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
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J39bBV7CBJk]. 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. Noone 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 deindustrialised 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, antiracist 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 selfdetermination 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.
To view all the articles in the online debate visit
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