Last week in The Discourse, two articles, in different ways, explored ‘the politics of place.’ The first, Adam Ramsay’s ‘It’s Time to Break up Britain’ was informed by extensive travels around the UK as well as by his work as an investigative reporter and as the editor of openDemocracy’s UK politics strand. Ramsay explores the growing sense that Britain is starting to lose its coherence as a political project. In Northern Ireland, in Wales, and pre-eminently in Scotland, the supposed benefits of political union structured around the needs of London’s finance-intelligence complex are beginning to pall. Glimmers of this disenchantment with the Empire State can even be detected in England, especially in regions outside the metropolitan south east. Whatever one makes of his thesis, he writes with a breadth of understanding that very few London-based journalists can pretend to match. (Full disclosure, Adam has published me in the past.)
Meanwhile the London-based Spectator published ‘New Labour, New Keir: How Labour will change tack in 2021’. This was informed by conversations with ‘party sources’, who told its author, Isabel Hardman, that Starmer will focus on ‘the politics of place and people’. Hardman explains:
This will include a switch from Labour sounding relentlessly negative – as it has done for the past decade – about people’s lives and the places they live. From now on, Starmer will stop telling people how bad things are and try to strike a positive note about the opportunities for their towns as well as the problems.
One of Hardman’s ‘party sources’ elaborates:
Even if someone looks at their town and think it’s nowhere near as good as it was, they still have that pride about it and we want to be optimistic about that place.
Some responses to the Hardman piece thought that Starmer is planning, or signalling, a ‘Blue Labour’ style appeal to provincial English voters, using the language of patriotism and social conservatism. We’ll have to see. The article is short, and even shorter on detail. The fact that her source is talking about wanting to be ‘optimistic’, rather than suggesting what Labour can do to improve living standards doesn’t inspire confidence.
While the two articles are wildly different, in scope and political orientation, they touch on something rarely discussed in the UK. In a first-past-the-post electoral system, all politics is, to a degree that is almost always decisive, a ‘politics of place.’ The only party that has broken the hold of the Labour-Conservative duopoly in Great Britain since 1945 has done so by developing a ‘politics of place.’ The Scottish National Party became the dominant political force in Scotland by tying the cause of national liberation to mild social democracy. Along the way it has decisively demoted the Labour Party. In the 2010 General Election Labour won 40 of the country’s 59 seats. In 2019 it held on to only one. The SNP, meanwhile, has gone from 6 seats in 2010 to 48 in 2019.
Labour’s own rise to a place in the UK-wide duopoly was itself a consequence, at least in part, of the ‘politics of place.’ The concentration of unionised labour in Britain’s coalfields and industrial cities made it possible for the Labour Party to secure Parliamentary representation long before it had become able to secure a convincing national majority. Had their electoral base been spread evenly throughout the United Kingdom they might never have been able to displace the Liberal Party. Today, as the Green Party and UKIP show, millions of votes can still translate into meagre electoral rewards when your supporters won’t gather in numbers sufficient to win individual constituencies.
Any UK-wide challenge to the duopoly would have to achieve an overwhelming depth of support to become anything other than a spoiler for either Labour or the Conservatives. But political movements that work with the grain of place-based identities can offer voters a vision of a transformative future that doesn’t depend on securing a majority in Westminster. Instead of sounding ‘optimistic’ about the kinds of places that Hardman’s sources almost certainly don’t live in, radical nationalists and secessionists can speak candidly and coherently about the need for a clean slate – the creation of an altogether new form of shared life. And this as true of the English regions as it is of Wales and Scotland.
Welsh and Scottish independence and secession in England are causes that open up a space to discuss the fundamentals of rule. The UK outside of London and the South East has been starved of investment since 1980, to the point where, as Ramsey points out, incomes in some places are closer to Poland’s than to Holland’s. What, then, does a modern developmental state look like? How is economic development to be achieved against a background of deepening environmental crisis? How can we hold our politicians to account? How can we secure the information we need for citizenship? What does economic management look like, once the Treasury-City-of-London-Bank-of-England system is out of the picture?
Far from being ‘relentlessly negative’, Corbyn’s Labour was willing to start answering these questions. In order to do so he happily adopted ideas from Scotland’s radical independence movement, like the proposal for a National Investment Bank. Labour’s defeat in 2019, and Starmer’s strategy since, mean that the party will struggle to inspire those who believe in the need for radical reform. Starmer himself will have the logic of the lesser evil on his side in those places where the UK-wide duopoly still functions; a vote for anyone other than Labour is a vote for the Conservatives. But independence and secessionist movements might make rapid gains if they can persuade voters that their future lies outside Westminster’s zone of control. Maybe not voting for Labour will help the Conservatives win this seat or that. But once the game is exit from a discredited central state, the calculations change. Eyes turn to a transformative horizon, and marginalising Labour becomes part of the point.
After Brexit it doesn’t seem that reckless for constituent elements of the UK to want to leave. Scotland might already be on the way out. As Ramsay points out, a united Ireland is no longer the stuff of Protestant nightmares. And if a united Ireland and an independent Scotland are within in the bounds of the possible, people in Wales might also look more favourably at independence. Labour is now almost completely confined to the south of that country. South Wales was one of the birthplaces of the Labour Party. Just like Central Scotland was.
And what then do the rest of us do? Cornish confederation with Wales and Scotland doesn’t seem wildly more unlikely than remaining in the UK. Northumbrian confederation along similar lines would make a lot of sense. Other English regions might start to appreciate the advantages of ending Westminster rule and one by one enter into a social union that borrows institutional forms but denies power to those in the unaccountable distance. We can imagine a future where the United Kingdom shrinks to a latter-day version of the Papal States, comprised of the Square Mile, Buckingham Palace, Chelsea and one or two of the leafier Home Counties suburbs. The rest of us can embrace our future as citizens of the Various Islands of the North Atlantic.
All this is to say that Starmer’s attempt to win back support in the North of England and the Midlands is not risk free for Labour. After decades of loyalty Scotland has gone and shows no signs of returning. If Labour does not articulate a vision for all of the UK that acknowledges the scale of the challenges facing most people, it risks being replaced by those willing to tell a different story altogether.
Forty years of neoliberal economic management, ten years of austerity and a pandemic have tested the viability of the UK to destruction. Wanting to sound optimistic won’t cut it.
The Return of the Public 