In her pitch for the Labour leadership Rebecca Long Bailey has raised the idea of a ‘progressive patriotism’.
Some have already noted that this looks like an alternative to Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-imperialism. Some may well find that attractive but with a bellicose Tory like Boris Johnson in No,10 a starting point of opposition to at best doubtful imperial adventures would surely be no bad thing.
That said coming as I do from a tradition that is not keen (to put it mildly) on supporting any super power Corbyn’s take on the matter was not always mine own. These are debates for another time.
Of the moment is the meaning of progressive patriotism, a phrase which has both a complex history and refers in certain ways to complex history.
Long Bailey gives the example of the US Civil War and solidarity offered by mill workers in Lancashire in the early 1860s and E P Thompson’s Peculiarities of the English is also a key text here. I’ll return to both in later posts.
In the mean time below is an extract from an interview the late marxist theorist Stuart Hall gave to the New Statesman in 2012 where he touches on some of the issues with progressive patriotism as he saw it.
What Thompson called the “peculiarities of the English” (and especially the peculiarities of English socialism) have been on Hall’s mind a good deal lately. He has been talking about the New Left and Englishness with, among others, Jonathan Rutherford, his colleague on the editorial board of the journal Soundings and a prime mover in “Blue Labour”, and Jon Cruddas, entrusted by Ed Miliband with responsibility for the Labour Party’s policy review.
Hall says he understands the impulse behind Rutherford’s and Cruddas’s attempt to find intellectual resources for a new politics of “common life” in ancient English radical traditions. Yet he insists that such traditions cannot be revived “at will”. “I talked to Cruddas about this,” he tells me. “I think I understand his preoccupations rather more than Maurice Glasman’s. In a constituency like Cruddas’s, where you’re fighting the far right, you have to think about those things [English identity, immigration]. But you have to be careful about how you recruit them. He came to talk to me about the New Left, which, of course, was interested in the popular language of the nation. But I had the feeling he was raiding the past, out of context, in a way.”
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