Andrew Pearmain
"Its defense of 'Englishness', of that way of 'being British' or the English feeling 'Great again', is a key to some of the unexpected sources of Thatcherism's popularity". Stuart Hall, The Meaning of New Times, 1989 .
"This is our last show in England. Tomorrow we play London." Steve Earle, performing at UEA 1999.
"We'd grown up in that unsettled post-war Britain where council-estate kids, while encouraged by the welfare state, were still marginalized by the class system. So the margins were bursting with creativity… Mod is the moment when working class kids broke out. It's also the melding of the rudies and the teds with a dash of Continental elan and black GI cool." Robert Elms, The Way We Wore, 2005 .
I have lived in the fine old English city of Norwich since 1990, just after Stuart Hall et al. ushered in New Times. Norwich is a lovely, easily manageable and traversible, civilized and surprisingly cultured "big village". It makes a great "place to grow up and a place to grow old", to quote Steve Earle again . My own three children have thrived here, and enjoyed a freedom and security, an all-round quality of childhood, I cannot imagine in most other cities of the UK, least of all London where we previously lived. The surrounding Norfolk countryside is breathtaking, but rough and ready. There is nothing twee and tidy about it like, say, much of the neighbouring county of Suffolk, which is blighted by its proximity to London for commuters and the weekend green-welly brigade.
If the Norfolk landscape sometimes feels bleak and featureless, you've got the enormous ever-changing skies to gaze up at. This is a working countryside, of ploughed and foraged fields and farmyards full of yapping dogs and rusting machinery, broads (lakes created by mediaeval peat-digging) and overgrown riverbanks only accessible on foot, which is how I and my dog get out there as often as we can, on tracks that often feel pre-historic. Then, within an hour from wherever we are, we return to the bright welcoming lights of the "fine city", preferably on one of our three remaining local railway lines.
But there is something very odd about Norwich, which has a lot to do with its location. First, it's not really on the way to anywhere except Great Yarmouth, and - believe me - you wouldn't want to go there. Second, it's a substantial city surrounded by countryside and sea, fifty miles from any other sizeable settlement and nearer to Amsterdam than London. Thirdly and above all, the people of Norwich and Norfolk represent "Englishness" more purely than anywhere else in the world. I know this is an infinitely debatable point, and rests on a whole universe of assumptions and stereotypes, but you would struggle to find anybody as deeply reserved, as defiantly curmudgeonly, as impatient with pretence and pomposity, as sheer downright bloody-mindedly English as your average Norfolker. This again is largely a matter of geography: there is a sense in which Norfolk people feel themselves driven back by the modern world. There is no place left to go but the North Sea.
History bears this out. Norwich was second only to London for much of the last thousand years, until the small matter of the industrial revolution sent the local agricultural and craft-based economy into steep decline, never entirely halted let alone reversed. It's been downhill all the way since the middle ages really, give or take the odd peasants' rebellion and urban bread riot; waves of bubonic plague apparently survived only by the 'anchoress' Julian, whose Book of Revelations (or rather 'Shewings') were the first published work in English by a woman; influxes of Huguenot 'strangers' and Flemish weavers; an 18th century agrarian capitalism that gave rise to Barclays Bank and Norwich Union; a 'school' of artists (various Cromes, Cotman etc.) wholly invented posthumously by the local bourgeoisie to boost the market value of their bedraggled collections; and a vigorous tradition of urban radicalism expressed through 19th century non-conformism, 20th century labourism and now 21st century environmentalism. We have the largest group of Green councilors in the country, and within a few years a realistic chance of the first Green-run council and a Green MP instead of the Right Honourable Charles Clarke. A funny old place.
To me, the places of Norwich and Norfolk represent the best of England, but there are other less savoury sides, and there are newer threats to its whole way of life which again are starker here than elsewhere. First the unsavoury bits. The National Front famously described Norwich as "the last white city in England". The 1991 census found that only 1% of the local population were non-white, and the majority of those were Chinese and south Asian working (and often living above) takeaways. The 2001 census showed signs of change, and there has been a massive, more recent influx of immigrants, but they are mostly Portuguese and Polish, young and hard-working, visibly European and relatively easy to assimilate into the indigenous, white population. Norwich Union has brought in a lot of Indians, as part of the reciprocal processes of call-centre 'off-shoring', but they are wholly middle-class and seem to establish themselves quickly. They "disappear", while the few resident black people report that they are still regularly gawped at in the street. 'Indigenous' Norfolk people are notoriously difficult to get near. Pretty much all the people I've got to know well here have been other in-comers or, in the subtly pejorative local vernacular, "blow-ins".
Secondly, the threats to the old way of life come from surprising sources, not least the changing tastes and behaviour of the local Norfolkers. We are subject to the same processes of privatization, commercialization, suburbanization and homogenization that have reduced much of the western world to a set of identikit "crap towns", but English cultural degeneration in the face of wholesale marketization takes particular forms. I feel an anecdote coming on. Last summer, in the early stages of the football World Cup, I was out walking with my dog in Northeast Norfolk, not far from the coast. It was a lovely English summer day, all shades of green underfoot and on every side, a benign, warming sun high above and the occasional drifting, cooling cloud. The walk took me through woods and meadows, round a broad and past several enormous, isolated, flint-towered and extraordinarily still open mediaeval churches.
There came a point towards the end when we had to walk along a narrow country lane, about a mile back to the train station. Within a few moments, a steady stream of traffic began to build up and I put the dog safely back on the lead. I had no idea where all these people were going, to the pub for lunch and back home again perhaps, but they all slowed courteously as they passed us and each other. Within sight of the station, however, a roar came up behind me and I turned to see a 4x4 Sports Utility Vehicle bearing down on me. It had St. George crosses flying from every window, two fat children peering out and a pig of a man behind the steering wheel. It took up most of the road and, as it sped past, threw me and my dog into a flooded ditch and a damp, bedraggled, cursing half-hour journey home. Fucking bastard, I muttered for most of that time, probably a heavily Euro-subsidized and -skeptic agri-businessman farmer, a sales manager at Bernard Matthews or an accountant at Norwich Union living in a massive barn-conversion in a recently suburbanized outlying village. Desperate to get his ugly kids back to watch England disappoint again.
Gramsci and the National-popular
I have no idea whether Antonio Gramsci did much walking as an adult. For
the last 10 years of his life, during which he produced the extraordinary
Prison Notebooks, he was only ever able to walk around his cell,
prison yard and hospital ward. As a child, however, he spent much of his
time roaming the Sardinian hills and fields, and recalls it regularly in
his Prison Letters as an obvious highlight in a troubled, poverty-stricken
childhood. What shines through all his writings, in freedom or incarceration,
is a deep appreciation for the feelings, traditions and perspectives of
ordinary people, both in his native Sardinia and recently unified, mainland
Italy. But his affection was fiercely realistic and wholly unsentimental.
He was acutely aware of the contradictory impulses at work among the nascent
Italian masses: from women like his mother holding together fractured families
and communities, and the self-taught, determined and heroic activists of
the 1919/21 Turin factory occupations, to "the scum of society" he remembered
hanging around the squares and bars of Cagliari and the "monkey people"
who embraced fascism.
Gramsci was always preoccupied with the social, cultural and regional tensions amongst the Italian people, from a 'Sardist' schoolboy composition calling for "the mainlanders to be thrown into the sea" to his final essay as a free man, "The Southern Question", which scrutinized the supposedly "scientific basis for regional prejudice" propagated by the Italian Socialist Party among the northern industrial proletariat . The Prison Notebooks make repeated reference to the processes whereby the Italian people are brought together and pulled apart. I want to concentrate here on the Gramscian concept of the "national-popular", what Gramsci meant by it and how he applied it to Italy and elsewhere, then move on to consider what use we might make of it in making sense of England and the English.
For Gramsci, the national-popular is a key element within the process of hegemony, whereby a particular social group represents its own interests as those of the whole nation. The success of this hegemonic project is measured by the extent to which other subordinate or 'subaltern' social groups accept this new 'settlement', more or less voluntarily, and are drawn into a 'historic bloc' around the dominant elite. We might call this, a little cheekily, "a coalition of the willing", but note that in Gramsci it is a wholly real rather than rhetorical device. Together, these new social allies forge a national-popular identity and purpose, which becomes a crucial part of the new 'common sense' of the epoch, a "collective will as operative awareness of historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and effective historical drama" . A further condition of the continued hegemony of the national-popular historic bloc is that it is constantly refreshed with new personnel, energies and insights, especially from subaltern groups' own elites and intellectuals.
As always, Gramsci insisted on concrete analysis of specific historical trends and entities. Only thus could we hope to understand the "dramatic representation of the attempts made over centuries to awaken this (national-popular) collective will" and the formation of a distinctive national-popular culture, with the similarly distinctive mythology and iconography required to construct what we might now call a national 'story' . Gramsci was by academic training a linguist and always especially sensitive to "the language question" within a national-popular project . A common language is one of the primary sites wherein a nation coheres, and literally learns to talk to itself. In our own time, this explains the extraordinary sensitivity over the uses and abuses of English, especially amongst certain sectors (Radio 4 listeners spring to mind) who rush to its defense at the slightest provocation, especially over suspected Americanisms . This linguistic protectionism is even more evident in France, which Gramsci felt displayed a more pronounced "national-popular culture" than any other nation, largely because of its thorough-going bourgeois revolution and because its intellectuals "tend to guide the population ideologically and keep it linked with the leading group" .
These are relatively successful attempts to forge a "national-popular" consensus. What explains examples of historic failure? Gramsci attributes it primarily to the limits of the "economic-corporate" stage of class-consciousness, where a class is unable to represent its own sectional interests as the interests of the nation. The examples he cites are mostly drawn from Italian history, and demonstrate the failings of the Italian bourgeoisie to fully "unify" the country, but British Labourism offers an equally resonant case study . When Gramsci says of the Italian Risorgimento "an effective Jacobin force was always missing", he might just as well be indicating the recurrent failures of political leadership within the British labour movement. In particular, the lack of a "Modern Prince" - by which Gramsci meant a coherent, consciously revolutionary party with a wide, deep mass base - points to the utter historic failure of the "militant" wing of Labourism, the Communist Party of Great Britain .
And in case anyone suspects me of Leninist-style 'vanguardism', the 'British problem' is not simply one of leadership. As Labour historians like Eric Hobsbawm and Gareth Stedman Jones have established, the class-consciousness of the oldest and proportionately largest proletariat in the world was formed and expressed primarily through lifestyle, recreational pursuits and appearance, manners and ethos, rather than political action, intellectual formation or deep-seated ideological affiliation . As Stedman Jones puts it, "Its dominant cultural institutions were not the school, the evening class, the library, the friendly society, the church or the chapel, but the pub, the sporting paper, the racecourse and the music hall… both impermeable to outsiders and yet predominantly conservative" . What political agencies have emerged from the British working class, in the various forms of the labour and trade union movement, have been shallow and ineffectual, and imbued with a quasi-religious mythology and iconography and a narrowly electoral approach .
Gramsci insists that what is required of the "Modern Prince" is a conscious and systematic programme of "intellectual and moral reform" conducted by "intellectuals who are conscious of being organically linked to a national-popular mass" . This is so far from populism, in our own deep-dyed "anti-elitist" time and culture, to make me at least feel deeply uncomfortable, and apprehensive at the prospect of such a programme. The Selections from the Prison Notebook's esteemed editors, Nowell Smith and Hoare, plainly also feel uncomfortable with 'the national popular' and add a strangely fastidious note of their own on the concept, which they describe as "one of the most interesting and also widely criticized ideas in Gramsci's thought. Supposedly at the origin of the cultural policy of the PCI since the war, it is perhaps best taken as describing a sort of "historic bloc" between national and popular aspirations in the formation of which the intellectuals, in the wide Gramscian use of the term, play an essential mediating role. It is important to stress however that it is a cultural concept, relating to the position of the masses within the culture of the nation, and radically alien to any form of populism or national socialism" . Indeed, Nowell Smith and Hoare's translation more often refers to the "popular-national" than the "national-popular"!
Their clear unease and the unusually inelegant phrasing of this footnote ("perhaps best taken", "in the formation of which") betrays their underlying allegiance to the New Left Review end of British Gramscianism, which amongst other things was severely critical of Togliatti's application of the Gramscian legacy to post-war Italian politics. But it also serves the useful purpose of demonstrating much of the British left's traditional discomfort with the "nation" and pretty much any aspect of the "national", especially when applied to the geographical and social entity of England. The footnote's final, frantic distancing from "any form of populism or national socialism" rather gives the game away.
And, we may well think, no wonder. The history of the English nation-state is generally one of military aggression, conquest and violent dominion over other peoples. From the Holy Land of the Crusades to Cromwell in Ireland and the clearance of the Scottish Highlands; the colonization of the New World and Australasia; the enslavement, imperial occupation and exploitation of large parts of Africa and Asia; to more recent military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, we English lefties have much to feel deeply uncomfortable about. Even Tony Blair, our furthest outrider, recently felt moved to apologize. The anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist, "internationalist" and solidaristic currents of the British left run deep. And, while many other of our traditional stances have been jettisoned in the last 20 or 30 years, this one has if anything been re-invigorated by its coupling with anti-racism and more recently anti-globalization.
There is a variant on this latter theme, what we might call a social-democratic anti-globalization, which argues that the nation-state is redundant in an era of unchecked global capitalism and that we must shift our attention and efforts to supra-national institutions and their requirements of our population. This is a generous interpretation of the "Third Way", especially in its Brownite version. It seems to me a contemporary economism of just the kind Gramsci railed against in early 20th century social democracy and 'orthodox' positivistic Marxism, fixated on the economy and the state, with no sense for the separate, "relatively autonomous" arenas of the cultural or ideological or the politically contingent . The national-popular has become if anything more important in this latest phase of globalisation, not least as a form of ideological protectionism for groups who feel threatened and marginalized.
This is surely why the symbolism of national identity has become so evident, all across the globe and sometimes to murderous effect, as an expression of popular grievance and resentment at the effects of the neo-liberal agenda. Like all subaltern cultural forms, it ultimately serves the purposes of consolation and adjustment to new hegemonic realities, but it is still a major part of daily material reality. Within the still vigorous ideological corpus of Thatcherism, the "patriotic" heart of "Englishness" that Stuart Hall alluded to in 1989 still strongly beats, even as the world status of the English nation-state continues to decline. But then the British left has never wholly accepted or understood the full ramifications of the ideology of Thatcherism, not least because our latest political "project" (New Labour) is turning out to be an embarrassing "transformist" adaptation and deepening of it .
As for Gramsci and the Italians, we might say, it's all right for them to talk about the 'national popular'. They don't have quite so much, by way of imperial conquest and dominion, to feel ashamed of. And what they do have, in North and East Africa, can easily be blamed on Mussolini and the fascists, who were no less rapacious in their treatment of parts of Italy itself. Gramsci himself was amongst the first to identify, in 'The Southern Question' and elsewhere, the colonial relationship between the industrial and financial capitalism of the Italian north and the peasant, agrarian south. But then hang on a minute. What about the relationship between the wealthy South east of England and large parts of the rest of the country, especially the industrial north of England where I originally came from? Wasn't that, and in some ways continues to be, oppressive and exploitative? And Italian fascism was, and still is, deeply rooted in the oppressed, 'subaltern' south, and is still a vigorous current in the rest of its 'modern advanced democracy' . Just as conservatism, xenophobia and racism are deeply rooted in the British proletariat and most of its post-industrial fragments.
So, as Gramsci might ask us, is there something specific and peculiar in the British left's discomfort and occasional loathing of the national, and in particular the English? And might it go some way towards explaining, or at least illustrating, the almost total disappearance of the communist, socialist or even social-democratic currents from our country's political system and culture? Perhaps we should start by asking exactly what is "our country".
Where is England?
Well, I think I live in it. So, for me, it's the earth beneath my feet and
the landscape I walk through with my dog. Green and pleasant, temperate
and mild, most of the time anyway. It's the slightly scruffy streets of
the fine city I live in, and the cafes and theatres and galleries and museums
and gyms that give me culinary, aesthetic, intellectual and athletic sustenance.
It's the semi-darkness of the urban evening, the encounters with the familiar
unknown and the safely dangerous, which as a man I feel securely entitled
to. Then, venturing further afield for work and research, it's the creaking
railway line that takes me to London and Essex, where I make my living as
an expert of sorts in the social care of people with HIV/AIDS. As I speed
past the fields and woods, back yards and warehouses of East Anglia, I often
wonder what kinds of lives are led there and whether they are anything like
mine. Then, at the end of a working day, I speed back to Norwich and Norfolk
and a decent night's sleep in this "city of silence". This was the poet
D'Annunzio's term for ancient, pre-industrial cities, cited in the Selections
from Prison Notebooks: "all had glorious pasts but are now of secondary
importance, some little more than villages with magnificent monumental centres
as a relic of their bygone splendour".
But then, England has more often defined itself by what it is not: black, Jewish, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Asian, African, French, German, European of any sort really. This "negative identity" is characteristic of national-popular cultures shaped by militaristic adventure and imperial dominion . So maybe I should say what the England I live in is not. First off, it is no longer "British", at any rate since Scottish and Welsh devolution, which had the (surely unintended but wholly predictable) effect of making the English feel like these other people of the British landmass really didn't want to live with us any more. Secondly, it is not (for all its best intentions) multi-cultural, in the sense of a diverse but essentially unitary community. Let's be clear: the ethnic groups of England live (and, where they have to, work) alongside each other, but there is precious little real, voluntary inter-connection . And what there is often takes the form of slightly broader "exclusive alliances" based on new "negative identities", such as underclass white and black youth united in "chav/gangsta" culture against both Asian youth and the wider "respectable" society. The cultural historian Paul Gilroy famously wrote in the 1980s that "there ain't no black in the union jack", thereby posing the crucial cultural question at that time of what it was like to be non-white in Britain. Well, there's plenty of black in the St. George Cross in 2007, but very little brown, and certainly not any tartan or taff.
I am conscious that in this last paragraph I have finally introduced some real live people into my account of the English, even if only to argue that many of them don't seem to want to have much to do with each other. And this, it seems to me, is another currently defining "negative identity" of the English, coming ever closer to home: that, as I and others have argued in the pamphlet 'Feelbad Britain', "we are a society of people who don't appear to like themselves and each other very much" . The white people I commute once or twice a week to Essex and London with - on crowded, uncomfortable, often malfunctioning and surprisingly slow trains - barely exchange a glance let alone a word, and for much of the year are yellow and grey with fatigue and ill health. Unless they've just been on their holidays, when they briefly turn a lightly toasted colour.
Finally, one other thing England is not: London. Our supposedly capitol city is now a quite separate entity, a member of the international network of mega-cities, which has turned its back willfully and consciously on the country of England. I regularly commute between the two, and spend time in both, and they are now in reality wholly separate places. And to be specific, for the sake of people reading this, the concerns and perspectives of the metropolitan liberal left - in that lovely term, "the chattering classes" - are shared by very, very few people outside London. I know it comes as an occasional, very nasty surprise to be reminded of this by such phenomena as the Countryside Alliance, periodic fuel protests, or the recurring rumble of irritation about 'political correctness', but the middle and upper-class liberal intelligentsia who staff the political and media and cultural industries of London have really very little idea of what's going on in the separate country of England.
London's Unilateral Declaration of Independence is, it seems to me, a key element in the breakdown of the traditional English national-popular settlement. It has been gathering pace for decades, if not centuries, and its effect is now evident in the attitudes of non-Londoners towards our notional national capitol. Popular reactions in the rest of England to exclusively London phenomena - from the Millenium Dome to the 7/7 bombings and the 2012 Olympics - are at best ambivalent and at worst downright contemptuous. So this England is not London, it is not Scotland or Wales or Europe, and large parts of it subsist on an emotional diet of aggravation and disquiet which could, if we're not very careful, turn seriously nasty. Even parts of the Southeast, London's own hinterland, are getting seriously pissed off. If I were a displaced white East Ender, living in the modern post-industrial slums of the "Thames Gateway" towns of Dagenham, Thurrock or Basildon, with an extended family in inter-generational multiple deprivation, I would be seriously tempted to vote BNP, just for the sheer two-fingered hell of it. And if you find that shocking, I would respectfully suggest that you are lacking in political imagination, and offer to accompany you there on my next fortnightly visit.
So what might a national-popular England be like?
I am well aware that mine is not the first attempt to flesh out a "progressive
patriotism". E. P. Thompson harked back somewhat sentimentally to "the freeborn
Englishman", and the Communist Party in its immediate post-war heyday had
a stab at a patriotic national 'story' taking in the various waves of peasant
and proletarian rebellion and martyrdom. Most famously, George Orwell attempted
it in some of his rightly celebrated essays, especially 'England your England',
written in late 1940 as "highly civilized human beings are flying overhead,
trying to kill me" . Orwell is a vastly overrated writer, a much better
essayist than novelist, and as for his politics, I've always thought Isaac
Deutscher pinned him down as "a simple-minded anarchist" . This explains
why Orwell lends himself so readily to reactionary purposes. But in his
wartime essays, Orwell came close to identifying the quality of defiant
reserve in the English that thumbed its nose at 'Itler and the Jerries and
pretty much everyone else too, and might just yet make the kernel of a national-popular
"positive identity". Orwell called it "national loyalty… as a positive force",
but his observation that "in moments of supreme crisis, the whole nation
can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a
code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone though never formulated"
is deeply if unconsciously Gramscian in its grasp of the political and ideological
function of national-popular "common sense" .
Towards the end of my own last bout of 'democratic left' activism, in the mid-1980s, people associated with Marxism Today attempted to 'reclaim the union jack' for the left. This reached its ultimate absurdity, I recall, in a version of that tawdry, blood-stained rag in Rastafarian colours . More recently, another old friend of mine Mark Perryman has been heavily involved in what he calls 'football activism', with the aim of turning the England football team into a Gramscian 'national-popular' cause. A bit of a lost one, I would say, given the abject performances of that bunch of overpaid, over-hyped, overgrown infants. Billy Bragg and Tessa Jowell have argued that the football-related mass sproutings of the St. George's Cross can be seen as, variously, an expression of national pride or "just a bit of fun". Well…
It may be because I am so bloody English, and defiantly anti-postmodern, but I'm getting increasingly impatient with the symbolism of it all: the various flags, principles and abstract values and causes we are supposed to espouse as our 'national identity'. It's all just too easily switched on and off, manipulated and repackaged, usually for the commercial interests of various media and leisure corporations, to be unfashionably anti-postmarxist about it, and sometimes for blatantly manipulative political purposes. And to return to my anecdote about being driven into a ditch by a fat pig in an SUV, it has no relationship with the real place of England, the land of fields and woods, towns and cities that we all of us actually spend our lives in. As Orwell put it in 1940, and I would love to think it still holds, "In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the 'Rule Britannia stuff', is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious" .
So let's shove all that to one side, and dig a bit deeper into our past and present for the English national-popular. To begin with, we can just about discern some sparks of resistance, and embryonic Gramscian popular hegemony, within what Gareth Stedman Jones called the English proletarian "culture of consolation" . It's there in elements of the music hall and folk tradition: the mocking and the cheeky, rather than the maudlin and sentimental. It's there among the 1950s "angry young men", especially the 'social-realist' wing of 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' or 'A Taste of Honey'. It's there in 1960s mod culture, that extraordinary appropriation by white working class youth of black American and Caribbean music and 'cool', European elegance and fashion, and avant-garde pop-art stylings . It's there in the DIY, democratic wing of punk, especially in the Northwest, which was much more explicitly cultural-political than the showy, bin-liner and safety pin London variety. It's there now in the TV show 'Shameless', which at its best assembles story-lines and characters from the writer Paul Abbot's own childhood on a Manchester estate into a prototype for new, reconstituted proletarian living, joyful as well as shameless; resiliently female as well as fecklessly male; and yes, naturally if wishfully multicultural.
There is something in all of this that is enduringly "down to earth"; what Orwell called our "horror of abstract thought". This seems to me the central feature of the English national-popular identity, and happily resonates with my earlier call "back to the land". It locates us firmly where we need to be, in our material existence rather than a fog of tacky symbols. And let's be honest: it exposes the complete dead-end we on the left have allowed ourselves to be shunted into, of "political correctness". How on earth (that word again) did we allow otherwise progressive demands, about equality and freedom and fairness, to be turned into a new moral code for language and behaviour that the majority of the population finds utterly bewildering and alienating? What we have done with "political correctness" is set about imposing upon the national discourse a new form of the traditional middle-class sensibility of politeness and nice-ness and "good manners". Only instead of not eating off your knife or saying "bloody", doing the washing on any other day but Monday and never discussing personal feelings, we now forbid the white lower orders from using terms of ethnic or sexual designation that are in everyday use among minority ethnic and sexual communities themselves! Whatever possessed us? Probably the same malign spirit that made us think we could construct a progressive - even socialist! - politics around every other aspect of "individual identity" than nation and class, the central categories within Gramsci's teleology.
But then, as Stedman Jones reminds us, there are plenty of historical antecedents for this kind of thing within the social relations of our country. Sometimes they have played a key role in the maintenance of bourgeois hegemony, as in the "affinity of outlook between the 'top and bottom drawer' against the 'killjoys in between'" during middle class attempts to impose a restrictive moral order on pleasure-taking in the late 19th century . This was when Conservatism put down its deep roots amongst the English working class, because you could drink alcohol freely in the "Conny club", sing along with gusto at the Conservative-protected music hall, and cheer on the boxers and football teams sponsored by your Conservative employer. Well out of reach of the finger-wagging zealots of non-conformism, Liberalism and Labourism. For the 19thC Temperance Movements, "or the Humanitarian League, or the anti-Gambling League, or Anti-Vaccination… all acting on the same principle, trying to interfere with the enjoyments and pleasures of the people", read 21stC "political correctness gone mad" .
Much of the theorising about culture and identity of the last 20 years has followed a trajectory from "communities of identity", people drawn together by a common ethnicity or sexuality, through "communities of interest", people with shared hobbies or pastimes, to "communities of affect", people united by taste or sensation in music, art or other spectacle. What we have ended up with is a society of "virtual enclaves" or self-selecting ghettoes, mutually exclusive sets of PLUs (People Like Us) living alongside but not with each other, the reductio ad absurdum of a process of retreat first identified in the late-1980s by Mike Rustin and others. I propose, in pursuit of the English national-popular - the Scottish and Welsh are welcome to join in too, by the way, but from recent visits to the glorious city of Edinburgh it seems to me that they're a fair way down their own road already - that we seek to rediscover "communities of place". That is, real, geographical, material places you can put your finger and foot on, like Norwich and Norfolk or anywhere else that takes your English fancy. A quaint notion, I know, but the fact is that while we've been busily setting up communities of identity/interest/affect, most real people have continued living in such real, geographical, material places. Let's rejoin them.
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