK has to be a 'broad church' is not a new idea or, indeed, one that is anything other than common sense given our 'first-past-the-post' voting system. But this game of setting a series of words in juxtaposition as a way to say that 'populism' or 'nationalism' isn't part of that broad church represents a break with the idea of a broad church. I might not be one of them but there are plenty of people in the Conservative Party, and even more among the voters, whose politics do reflect the idea of nationhood, queen and country, Rule Britannia. What Gauke says to these people - having said we're a broad church - is that we don't want any of that unswerving patriotism in our party, we're forward-looking, progressive, modern and slightly uncomfortable with all that nation stuff.

This is the problem with today's one nation tories - bear in mind that the original One Nation group in the party back in the 1950s included Ted Heath, Ian McLeod and...er...Enoch Powell. Now, One Nation Conservatives, even outwith the Brexit thing, represent establishment machine politics rather than, as was the case in the 1950s, an endeavour to grasp the essence of Disraeli's party by forging together social concern, robust finances and an open economy. Worse, advocates of this new One Nation like David Gauke have taken to positioning it as merely oppositional - not Thatcherite free markets, not populist, not reactionary, not traditionalist.

Conservatism may be a broad church and, indeed, a very flexible ideology but it has boundaries (or, at least, I thought it had boundaries). At the heart of conservatism, however, is the idea that our relationship with place matters more than merely maximising utility. And if you're going to call it One Nation then, unless the term is meaningless, it is absolutely a statement of nationalism. Yes you can modify this by saying 'civic nationalism' but it's still an idea founded on the importance of the place we call our nation.

Conservatism also seeks (the clue's in the name) to conserve and preserve, to recognise that while things change we should do it carefully and slowly so as to avoid losing the baby with the bath water. When David Gauke speaks of 'yearning for a mythical past' he's summoning up the idea, popular with the intellectual left, that 'populism' harks back to some golden era - how often have you heard or read some sneering representative of the intelligensia dismissing Brexit voters as wanting a return to Empire or some similar huffle. Yet that 'mythical past' is not what people hark back to, except in the understanding that people love the idea of a world with secure employment, stable families, strong communities, low crime rates and trusted institutions. And if a little less utility maximisation and a bit less globalisation is the price of getting closer to that mythical ideal then maybe populism isn't all that bad.

Disraeli wrote of 'two nations' - in simple terms, rich and poor. And he set the Conservative Party, in opposition to the Liberals, as the party with a mission of forging one nation again. In doing this, however, Conservatives recognise that the answer is not revolution or radicalism - you don't get one nation by tearing down the world of the rich and powerful but by allowing the poor to become part of that world. If you want to criticise the populism of Trump, you do so by pointing out - as the Conservatives came to accept after a great deal of pain - that protectionism is far worse for the poor than it is for the rich. You need to accept that moving people from poverty to comfort requires that the rich and powerful give something back and that the best way to do this is by them being part of the same community - sharing the same place and space.

Right now the David Gauke position - because it defines itself negatively - is losing the argument with what he calls 'populists'. It's no good standing there telling people you know better (you might of course, but they have to know that to believe you and right now they don't) when there are people prepared, sometimes cynically, to say to people 'I know you're angry, I'm angry too, let's go and knock some heads together'. The sort of thinking coming out from the rash of new (all London-based of course) think tanks like Onward is narrow, technocratic and ideologically rootless - we're fixing the window locks and installing alarms when the real problem is that the door's wide open. Lots of feel-good policy initiatives that friends in the media will love but no substantial thinking about what we want our world - or rather the hundreds of little worlds in which people actually live - to be like.


If your political idea is One Nation - united, strong - then you are a nationalist. Is David Gauke?
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Welcome to the 'Great City of the West' - mankind's dead end

In the opening chapter of 'Starman Jones', Robert Heinlein sets the scene with the young hero, dreaming of space, watching the Chicago, Springfield & Earthport Ring Road - essentially a high speed inter-city transit:

"The incredible sight and the impact on his ears always affected him the same way. He had heard that for the passengers the train was silent, with the sound trailing them, but he did not know; he had never ridden a train and it seemed unlikely, with Maw and the farm to take care of, that he ever would."

In this short chapter, Heinlein not only sets the scene for 'Starman Jones' but describes the chasm that divides rural and urban America. It's true that, in American Dream style, Max Jones, Heinlein's hero does escape from his rural isolation such that the book closes with Max on one of the trains. But we need to be interested in the rest of Max's world, in the people who stay on the farm. These people, rednecks, provincials, the "left behind" have suddenly become important folk. Not individually but collectively.

The election of Donald Trump, the UK's vote to leave the EU, the growing support for France's Front National and similar trends in Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany all focus on people who aren't living in the shiny world of what Ishaan Tharoor in the Washington Post calls "the West's major cities". And the world beyond the cities is filled with reactionary forces aimed at stopping the glorious people in those shiny cities from dominating the world - there's even an "if mayors ruled the world" group that says this:

“These reactionaries,” Barber said, “are the last wave in a series of political attempts to pretend that sovereign states still work.” The nation-state isn't about to disappear, he cautions. But Barber envisions a future where there'll be a “rebalancing of the relationship” between nations and cities that will enable greater local governance across the world for the benefit of all.

By greater local governance, Barber doesn't mean a local municipality at some sort of human scale but rather grand 'city regions' ruled by elected but autocratic mayors. And some places will be left outside these 'Great Cities of the West' struggling in rural decrepitude or small town decline. Other rural places will tag themselves onto the great cities, stretching their boundaries so as to get some small crumbs from the mayor's table. Soon these latter places will realise they've the worst of both worlds - higher taxes, more regulations and the envious sight of money pouring into super-rich inner suburbs and city centres. Places the residents of the city region's remoter outposts seldom visit and that's often merely to gawp at the beautiful people as they enjoy their playground while shrugging at the unaffordability of all this stuff.

Since the West's population is increasingly concentrated in cities, we've come to assume that the city is the demographic and, therefore, political form of the future. There's a hankering for the idea of the city state - essentially autonomous places within a weak state - and, in this, with the idea of strong, enlightened leaders elected by those cities' wise and enlightened electorates. The result - or rather the objective of the 'Mayors Should Rule the World' advocates - will be a fragmented, divided polity dominated by the needs and preferences of those ruling mayors (or rather those with access to these mayors).

Returning to 'Starman Jones' for a second, we see the manner in which the human world's design intentionally favours the city as a form. It's not just that the train swished through Max Jones' rural America but that the design of such systems today is creating such a world - England's HS2 is designed to connect London to Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. What lies between the cities is irrelevant except as a place filled with ghastly NIMBYs who oppose the railway for spoiling the countryside. But why should someone in an old mining village like Havercroft or Fitzwilliam look kindly on HS2? Like Max Jones they'll be watching the fast trains whoosh by while wondering where their children and grandchildren will get a job that's better than in a warehouse or serving on at a cheap restaurant (assuming that the robots and minimum wage rises haven't killed those jobs).

There's no actual reason, other than our sociable nature, for us to live in those 'Great Cities of the West'. Indeed, they're filled with untypical humans. There are the brave few who upped sticks and travelled thousands of miles to live poor quality lives on the fringes of the gleaming, sparkly city hoping for a lucky chance. We've the fortunate beneficiaries of inheritance or beauty who can skim across the surface of the city enjoying its lights and pleasures while affording the means to avoid its darkness. And there's a vast mass of clever, skilled, hard-working people who turn the wheels of the city's economy but can't get a stake in the city, can't find the means to settle and have a family, and who justify this on the basis that they can get to see the beauties in their plays, galleries and stadiums.

If this - 'The Great City of the West' is the future of mankind then it isn't a future, it's a dead end. Because the great mass of the city dwellers can't afford a family, the only way to provide the services is to import more people from elsewhere. But what happens when those elsewheres don't provide people any more? The city grinds to a halt when economic growth in other places reduces the imperative to migration. So perhaps this explains the enthusiasm of the great and good of such places for elsewheres to remain poor - not starving but just poor enough for the stream of migrants not to dry up. But this is a false perspective - even the gradual rising of economies results in reduced birth rates so the city cannot win if it does not breed.

And cities are, in everything they do, anti-child:

...localities with higher densities and higher prices — the two are often coincident — have considerably lower birth rates than areas with lower prices. This becomes even more evident when one considers the segment of the population between 5 and 14 years old, when children enter school. In 2012, urban areas with the highest percentage of children are predominately lower density and lower cost, including Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Riverside-San Bernardino, Atlanta, and Phoenix. Urban areas with the lowest percentage of people in these age groups were also the New Urbanist exemplars, such as Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Seattle.

And who would - without necessity or accident - have children in a high-rise environment featuring fug-filled air that causes asthma, streets filled with rushing vehicles, public spaces designed for adults, and places dominated by strangers. In San Francisco and Berkeley over 70% of households are childless. And we're supposed to see dense urban living as a better model than the sprawl or the suburbs, the comfort of the small town or the community of the village?

The problem isn't just that the rural and small town West has rebelled against the city but that the city is a failing model - at least the idea of the concentrated, centralised, mayor-led city. These things are parasites, sucking away all the good from small towns with the promise of riches, opportunities and better bars while giving little back when it comes to the long-term quality of our lives. Urbanists talk about 'liveability' and 'walkability', about public spaces, even about play - yet the reality of the city is selfish, focused on the here and now rather than on creating places to which people can relate, where they might want to spend their whole lives.

Planners rejected suburbia as somehow too naff, 'not our sort of place' and then justified their rejection with tales of sustainability, sprawl and the curse of the motor car. Yet suburbs - at least the one I was brought up in - were liveable, open and child-friendly. They might have been a bit boring for childless, young adults but they weren't boring for children and, mostly, weren't so for grown ups with sheds to do hobbies in, gardens to keep and associations to join.

So no, the city is not the West's defence "against right-wing nationalism" but rather one cause of that right-wing nationalism existing in the first place. If your billions of infrastructure spending excludes most of the country they won't thank you for it. If every policy you espouse is designed for the child-free world of the city, the provincials will hate you for it. And if your attitude to people who don't live in the 'Great City of the West' is sneering, dismissive and patronising don't be so surprised when they kick out at you.

This idea of a the city as a place piled on top of itself, crowded, expensive, frantic, is a dead end. It is a model that will fail and in doing so may threaten what we choose to call western civilisation. The lesson in all this is to understand that, as one commentor obeserved, cities come with a huge barrier called "cost of living", a barrier that far from making the city a solution sets it up as a parasite.

Right now the only route to success in the city for the likes of Max Jones is still to borrow your uncle's space suit and save humanity. And given that few provincial folk have uncles with space suits (or other opportunities to save mankind come to think of it) they'll stay in declining rural and small town communities sneered at by people in cities who think the future of humanity is having shiny things but no children. It won't end well.

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What links Peter Hitchens, John McDonnell and Donald Trump?

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The answer is a hatred of free markets, free trade and free enterprise plus a belief that the solution to our supposed economic problems is economic nationalism. All these fine men promote nationalisation, speak of the evils of foreign investment, and play to the fears of workers about foreigners, big business and the bankers.

I considered heading this article with some like "In which Peter Hitchens goes full Fascist" but that would be a little polemical. Hitchens has, for over twenty years now, conducted a one man hate fest directed at the Conservative Party. On more than one occasion he has used his pulpit to pray for the Party's destruction so it must be a cause of deep and personal pain that this organisation he despises so much got it self elected with an overall majority in the UK parliament.

It shows:

I am so sorry now that I fell for the great Thatcher-Reagan promise. I can’t deny that I did. I believed all that stuff about privatisation and free trade and the unrestrained market. I think I may even have been taken in by the prophecies of a great share-owning democracy.

And more along these lines, not based on any actual facts or anything as mundane as research, just Hitchens' absolute belief that the Conservative Party and all its works is a thing of great evil. So what we get is an advert for Hitchen's Conservatism - one essentially indistinguishable from that of Donald Trump. It's a sort of admission of defeat, a belief that inside a cosy little barrier built from tariffs, bans and protections we will be reborn as a 'great nation' filled with horny-handed sons of toil bashing away making things. I can see the posters lifting the spirits of our nation now, images of those workers looking to a noble future arm in arm with their families.

Britain, for the Hitchens of this world, is crying out for a new direction - a New Party - that rejects globalisation, foreign investment, free trade and the idea that running a restaurant is as noble a pursuit as pouring molten steel from British blast furnaces. The world conjured up by Hitchens and Trump is a dystopia where foreigners, drug dealers, shadowy businessmen and venal politicians conspire to do down the decent, honest working men of Britain and America. It is a fearful place where only a powerful state with a strong leader can protect what little is left of our greatness.

This is the dark side of conservatism, the place where nationalism and a sense of national injustice push aside the hopeful and aspirational conservatism that yearns for people to be free, for them to be able to make their own choices and live their own lives. This is the consequence of an obsession with security - national security, community safety, energy security, food security, local resilience - that acts only to justify the longer reach of the state, that fools people again into thinking that our telephone services before privatisation was in any way at all better than the service we enjoy today.

This is the world where the intervention of government in industry, supposedly driven by some sort of 'industrial strategy', is determined by political considerations, by the imminence of elections and the influence of union barons or the media. Billions of our taxes are splurged on bailing out industries, mountains of tariffs are built and, before we know it, prices are being fixed and markets set in stasis with the result being decline, poverty and economic collapse.

It'll look so fine at the start as Hitchens' New Party winds back the liberalisation of the Thatcher years. Vital national industries are defined, plans and strategies are written, solid, broad-bottomed men are set onto the boards of the industries - Great Britain is reborn. And then it doesn't work - small exporting manufacturers close because they can't compete, the higher taxes needed to pay for the intervention mean less investment and billions of foreign investment gets relocated to places that are more friendly, more likely to provide a return on those billions.

It's easy to talk of a lost age of 'making':

A journey across the heart of England, once an exhilarating vista of muscular manufacturing, especially glorious by night, turned into archaeology. Now, if it looked like a factory, it was really a ruin.

But this covers over the deeper truth - that we are so much richer and happier than we were when those industries were booming. It's a myth that we are poorer for the loss of dirty, unpleasant dangerous jobs down mines, in foundries and in factories. We are not poorer - the children of those workers are mostly doing better paid and safer jobs of offices and will live to be 80 or older rather than dying painfully in their sixties of industrial diseases. Even Hitchens reluctantly hints at this betterment with his talk of luxuries, better coffee and better restaurants.

These are not fripperies but things that - in Hitchens' golden age - used only to be there for the rich and powerful. The miners, steel workers and factory hands of that age of glory didn't have a decent car (if at all), never went to restaurants and couldn't afford a foreign holiday. Today's equivalent worker has all those things plus a bewildering array of new stuff - smartphones, digital TVs, ice-makers, microwave ovens, power tools and fridge freezers. And their children - our children - will be even richer, having things we can only imagine right now.

But we'll only get those things if we cling to the revolution for which Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are rightly praised - free trade, free markets and the celebration of free enterprise. Building walls - real or regulatory - isn't a route to poverty not a salvation. And economic nationalism - whether it's sold to us a 'socialist' by a Labour shadow chancellor or 'conservative' by a Daily Mail columnist - always, everywhere, gets worse results than the free trade it forces out.

The evidence from approaching four decades of neoliberalism, of our embracing a global economy, is that it has led to the biggest, sustained improvement of well-being in human history. To throw all this aside to indulge in an orgy of self-pitying nationalism would be an act of monumental folly. Yet that folly is just what Peter Hitchens, John McDonnell and Donald Trump are offering.

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Quote of the day - on the curse of left-wing nationalism

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The summation of what left-wing nationalism looks like.

Ironically, the Scottish government’s underperformance rests precisely on the formula that makes it dominant. Special-interest groups are indulged, populist spending protected, services left unreformed for fear of making enemies, tabloid-friendly changes embraced and an “other” (the English, represented by Westminster) fingered for every failure or disappointment. The SNP’s soft autocracy in Scotland is the thread holding together the party’s distinctive tartan of universal handouts, leftist posturing, melodramatic flag-waving and structural conservatism. It amounts to a style of government that is more akin to Argentina’s Peronists than to the reformist Scandinavian social democrats to whom SNP politicians flatteringly compare themselves.

The difficulty is that it's hard to respond - we're most of us patriots and want the very best for our nations. And the nationalists know this so respond to criticism with cries of that most heinous of crimes - not caring about our country.

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Economic nationalism is always a bad idea - even when Will Hutton proposes it.

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The other day Will Hutton wrote a piece for The Guardian (as he does) entitled "Selling off Britain is not a sign of strength, but profound weakness". In the main the purpose of the article was to plug Hutton's latest book and a spin off TV programme he has wangled from Channel 4 but the gist of our man's argument was that:

The average Briton will now work, drink, travel, eat, drive, and use energy from assets and services supplied by foreign owners more than ever before – and in a growing and escalating deficit. Globalisation obviously means increased inflows and outflows of capital. But overseas investors are buying a great many more British companies than we are buying abroad – a ratio of more than two to one. It is not just that the control of our economic destiny moves abroad with nobody turning a hair; the associated flows of income abroad are beginning to be alarming.

Now it's clear from this that, just as we see from the new left parties in Greece and Spain, the argument is essentially one of economic nationalism. The problem isn't capitalism or even the market economy but rather that these things result in foreigners coming over here and buying up our stuff - or in Hutton's terms those wicked neoliberals are 'selling off Britain'. On one level Hutton's argument encapsulates the problem with nationalism (we'll come to this later) but it is also a misrepresentation of those capital inflows.

Hutton portrays the foreign purchase of UK 'assets' as a loss arguing that the resulting loss of income is matched by a loss of economic control. Yet in another respect the excess of capital inflow over capital outflow represents a vote of confidence in the UK and a net increase in the capital available for the UK economy. Hutton also makes no reference to what is done with the receipts from those sales to foreigners - are the resulting wealthy Britons simply, in the manner of Scrooge McDuck, piling up their gold in a big vault so they can look at it? Some how I doubt this - the money from those sales will either be reinvested or consumed.

We can also deal with Hutton's argument about the loss of income - it's true that the increased foreign ownership results in more dividends and other income flowing out of the UK. Right now total corporate profits represent about 12% of UK GDP and we know that not all of this profit is paid in dividends to owners - some goes in tax, some is retained for reinvestment. So perhaps 6-7% of UK GDP is paid out in dividends. And, even with Hutton's scary (if anecdotally reported) argument about foreigners buying up our stuff, most of the UK is still owed by British folk. Relative to the whole economy outflows of income resultant on dividends from foreign ownership is a piffling amount.

Hutton is on better ground when he talks about the innate bias towards the home country or local neighbourhood for that matter in business decisions. After all, Adam Smith had something to say about this:

As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value, every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.

Now aside from this being the only occasion when Adam Smith uses the term 'invisible hand' in Wealth of Nations', it does rather support Hutton's contention about ownership. Except that, as we know, those foreign owners buying up Britain have not endeavoured as much as they can to employ their capital domestically - they've chosen instead to invest it in Britain. And one assumes that this investment decision isn't on a whim but is a rational business decision that, the investor hopes, will lead to an acceptable return. Indeed Hutton shoots down his own argument when he explains away the success of BMW- and Tata-owned UK businesses by referring to their ownership model and business structure (he describes BMW as a family-owned business though which it manifestly isn't - an I'd note that 10% of it is British-owned too).

All this brings me back to the problem with nationalism - even a bien pensant socialism-light nationalism such as Will Hutton's. Firstly nationalism is pretty hard (as the Greeks are finding out) so long as you're a member of the European Union. Indeed ownership of British assets by French, German or Dutch firms would, one assumes, be expected in a successful union and vice versa (there's an issue here because to a degree French and German businesses don't always play to the same rules especially the state-owned ones).

Secondly economic nationalism isn't a great economic strategy - it's good news for the businesses who are protected and for the owners of those businesses (or so it seems at the time) but the real effect of protectionism is sclerotic industry and poorly served consumers. By constraining investment, Will Hutton would limit the ability of British firms to compete by making it more difficult and almost certainly more expensive for them to get the capital they need to grow.

Finally - whatever we think of Hutton's analysis - there is the matter of the message his argument sends out. He may be able to wrap his nationalism up in fine words, to say "oh no it's not protectionism" and to talk about how the "system is organised to favour transient, short-term shareholders who incentivise management teams to extract value from their companies" but the core of his message is that the government should act to prevent foreigners buying UK assets. A sort of capitalist version of "British Jobs for British Workers".

In the end we should be asking why it is that foreign cash is flooding into the UK. I doubt (however much my patriotic instinct tells me to believe) that it's because our economy is all tickety-boo. Rather it's because we're not doing so badly as a lot of other places which means the rich from places like Spain, Greece, Italy and assorted Middle East tragedies are piling their money into London - buying property, businesses, shares and sticking their money safely away in places where the great sucking sound of economic or social collapse can't be heard.

I take the view that patriotism - that preference for domestic industry Adam Smith described - is just fine but nationalism, by which I mean the structuring of policy to exclude foreign involvement, is always and everywhere a bad thing. At least Mussolini was honest with Italians over his economic nationalism - promising them that their sacrifice would mean their sons were rich (he was right about the sacrifice but probably wrong about the rich sons) - whereas Will Hutton pretends that his Guardianista national preference represents a better economic approach that will save us from doom and make us richer. Hutton is wrong.

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Is the EU more Holy Roman Empire than nascent super-state?

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I've thought something like this for a while:

These attitudes suggest that the EU could be devolving from a nascent super-state to something that increasingly resembles the Holy Roman Empire, a fragmented landscape of small, unimportant states wrapped in a unitary, but ephemeral crepe.

If this is so - and I fear it is, the need for a sustainable reform of EU institutions become imperative. Without this Europe as we know it could well collapse into the sort of bickering autarky that organisations like UKIP and the Front National increasingly present as their preferred future.

We need to begin presenting an internationalist alternative to both petty nationalism (UKIP, SNP, FN, etc.) and to the fortress Europe policies of the EU elite. Only Britain has the desire right now to have that debate and, in the UK, only the Conservative Party dare challenge both those sclerotic EU institutions and isolationist nationalism. And that referendum is essential as the lever to make Europe change.

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Ludovic Stur and the revival of Yorkshire identity - a nationalist romance

This piece of modernist statuary is a memorial to Ludivic Stur - the words below the monument describe him as 'Slovensky Narodny Buditel'. Roughly translated this means 'Slovak National Revivalist', which describes what Stur did (at least according to the Soviets):

Štúr studied philosophy and philology at the Bratislava Lycée from 1829 to 1833 and at the University of Halle from 1838 to 1840. With J. Hurban and M. M. Hodža, he carried out a reform of the literary language that based the language on the Central Slovak dialect; he organized the cultural and educational society Tatrin. From 1845 to 1848, Štúr published Slovenskje narodňje novini, the first Slovak political newspaper, and a literary supplement, Orol tatrański.

In 1847 and 1848, Štúr was a deputy to the Hungarian Diet. At the Slavic Congress in Prague in 1848 he demanded recognition of the Slavic peoples’ rights to free national and cultural development. He took part in the Prague Uprising of 1848, and in the Revolution of 1848–49 he led the struggle of the Slovaks for national liberation.

But I'm not here to talk about the birth of Slovakian nationalism although it's worth noting that it took over 170 years from Stur's revival of the Slovak language to the creation of the first independent Slovak state. And it's that independence - or the idea of independence - that I'm struck by here. So let's speculate by talking about Yorkshire, remembering while we do just how long it took to realise Stur's Slovakian dream.

Here's something from a Yorkshire regionalist party in the recent European elections:

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the 19017 that put their faith in a different future. We salute you for giving life to Yorkshire First. The fight goes on to convince all parties that the time for change is now. It is time for Yorkshire

Yorkshire has a larger population than Scotland and an economy twice the size of Wales, but with the powers of neither. We support the devolving of powers to the least centralised authority capable of addressing those matters effectively – within Yorkshire, the United Kingdom and Europe. 

We can have a little giggle at such a ridiculous idea - there's never been an independent Yorkshire, this is just some sort of indulgence. Except that this is how such ideas start - with a romantic dream such as Ludovic Stur's idea of Slovakia. I know that the Soviets paint him as some sort of noble revolutionary but the truth was that he was just a man who was steeped in the language and culture of the place he called Slovakia. And in the first instance it is that cultural identity combined with a romantic view of past and future that creates nationalism.

The origins of Scottish and Welsh nationalism don't lie in the dry world of economics or even in the technocratic, ideology-free statism of Alex Salmond. Those origins lie in the myths and legends of these places, in the vaguely remembered events of the past, in a set of wrongs felt unrighted and in the saving of language from extinction. These romantic ideas - the spirit of nation, if you wish it - are what makes separatism a possibility not dry analysis or logic.

Checking on Wikipedia reveals a long list - over 100 organisations that in one way or another seek independence or greater autonomy. And there's an association, the European Free Alliance, that brings together about 40 separatist political parties including the UK's Scottish, Cornish and Welsh nationalists. And these movements are making progress - we know of the independence vote in Scotland and may have spotted the recognition of the Cornish as a nation. But there's more - tens of thousands of Basques formed a human chain to call for the Spanish government to grant them an independence vote. There's an ongoing debate in Catalunya where the regional government wants a vote but the national government is trying to prevent this happening. We saw an on-line poll showing overwhelming support for secession of the Veneto from Italy (and the arresting of some separatists in a weird tank incident).

There is no certainty in nationhood or in the boundaries that are drawn to create those nations and we are fools if we believe these things to be either eternal or sacrosanct. Nations only remain nations by consent - where that consent is taken for granted or worse abused then the case for change, which will nearly involve a new nationalism, is made. We look at Europe and see the EU, a sort of Frankenstein's monster version of the Holy Roman Empire filled with unaccountable and distant bureaucrats governed by entitled autocrats who owe their power to patronage rather than the will of Europe's populace. Add in economic collapse on a scale, for Southern Europe especially, not seen since the aftermath of the last world war and we have the recipe from fragmentation, for that cherished multi-culturalism to descend into distrust, blame and the desire to break from the state that led people into this disaster.

I'll finish by coming back to Yorkshire and that sense of identity, the essential first ingredient for nationalism. How many medals did Yorkshire win at the Olympics?

Some say it’s the Yorkshire water. Others say it’s the Yorkshire beer. But Nicola Adams, born and bred in God’s Own County, is in no doubt over the reason for Yorkshire’s stunning success at the Olympic Games.

‘It must be all those Yorkshire puddings,’ she said in the aftermath of her historic boxing gold medal, the first ever won by a woman at an Olympic Games.
 

When Luke Campbell, proud son of Hull, fought his way to a boxing gold medal by defeating Ireland’s John Joe Nevin in the bantamweight final, he took Yorkshire’s medal haul at London 2012 to five golds, one silver and two bronze.

If Yorkshire was a country, as some of its more fanatical supporters might prefer, it would be 15th in the London 2012 medal table, just behind New Zealand but ahead of sporting giants South Africa, Spain and Brazil.

In past Olympics (the ones where we managed to win medals that is) this regionalism was never noted but suddenly, when the Games are back in London, that sense of Yorkshire pride is apparent and rampant. So when Yorkshire coming knocking at Britain's door saying "we want what Scotland's got" it will be a brave government that turns them away.

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God gave us small hearts - the rebirth of nationalism

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For most of my life the 'direction of travel' (as the trendy term goes) has been towards supranationalism, towards the idea of economic blocs and even the merger of states to produce a still bigger state. In some ways this was an understandable reaction to forty years of 'cold war', to a geopolitical contest between giant states - the USSR and the USA.

So we created our own union - just as did nations in South East Asia and South America. Pushing aside all the fine words and grand statements, these blocs were comfort blankets for smaller nations in a world of power bloc politics. The politicians would point out that the EU 'prevented' another war in Europe (it's all right folks, I know this is a pretty drastic rewriting of history but that's what politicians do) and allowed us to 'compete' with the USA, with the old Warsaw Pact and with China.

Petty nationalisms - the grumbles of Catalans, Venetians, Scots and Flemings about being subsumed into a larger identity - were disparaged. Either dismissed as rose-tinted nostalgia, indulged as sweet romanticism or condemned as fascism. The great future was deeper and closer union, an inevitable journey towards a New Europe free from the old tyranny of nationalism. Only a few nationalisms, the violent ones in Ireland and the Basque country, stirred us into action but this was simply to police the problem rather than find a solution.

Today Venetians are heading to the polls to decide whether to pursue secession from Italy, to recreate the old Venetian Republic (or at least the bits of it that still remain in Italy - we forget that a fair old chunk is now in Slovenia and Croatia). Although today's vote isn't binding on the Italian government, it would be hard to see how greater autonomy cannot follow if the vote matches the opinion polls showing 65% support for the idea across the Veneto.

We are approaching a vote on Scottish independence, there will be a similar poll in Catalonia and probably one in Galicia. And places like Corsica and Sardinia have active independence movements. At its recent conference, the UK's Liberal Democrats came out in support of devolved powers - the first step on the road to independence - for Cornwall.

Those petty nationalisms that the grand Europeans sneered at have become a new politics in Europe. One that threatens not just the EU but the nations that make up the EU - Spain, Italy, the UK, Belgium. And we can no longer simply dismiss the politics of nationalism as the work of a few lunatics.

For me there are two things driving these changes - the first one is economic, expressed here by a Venetian:

"Venetians not only want out of Italy, but we also want out of the euro, the EU and Nato," said Raffaele Serafini, another pro-independence activist

The EU - and most of all, the Euro - has completely failed places like Italy. The hope that Europe would free Italy from the corrupt institutions it inherited from Fascism was dashed as those institutions - the creatures of the corporate state - became the vehicles of the commission's control.

But there's also a romantic notion here, the idea that those old and smaller places are places with which we can identify, that we can love. And that, as Venice did before and small nations - Switzerland, Norway, Singapore, Iceland - do today, such love engenders success through trade, through business rather than through the idea of the big stick implied by the economics of the power bloc.

Above all it's about the size of our hearts:

GOD gave all men all earth to love,
But since our hearts are small,
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Belovèd over all;
That, as He watched Creation’s birth,
So we, in godlike mood,
May of our love create our earth
And see that it is good. 

....

So does Ed Miliband really like morris dancing?

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Today Ed Miliband, for reasons known only to those who advise him, has come over all English:

We in the Labour Party have been too reluctant to talk about England in recent years. We’ve concentrated on shaping a new politics for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. But some people in England felt Labour’s attention had turned away.

That something was holding us back from celebrating England too. That we were too nervous to talk of English pride and English character. Connecting it to the kind of nationalism that left us ill at ease.

I am pleased for Mr Miliband. Outside the Labour Party people have never stopped talking about England, have never been "too nervous" to talk of English pride and English character. We smile - with an element of rueful nostalgia - at the old Cecil Rhodes quote:

Remember that you are an Englishman, and have consequently won first prize in the lottery of life.

It's true, of course, but no longer in the manner that Rhodes meant it. After all, England is unsurpassingly gorgeous in both its scenery, its heritage and, on a good day, its people.  To live here is a prize worth grasping and to protect the idea of Englishness is a fight worth fighting.

I fear that Ed Miliband's Englishness is somewhat wafer thin but hope it isn't. I wonder whether we're seeing a theme - first raised in Ed's slightly worrying and protectionist, 'Blue Labour' period - of invoking nationalist sentiments, of seeking to capture the idea of English nationhood without changing the substance of English grievance.

No doubt this Englishness won't run to liking morris dancing, folk music or free speech. It will be a card played once or twice - ahead of a major football tournament in which England are competing, for example - to snaffle a little of that working class nationalism that, in truth, Ed Miliband and all around him despise.

So no Ed Miliband doesn't really like morris dancing. His Englishness is worn too lightly for that.

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Nationalism, immigration and national recovery - a dark thought

A Poster from the US National Recovery Administration of 1933

 

In my meanderings round Bradford, in thousands of conversations with folk from every conceivable ethnic, economic and political background, I have often heard non-white people bemoaning new immigration. After all like the white working class, our Black and Asian workers feel threatened by the influx of new people. And – just as white people worry about the impact of new cultures, so do established Asian and Black communities!

And the racism! Some of the racist people I know are Pakistanis – some comments about Bengalis, Chinese, Arabs and Jews cause even a hardened old hand like me to wince. This isn’t to do down my Asian friends and acquaintances but to point out that they live in the same city as the white folk and that the pressures of that urban life produce a related set of prejudices, assumptions and biases to that we are familiar with from white racists.

Now Searchlight, the anti-racism group have conducted a survey looking at attitudes to immigration, race and ethnicity. And here’s one of the findings:

According to the survey, 39% of Asian Britons, 34% of white Britons and 21% of black Britons wanted all immigration into the UK to be stopped permanently, or at least until the economy improved. And 43% of Asian Britons, 63% of white Britons and 17% of black Britons agreed with the statement that "immigration into Britain has been a bad thing for the country".

Stop and think a little. Is what we are seeing the “deracination” of immigration as an issue? Or are these opinions a reflection of racism becoming a more complicated than our current depiction of “white prejudice”? I don’t know but is reminds us again of the challenges we face in managing the competing needs of the economy, community and individual families.

Understandably, the left-wing opponents of nationalism find political concerns in the polling – not surprising given this finding:

 ...48% of the population would consider supporting a new anti-immigration party committed to challenging Islamic extremism, and would support policies to make it statutory for all public buildings to fly the flag of St George or the Union flag.

I guess that these people would also be susceptible to protectionism, to tougher punishments for criminals, to less tolerance of bad behaviour and to a host of intrusive measures aimed at creating that stable, predictable, mildly hierarchical society beloved of Fabians. This is why we must watch with care the debate inside the Labour Party – the ascendancy of beer-bellied, rough-talking union masters may just, if connected to the agenda of immigration control, nationalism and protectionism, create a terrible government. A government badging itself one of "national recovery" and employing all the techniques of modern media to enforce compliance - far more effectively that with America's NRA in the 1930s.

"Perhaps the most famous case was Jacob Maged, the fourty-nine year-old immigrant dry cleaner who spent three months in jail in 1934 for charging thirty-five cents to press a suit, when the NRA had insisted that all loyal Americans must charge at least fourty cents"

...one that would destroy the great good that has come from 50 years of free trade and free enterprise and squash any real hope of recovery.

...