In

association with Winchester Universitys Centre for English Identity

and Politics

Labour, England, and the end of British Scotland

Jonathan Rutherford

Gordon Brown's speech the day before the 2014 Scottish referendum
vote was a passionate defence of the politics and history of the British
union. He expressed the heart and soul of Labour in Scotland.

Scottish Labour from its beginning was a unionist party. The Scottish
Workers Parliamentary Committee was set up in 1899, changing its
name to the Scottish Labour Party. The Labour Representation
Committee was established in England and Wales in 1900 and changed
its name in 1906 to the Labour Party. In 1909 Scottish Labour and the
Labour Party amalgamated. The history of the Labour Party is the history
of the union.

The end of British Scotland
In the last decades Labours role as the Scottish establishment cemented
Edinburgh to London at an elite level. In Glasgow, Labours unionism was
its principle means of warding off sectarian strife. But the growing
estrangement of Labour from the British electorate and the shift in
Scotland of the Catholic vote in favour of independence, fatally
weakened Scottish Labour unionist politics.

The SNP delivered the coup de grace. It re-worked Scottishness into a
modern, inclusive sense of national belonging and skillfully excluded
Labour from the Scottish family. Labour was defined as the party of
Westminster and the status quo. However much Labour exposed the
social democratic failings of the SNP it could not fight on the cultural
terrain of national belonging and identity. It no longer had a compelling,
popular story of why Britain was better together.

Ten days before the referendum vote on the 18th September, a You Gov
poll put the Yes vote on 51 per cent and the No on 49 per cent. It

proved to be a rogue poll but by the following day Gordon Brown had
announced that if the Scots voted No they would be granted further
devolution with greater control over finance, welfare and taxation. No-
one in the Labour Party contradicted this concession. David Cameron fell
into line and supported it. Browns unilateral, last minute fix only
confirmed the end of British Scotland. His eve of poll speech the
following week proved to be an elegy for the lost world of Scottish
Labour politics.

Despite the vote to remain in the union, the demand for independence
had revealed Scotlands equivocal relationship with England. It
highlighted the ambiguous nature of an English polity within the
constitution. The morning after the referendum, David Cameron
committed his Coalition government to further devolution. He raised
the West Lothian question and challenged Labour to back English votes
for English laws. Despite ample warning of Camerons likely intention,
Labour was silent. When it finally called for a constitutional convention it
sounded defensive. Never had victory looked so like defeat. Labour had
won a pyrrhic victory in Scotland and it had failed to identify itself with
England. In preserving a status quo that no longer existed, Labour had
dramatically weakened itself as a British political force.

Labours annual party conference followed the result of the
Referendum. Even at this late stage it could have addressed England
directly and recognised its political identity alongside Scotland and
Wales. It could have acknowledged that Westminster must change, and
that this would mean reducing the influence of Scotland. It could have
decisively embraced devolution within England, offering more power to
its cities, counties and communities. And it could have begun a debate
on an English Labour party. But Labour did none of these things. It had
no story to tell England, just as it had had no compelling story of Britain
to tell the Scottish people.

Will Scottish Labour revive itself ? It can still call on residual loyalties. It
is not a toxic brand in the way Labour has become in parts of England.
But what exactly does it stand for? The SNP has seized its social
democratic mantle. Scottish Labour has stood for the redistributive,
unitary British state. But the Tories are transforming its architecture.
Scottish voters lack faith in it, and a growing number of English voters
believe the Barnett Formula that distributes funding is unfair and over

generous to Scotland. Both the official Labour Party inquiry and Jon
Cruddas independent inquiry reveal that English voters overwhelmingly
reject the idea of the SNP as a partner in a Labour led UK government.


Culture and Nation
Labour played a major role in decolonizing the empire. It brokered a
cease fire in Northern Ireland, and it granted a Parliament to Scotland
and an Assembly to Wales. These are historic Labour achievements.
More by accident than design, it has contributed to the growing dynamic
toward greater national autonomy within the UK. But the Labour Partys
roots are in unionist politics, and its social democratic politics has
depended upon the unitary British State. Devolution has undermined its
political foundations.

Labours defeat in the general election of 2010 was arguably its worst
since 1918. Its defeat in 2015 was worse still. In Scotland it was wiped
out. In England and Wales it is strong in London and in the cities and
university towns. But London is now more a global city, and the latter
are more cosmopolitan, higher educated, and middle class than the
country at large. Labours success only highlights the growing gulf
between the party and the rest of the country. Its presence in English
areas of prosperity is tenuous and it has been driven back into the de-
industrialised regions which have been heavily dependent upon public
spending. These can no longer be described as Labour heartlands. The
challenge of UKIPs blue collar English nationalism means that safe
Labour seats can no longer be taken for granted.

There is a common view that a country is imagined what Benedict
Anderson, the political thinker, describes as an imagined community
(Anderson, 1983). It is invented, and so also reinvented, in
representation and the imagination in books, art, music, film and
popular culture. But the story of a country grows out of its customs,
traditions, institutions and ways of life. A country has a history and a
culture which is material. This culture is an inheritance which forms a
common life providing people with their principal source of meaning,
and a sense of identity and belonging. Individuals inherit their culture,
but they also contribute to reimagining it. The anthropologist Ruth
Benedict describes culture as the raw material of which the individual
makes his life (Benedict,1934:181). The loss of a culture is, a loss of

something that had value equal to that of life itself, the whole fabric of a
peoples standards and beliefs (Benedict 1934:).

In recent decades this common inheritance has started to break apart.
Large numbers of people experience a sense of cultural disorientation.
Cultural identification has been shifting away from Britishness toward
Englishness, Scottishness and Welshness. There is no one single cause,
but the globalisation of capitalism that began in the late 1970s plays a
major part in the destruction of our common life. In a single generation,
industrial class identities and forms of solidarity, along with the work
that formed them, have disapeared. A combination of technological
change, deindustrialisation and the financialisation of the economy have
entrenched a long term trend toward deeper inequalities of power,
wealth and income. The commercialization and standardization of
culture have deracinated local places and identities. Unprecedentedly
high levels of immigration has created division, anger and cultural
anxiety.

When people feel they are losing a sense of who they are and where
they belong, they will either defend their culture, or they will set about
reinventing it. Both these conservative and radical responses are
redefining the union of Britain.

Englishness is a native identity born of living in the country and for this
reason many immigrants in the past have felt themselves excluded or
even under threat from it. Anti-immigrant racism has mobilized the
iconography of Englishness. However in the last decade a cultural
renascence of Englishness has neutralized its association with racism.
Increasing numbers of minority ethnic groups are native to England.
Generations have integrated themselves into the common life of the
country, creating hybrid cultures combining their own ancestral
traditions with their English inheritance. Our shared English language ,
our literature, our music, food and cultural preoccupations are changing
and will continue to change.

This cultural hybridity is not the multiculturalism of fixed and
permanent ethnic cultures that exist in parallel to one another. It is a
practice of cultural mixing as individuals remake their identities in a
multi-ethnic society. But Labours politics remains within the
multicultural approach. It has retained from the 1980s the vestiges of an

anti-colonialist, anti-racist politics. Labour is right to stand up to racism

and discrimination, but it is stuck in a moral binary of minority good,
majority bad.

Individuals from all ethnic groups are reworking culture in everyday life
and so shaping a new common life which is the basis for new forms of
solidarity and the glue of social integration. There are two factors that
are obstacles to growing social integration. The first is our model of
capitalism which is generating inequalities of power, income and
opportunities across generations, regions and ethnic groups. The
second is the continuing high levels of immigration. Added to these is
the security threat of Islamist extremism. While Labour can talk about
the first, it changes the subject when cultural anxieties about
immigration are raised, and it looks unreliable on the third.

George Orwell remarked that England is perhaps the only great country
whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. Too often
Labour gives the impression of sharing this sentiment. It is an
extraordinary misjudgment born out of the changing composition of the
party as it becomes more metropolitan, liberal, and middle class. It
places Labour on the wrong side of both the cultural and economic
faultlines dividing the country. The party ends up estranged from the
people it wants to represent.

England and Labour
In October 2015, Labours newly elected leader Jeremy Corbyn gave a
speech to the Scottish Labour Party conference. He told his audience
that decisions about policy, the management of Scottish Labour affairs,
and the selection of candidates, will be taken, here in Scotland by
members and activists. 'That is what I am committed to and what Kezia
and I will deliver, with the UK and Scottish Labour parties co-operating in
solidarity with one another.' Corbyn has conceded the end of Labour
unionist politics but has withheld from admitting it. There can be no UK
Labour Party without Scotland. He continues Labours evasion of its
predicament.

In May Labour faces the challenges of Scottish and Welsh elections,
elections for the London Mayoralty and city Mayoralties, and local
council elections in England. Labour stands a good chance of winning in
London, and in the metropolitan cities and university towns. Although

elections for the new Mayors will be challenging for Labour. In the
former industrial regions the party looks set to suffer a further erosion
of its support as politics becomes more English focused and driven by
political grievances against Westminster politics. The elections for the
Scottish Parliament will confirm the SNPs political ascendency.

In the forthcoming EU referendum, the desire for national self-
determination will lead Scotland to embrace the EU and England to be
sceptical. The EU referendum vote risks intensifying existing faultlines
within the union. By 2020 Scotland will have got the autonomy it
wanted. George Osbornes Northern Powerhouse is devolving power to
English Cities and regions and there will be a growing expectation that
English decisions are taken by the English. Constituency boundary
changes will mean fewer English seats with an inbuilt Labour majority.

Labours position is precarious. Its future will be decided in England. It
needs a specifically English strategy to identify the politics and policies it
will need to win a majority of English seats. It needs to reform itself into
a federal UK Labour Party with an English Labour Party, and with Scottish
and Welsh Labour granted more autonomy to respond to their own
national politics. The party will then be in a better position to secure the
union in a more federal constitution. It cannot be a technocratic
exercise. In England, Labour needs to connect with the remaking of
common life, and develop a politics and language attuned to English
cultures, and to their regional differences and changing identities.

There is no status quo in the union and so there is no status quo within
Labour. The choice is to defend what no longer exists or open up to the
cultural life reshaping the country and in doing so radically remake the
union of countries in the UK.

References
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities Reflections on the origins
and spread of nationalism, Verso, 1983
Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1934

Jonathan Rutherford is part of the England and Labour editorial group.

Political notes are published by One Nation Register and a contribution
to the debate shaping Labours political renewal. The articles published

in this England and Labour issue of One Nation Register are part of an
online debate organised by the Centre for English Identity and Politics at
Winchester University.

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