Gareth Young (Lewes, CEP): Anthony Barnett has asked me to write a piece about the “way forward” for the CEP - the Campaign for an English Parliament. To be honest it’s a difficult task, not because I can’t see a way forward but because I think it’s other people, rather than the CEP, that need to take the next step.
If - or when - people decide they want an English parliament; or, to be more exact, when the political classes concede that the demand is legitimate, we can start thinking more constructively about it. Until that time Britain is the obstacle and unionism is the enemy, and so too are those people on both the left and the right who belittle the legitimate democratic cause of the CEP.
As far as the left is concerned it is going to be difficult to build any consensus until the self-styled progressives actually progress beyond sniping at people that they regard as reactionary, and until they understand that to be progressive in thought is pointless unless you are also progressive in deed.
Recently we have heard siren voices emanating from the left calling for a progressive English nationalism. But that’s all they have been, just voices. The CEP is not the unknown quantity here; it will never dilute its demand for national English government - and nor should it. The known unknowns are the voices from the left. So my answer to Anthony is, wouldn’t it be a better idea for you - or someone outside the CEP - to write something on the way ahead for the (c)ampaign for an English parliament (small c)? It seems to me that there are people outside the CEP who feel alienated by what they perceive to be the right-wing bias of the organisation but who are nevertheless interested in the campaign and cause. Isn’t it time for progressives to get off their arses and actually do something? To be actively involved? Perhaps it would be more constructive to hear what they, rather than the CEP, intend to do about it.
Perhaps it is time for Marquand, Bragg, Barnett, Perryman, to sit down with the CEP and try to help the campaign. I don’t think that a genuine offer of help would be refused because I don’t believe that the CEP is reactionary, and neither is its cause. The question is whether it can encompass wider concerns without diverting its energy from the central message. With input from the left it might do just that.
I have a feeling that the left is growing up, and reconciling itself to the need to engage positively with Englishness. In Imagined Nation: England After Britain Andy Newman (Socialist Unity) notes that the left in England is not yet an English left. Andy suggests several ways of rectifying this, but the one that I want to highlight, an olive branch to leave dangling, is this:
…the left needs unashamedly to participate in and support some of the constitutional and cultural initiatives that it currently seems to reject. These include the Campaign for an English Parliament, the increasing demand that England should have its own National Anthem, and local efforts to celebrate St George’s Day in ways which are both popular and inclusive. The alternative is that legitimate democratic aspirations will be hijacked by the far right.
Unambiguous statements like this (and by Hattersley - “I am English, not British but English“), are a start. But what is the “way forward” for the progressive English left?
