Labour is no longer the party of the working class. This was confirmed by last year’s general election, which saw Labour slump to its lowest seat-share in over eighty years and lose a significant number of its ‘heartland’ constituencies to the Conservatives. The Tories’ breach of the so-called ‘red wall’ portends a bleak future for Labour. Without reconnecting with working class voters, the party will likely be out of power for at least another decade. Yet there is little sign that Labour is capable of winning these voters back. In fact, the political thought that prevails in the party works against this outcome, a point that is most clearly illustrated by the issue of culture.
Culture now sits alongside economics as a major political faultline. In Britain, this was revealed most starkly by the EU referendum. Though the classic left/right divide mattered to this vote, its result was primarily shaped by a value cleavage. Broadly speaking, the culturally conservative backed leave and the culturally liberal backed remain. Working class voters on the whole were in favour of Brexit, a position that reflected their desire for more economic and cultural security. This demand for cultural security may be thought of as patriotism, defined by George Orwell as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life”.
Under Boris Johnson, the Conservatives have grasped what many blue collar Britons are after, as shown by their policy platform of moving left on economics while delivering Brexit and a tighter immigration regime. The best that can be said about Labour is that its Corbynite policies have spoken to the working class’ economic concerns. But that is all.
Why hasn’t Labour promised to supply the working class with greater cultural security? There are two explanations. The first is that many within or close to the party do not think that this demand for cultural protection has substance; or, to put this in Marxian terms, they consider the attitude that many working class voters have towards culture to be an epiphenomenon of underlying material conditions. Accordingly, if these voters had their economic insecurity redressed, their cultural insecurity would reduce. Jeremy Corbyn is a proponent of this view. He says that Brexit is simply the result of neoliberalism and the “wilful destruction of jobs” in working class communities.
The second explanation is that many within or close to Labour see the demand for cultural security as illegitimate. The philosophy behind this judgement is best referred to as liberal cosmopolitanism. This says that the “loyalty of each person to all humanity” is the moral basis for politics. It therefore fundamentally opposes particular allegiances such as the nation, which are seen as promoting exclusion and stopping people from identifying with the universal.
The intellectuals Daniel Trilling and Maya Goodfellow are partisans of this liberal cosmopolitan approach. In a recent piece, Trilling denounced calls for Labour to meet working class demands for cultural protection as “exclusionary”. Acceding to this demand would turn the party “against religious, cultural or racial minorities”, he wrote. Similarly, Goodfellow has argued that patriotism is merely a proxy for the “racialised idea that certain groups don’t belong in the UK”. This denies “people’s humanity”, she says, and ignores the fact that culture is “always changing”, a transience that permits individuals to forgo particular belongings and embrace wider solidarities.
Neither of these approaches to culture endears Labour to working class voters. While Corbyn’s crude materialism is disdainful of blue collar concerns, liberal cosmopolitanism is actively hostile to these. The party should soften these intellectual currents as a matter of electoral expediency. However, this isn’t just an issue of political strategy. It’s also an issue of accuracy. The materialist and cosmopolitan depictions of patriotism as immaterial, easily transcended, and exclusionary are at odds with reality.
Parochial attachments can be highly consequential to people’s lives. As the sociologist Craig Calhoun has shown, they are capable of providing dense “networks of mutual support … [and] frameworks of meaning”. Indeed, rather than being mere by-products of material conditions, such attachments can underpin economic security. The founding of the welfare state, the left’s crowning achievement, was dependent on a strong sense of national solidarity and a story of national sacrifice.
As this example implies, furthermore, certain groups may have more cause than others to hold on to particular loyalties. The less powerful in society may be especially keen to maintain local, ethnic, or national bonds precisely because they derive support and meaning from them. In this regard it’s no coincidence that patriotism is closely associated with blue collar voters, particularly the English working class. Over the last forty years this group has experienced a sharp decline in its economic, cultural and political influence (though Brexit and the nature of Johnson’s electoral victory may change this). In such circumstances, a commitment to the parochial makes sense.
And among the English working class, this commitment to the parochial – to England, more specifically – is not for the most part motivated by racism. According to research by John Denham, a former Labour MP and the current Director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics, the vast majority (90%) of those who identify as English do not see this group in racial terms. Rather, the traits they associate with Englishness include being traditional, locally rooted, tolerant, and fair. It is a community conceived in these terms that they are loyal to and wish to defend, not one that is articulated in opposition to others. England for them is a “positive object of loyalty”, as Orwell would have put it.
In its current form, Labour struggles to see the significance and merits of patriotism. Until it does, the party is going to have a tough time reconnecting with the working class.