Nationalism, Inequality and England’s Political Predicament

Charles Leddy-Owen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351617659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Based on fine-grained ethnographic research in an English city, this book offers a highly original perspective on England's contemporary political predicament. It argues that some of the most influential academic accounts of the country's current political situation, particularly those focusing on culture or racism, have neglected the key role of nationalism as an often unspoken, banal political principle and framing ideology. Suggesting that economic inequalities remain the key causal ingredient of English political life and, crucially, that these are being interpreted by individuals in relation to a nationalist/cosmopolitan ideological axis, the author argues that any effective, progressive political future will require a reinvigorated sense of political community. Proposing a politics that will promote both nationhood and cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, Inequality and England's Political Predicament advocates a seemingly contradictory but necessary approach by which explicitly anti-nationalist and anti-racist principles coexist expediently alongside short-term protectionist and immigration control policies.

1 Contemporary nationalist politics in England

Inequalities, culture and racism

1.1 Nationalism and politics

This book is about nationalist politics in England. When attempting to explain this overall premise in everyday conversation, to most academics and non-academics alike, it seems to evoke images of extremism. At different times I have been asked whether the book is about skinheads, far-right groups such as the English Defence League or, for one more historically minded friend, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. However, the term ‘nationalism’ in the context of this book, and more widely in the academic field of nationalism studies, is not ‘a covering term for objectionable ethnic chauvinism’ (Hearn, 2017, p. 20), limited to ethnically absolutist ideologies and movements citing the uniqueness of a particular people. It refers to something more mundane, and far more prevalent, than that.

At its core, ‘nationalism’, as Ernest Gellner (1983) stated, is ‘primarily a political principle that holds that the national and political unit should be congruent’ (p. 1). That is, nationalism holds that state and nation should be brought into union. Nationalism emerged as a major political force in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century West, after which time, and especially in the decades following the World Wars, it replaced or overlaid nearly all other state forms globally, most notably empires, dynastic kingdoms and tribal confederations (Wimmer, 2013, p. 1). The principle by which rulers and ruled were expected to hail from the same national background makes this social and political formation very unusual in historical terms – and still ‘the nation-state period counts for less than 2 per cent of human sedentary life’ (Malešević, 2017, p. 4). Despite this historical novelty, so accepted and successful has nationalism become today that, regardless of whether they are also legitimised and guided by liberalism, religion, monarchy, and so on, it is nationalism that provides the foundational legitimising principle for the vast majority of contemporary states. As Malešević (2006) states, in the modern world ‘not being national is scarcely an option anymore’ (p. 28) – or as Gellner (1983) perhaps more evocatively puts it, today everyone ‘must have a nationality as [s/]he must have a nose and two ears’ (p. 6).

Building on Gellner’s classic definition, Breuilly (1993) adds that through nationalism ‘the interests and values of [the] nation take priority over all other interests and values’ (p. 3; cf. Hobsbawm, 1991, p. 9). In other words, ultimately it is the nation that should be prioritised politically by its members and state. This prioritisation of a national in-group over foreign out-groups might well bring to mind anti-immigration politics or the bloodiest cases of twentieth century nationalist chauvinism. However, there are many more, comparatively mundane examples that we might consider, such as the national tax regimes redistributing financial resources to the citizens of a particular state, national parliaments and governments institutionally geared towards serving the interests of co-nationals, or the relative ease by which a citizen can enter and leave ‘their’ nation-state. While some of these examples might be qualified (there is freedom of movement for some citizens between nation-states, and some national resources are of course redistributed abroad or to non-citizen residents) such qualifications are exceptional in a world in which (usually inherited) nationality can be critical to individual rights and life chances (Carens, 1987).

As well as a political principle, drawing on the work of John Breuilly and Sinisa Malešević, this book will argue that nationalism is an ideology through which ‘human actors articulate their actions and beliefs’ (Malešević, 2011, p. 272). Nationalism can, to differing extents and at different times for different people, ‘provide … a conceptual map which enables [them] to relate their particular material and moral interests to a broader terrain of action’ (Breuilly, 1993, p. 13) – though always in relation to the underlining political principle regarding nation and state congruence. That nationalism seems so normal today, and that the term has become associated in popular and much academic parlance alike with extremism and violence, is a product of its success as an ideology and its consequent banality for the vast majority globally, perhaps especially so for those living in the ‘settled’ nations of the West (Billig, 1995).

Or at least until recently. The rise during the twenty-first century of right-wing populism and anti-immigration politics in nation-states widely considered to be some of the most ‘settled’ (and to possess the most mature democratic traditions), has brought nationalist politics more clearly into view, perhaps most notably with the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and the UK’s shock referendum vote to ‘take [national] control back’ from the European Union. In the context of these extraordinary, yet also rather familiar,¹ political developments and the deeper political divisions they represent, what will be argued in the present chapter is that among two broad bodies of (rapidly developing) research aiming to decipher England’s present political predicament, there is remarkably little direct, nuanced or sustained engagement with nationalism itself. It will be argued that a failure to grapple with the fundamental role of nationalism in framing and shaping state politics, ideas of political community and political identifications in England, has problematic knock-on effects vis-à-vis some of the key claims being made by these different branches of research, and that the consequences of this are potentially problematic if we are aiming to most effectively diagnose the rather worrying situation those of us living in Britain (and elsewhere) currently face.

It is important to note here that I will not be arguing that either broad sets of literature discussed in this chapter are somehow wrong – they are ultimately aiming to analyse, respectively, electoral politics and racism, and to research them in particular ways, and the reasons for their approaches are clearly justified on their own terms. What I am arguing is that in somewhat neglecting nationhood and nationalism they have developed important blind spots in the conclusions and potential implications of their research and theory. Ultimately, neither literature engages with each other very much, and still less with the field of nationalism studies, so the present study aims to cross-fertilise them all in relation to contemporary debates regarding nationhood and nationalism, class and inequalities, culture and economics, politics and the state, migration and racism. Both broad sets of research will be introduced in what follows, alongside an account of how this book engages with them in novel ways. I will then introduce the research site of the study – the English city of Portsmouth.

1.2 Quantitative research regarding England’s political predicament: inequalities versus culture

This first section will review recent quantitative analyses undertaken by political and social scientists, usually based on the analysis of nationally representative surveys, such as British Social Attitudes or the British Election Study. The core aim of these studies is to investigate formal state politics and parliamentary elections (and, more recently, referenda). Such approaches have found an England sharply divided in the wake of a post-industrial, more globalised economy and consequent class fragmentation. For Jennings and Stoker (2016, 2017), this division is represented as ‘two Englands’. One England, primarily situated in metropolitan areas of economic growth, is ‘global in outlook; relatively positive about the EU; pro-immigration; comfortable with more rights and respect for women, ethnic communities and gays and lesbians; and generally future-oriented’, while the other England, mostly found in provincial sites of economic decline, ‘is inward-looking, relatively negative about the EU and immigration, worried by the emergence of new rights for “minorities” and prone to embracing nostalgia’ (Jennings & Stoker, 2016, p. 372). The two Englands do not map onto the traditional class or political cleavages of British politics whereby, to grossly simplify, there are working classes who tend to embrace the Labour Party and middle/upper classes the Conservatives. As Jennings and Stoker (ibid, p. 381) argue, class fragmentation and the dispersal of the key cleavages for party voting across age groups, regions of the country, socioeconomic background and level of education, make obtaining a majority of seats in Westminster very difficult to achieve – and even attempting to do so risks alienating other key potential voters (not least those from more traditional bases).

Nevertheless, socioeconomic hierarchies and status are, albeit in newly fragmented forms, still positioned by these and other analysts as crucial for explaining the political divisions of a state more economically unequal today than at any time since the 1930s (Dorling, 2010, p. 179). The most important category emerging from recent academic research regarding this novel socioeconomic and political bifurcation is that of the ‘left behind’ voter, as popularised in Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin’s (2014) highly influential account of the rise of the populist radical right-wing UK Independence Party (UKIP). For Ford and Goodwin, the ‘dramatic changes’ in Britain’s social structure in recent decades (p. 114) had, by the early twenty-first century, produced ‘a growing pool of electorally marginalized, politically disaffected, and low-skilled white working-class voters’ (Ford & Goodwin, 2017, p. 20). This left behind social strata, when mobilised behind the issue of immigration and anti-EU sentiment, provided the energy for what UKIP’s leader Nigel Farage’s described as 2014’s ‘earthquake in British politics’, when the party gained the most votes in the UK’s elections for the European Parliament (Wintour & Watt, 2014) and over 150 council seats in local elections (Henderson & Deardon, 2014). A year later, in the 2015 general election, UKIP became the UK’s third biggest party in terms of the popular vote, attracting 13% of the electorate who turned out (nearly 4 million voters). From perspectives claiming to explain the party’s rise primarily in relation to economic inequalities or status anxiety, UKIP’s populist insurgency saw them enter a political space left open by a widespread political disaffection and sense of powerlessness most acutely felt by the least well-off or economically anxious, and by a party political landscape bereft since the late 1990s of explicitly redistributive class politics (Bonikowski, 2017; Dunatchik et al., 2016; Evans & Tilley, 2017; Gidron & Hall, 2017). For Flemmen and Savage (2017), following the evacuation from mainstream party programmes of explicitly class-related politics, the nationalist and anti-immigration politics of UKIP ‘has become the main “legitimate” way … by which anti-establishment statements can … come to carry the freight of a populist politics which is actually generated by deep-rooted [socioeconomic] processes of domination and marginalisation’ (p. 72). In this context, it has even been argued that the rise of UKIP, who in 2014 became the proportionately most working class party (Goodwin, 2014), represented a ‘substantial renewal of class voting’ (Evans & Tilley, 2017, p. 181).

While a broad coalition of voters was needed for the Leave vote to be successful (Swales, 2016), socioeconomic divisions were arguably even more evident when it came to voting in the 2016 referendum. In a vote split 52%-48%, the British Social Attitudes survey found that 66% of those from lower income households voted Leave, as did 70% of those ‘finding it difficult to manage financially’ and 60% of those ‘just about getting by’ (Swales, 2016, p. 7). For Goodwin and Heath (2016), the left behind population, primarily ‘anchored’ in areas bypassed by the economic successes of twenty-first century Britain, ‘delivered’ the Brexit outcome (p. 331). Taking a longer-term analytic perspective, Jennings and colleagues (2017) have suggested that the Leave vote was on average 20 points higher in areas of England that have experienced recent relative economic decline. The Leave vote also benefited from a disproportionately high turnout from those inhabiting more deprived socioeconomic statuses, including nearly three million who do not normally vote (Evans & Tilley, 2017, p. 205; Swales, 2016, p. 19), leading to the hypothesis that the referendum offered the left behind working class voter (or, more usually, non-voter) with an all-too-rare competitive choice between genuinely contrasting political visions (Evans & Tilley, 2017, p. 202).

However, many quantitative political scientists are critical of arguments suggesting that inequalities or class dynamics are the most important factors for explaining England’s contemporary political divisions. In terms of explicitly named reasons for voting Leave, according to the British Election Study, immigration (88%) or sovereignty (90%) were far more important than the economy (15%) (Swales, 2016, p. 13). Time and again, quantitative studies of anti-immigration and right-wing populist politics, in Britain and the West more generally, suggest that symbolic concerns and issues surrounding values and culture are at least as important for explaining political outlooks than objective economic status or subjective views on the economy, economic anxieties, and so on (e.g. Chan, Henderson, Sironi, & Kawalerowicz, 2017; Citrin, Green, Muste, & Wong, 1997; Fetzer, 2000; Hainmueller & Hopkins, 2014; McLaren & Johnson, 2007; Sides & Citrin, 2007).

While, as we have seen, Ford and Goodwin’s analysis clearly positioned socioeconomic inequalities as a key factor, they also positioned culture as crucially important. UKIP voters have been left behind by a globalised economy, but these authors argue that they have been more fundamentally left behind by ‘the rise of the university-educated middle class’ which has ‘changed the values that dominate … British society’ (Ford & Goodwin, 2014, p. 117). The outcome of this revolution is ‘a cosmopolitan, multicultural and globalised Britain’ perceived by those who feel excluded ‘as an alien and threatening place’ (p. 126) thanks to the ‘profoundly different’ norms and values now in the ascendancy (Ford & Goodwin, 2017, p. 20). Though to some extent fuelled by class identities and class politics, the concerns of the left behind are thus ‘increasingly emptied of material connotations’ (Kaufmann, 2017a, p. 4) and more saliently and usefully considered in relation to cultural concerns and perceived threats to ways of life and identities (Ford & Goodwin, 2017, p. 29; Goodwin & Milazzo, 2017, p. 331). Therefore, the argument goes, the central emphasis of those analysing England’s political bifurcation should not be on complex socioeconomic realignments but on the underlining, durable and growing cultural divide that is provoking a backlash among those whose identities are threatened. It is, in short, as Eric Kaufmann (2016) suggests, ‘not the economy stupid’.

In 2016, shortly after the EU referendum and shortly before the US presidential election, a paper published by Inglehart and Norris (2016) claimed that while ‘[t]here is overwhelming evidence of powerful trends toward greater income and wealth inequality in the West’ (p. 3) the recent rise of populist parties in the region is better explained through the notion of a ‘cultural backlash’ (p. 15). For these authors, ‘massive cultural changes’ and the effects of large-scale immigration, which have reached unprecedented levels in England since 1997 (Office for National Statistics, 2016), ‘seem to be eroding the basic values and customs of Western societies’ (Inglehart & Norris, 2016, p. 30) – broad patterns related by some social and political theorists with the undemocratic, cosmopolitan project of EU integration (Furedi, 2017) and with fears provoked among ethnic majorities by the Refugee Crisis (Krastev, 2018). This notion of a ‘cultural backlash’ has even been escalated by some analysts of English politics into a looming US-style ‘culture war’, with the Leave representing an early shot across the bow (Kaufmann, 2017a; Sobolewska & Ford, 2018, p. 23). Her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: explaining England’s political predicament
• 1 Contemporary nationalist politics in England: inequalities, culture and racism
• 2 Researching nationhood, nationalism and politics
• 3 Feeling overlooked: economic precariousness and political outlooks
• 4 Nationalist politics among the overlooked
• 5 Affluence, politics and place
• 6 Nationalism, cosmopolitanism and nationscepticism among the more affluent and mobile
• 7 Conclusion: nationhood, cosmopolitanism and England’s political future
• Appendix 1: Interview guide
• Appendix 2: Guide to the study’s interview participants
• Index