Jon Bright (London, OK): There's an interesting article by Paul Kingsnorth in the New Statesman today, calling on "the Left" to engage with English nationalism. He sets out both a political and a cultural case for supporting it - the imbalances of devolution, well documented in these pages, and the type of creeping cultural destruction produced by the logic of capitalism, which we have covered far less.
Kingsnorth cites closing post offices, bookshops, orchards and, most painfully of all, the local pub, as reasons for a new engagement with English nationalism:
In today's England we are losing what makes us who we are, at a frightening rate. Some of the world's most rapacious corporations, in a cosy alliance with an overcentralised government in love with the notion that business values are national values, are tearing meaning and character from the landscape. The independent, the historic and the diverse are everywhere being replaced by the corporate, the bland and the controlled...a huge, and in some cases irreversible, cultural loss, a loss of the everyday culture of the people.
Kingsnorth's problem is, of course, this lingering, undefined "we, the people" to which he refers, and the impossible circularity being defined by something that has been lost. If we have lost what makes us who we are, then who are we? His definition of English nationalism leaves much up for grabs, caught on the usual horns of the civic/ethnic nationalist debate:
It is time to reclaim both England and the proud tradition of radical nationalism, rooted but not chauvinistic, outward-looking but aware of our past, attached to place not race, geography not biology. The need to belong - the need for a sense of place and culture - is a basic human impulse. It should not be denied, and neither is it a bad thing unless it is perverted.
Who are Kingsnorth's English? I am left with a fleeting impression of a people in love with Orwell's illusory, traditional pub (which became famous enough to exist, in the corporate way), lamenting their closed Post Offices, but at the same time thrown together by mere happenstance of place. They feel like tourists in their own country, searching for some sense of nostalgia and authenticity, something "real" in a land of chain stores and strip malls, certain they have lost something but struggling to define exactly what it is. Without any easy recourse to an accepted language of ethnicity (which Orwell used frequently but Powell is remembered for), they are forced into the difficult position of the civic nationalist - trying to preserve some form of uniqueness whilst celebrating values based on universality. Are they able to recognise each other at all? Am I one of them?
