Discussion piece: The Convention on Modern Liberty
On February 28th individuals from across the United Kingdom will converge upon London to participate in The Convention on Modern Liberty. At stake are our freedoms, many of them long established English liberties, threatened, and encroached upon, by an authoritarian British state.
Joining organisations like Liberty, No2ID and Amnesty will be the Campaign for an English Parliament, who are proud to co-sponsor a session entitled Liberty and the National Question with the Institute of Public Policy Research.
What does this have to do with the Campaign for an English Parliament and English nationalism?
Yesterday, writing the Guardian, George Monbiot informed us that you don’t have to be a nationalist to support an English parliament, you just have to be a democrat.
I understand what George is getting at, for it’s certainly true that the campaign for an English parliament is a democratic cause. But is that all it is? If ours is only a democratic cause then we might just as reasonably argue for devolution to regions or counties, bypassing completely an English national level of government.
No, the CEP are nationalists, nationalists and democrats.
Nationalism is something of a dirty word, in certain circles, but for me nationalism implies nothing more than a belief in the nation (in our case England) as a fundamental building block of democracy (or whatever other political ideology you want to follow, which is why nationalism has a bad rap sheet).
To fear nationalism as only ever a bad thing is to misunderstand the relationship between nationalism and democracy and liberty, and to leave unrealised patriotism’s potential to galvanise the people in common cause. The Fraternity in “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” stresses community in an otherwise individualistic French motto. And when Abraham Lincoln declared “government of the people, by the people, for the people” he wasn’t addressing Monbiot’s global citizens, he was addressing a national people. That is civic nationalism. That is what the CEP stands for.
We know what the CEP stands for, but does ‘England’ still count for anything; is there a ‘we the people’ of England that can be mobilised in defence of English liberty?
England, a nation with a history, but no destiny
You may remember that in a couple of posts on Our Kingdom (here & here) David Marquand accused the campaign for an English parliament of being ‘entirely reactive: negative, sour, mean-minded‘ and of displaying ‘me-too’ responses to the ‘wonderful growth of national feeling in Scotland and Wales‘:
as I know, no one has yet put forward a positive case for devolution to England, based on a moral vision of what England and the English stand for or might come to stand for. Sadly, this is not surprising. There is no English national Myth comparable to the Scottish Myth of popular sovereignty or the Welsh Myth of Celtic socialism.
Marquand argued that campaigners for an English parliament are ‘barbarous reactionaries‘ and that England will ‘not be fit for self government‘ until they show that they belong to the tradition of ‘the Levellers, of Milton, of Tom Paine, of the Chartists, of John Bright, of the pre-1914 syndicalists, of George Orwell and R.H. Tawney‘.
And just a few weeks ago Andrew O’Hagan described the near sociopathic tendency of the English to “to lie down in the face of exploitation”, our apathy and our aversion to organised or personal resistance:
Events in America show the extent to which democracy there is fuelled by populism – Barack Obama’s victory is a manifestation not of Washington’s need for change, but of America’s. That is not how democracy works in England. A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality. It is strange that Scottish nationalism and Irish nationalism and Welsh nationalism – for all their faults – are still seen by a great many as healthy, colourful movements, while English nationalism continues to make people think of football hooligans, Enoch Powell, Oswald Mosley and the BNP.
…in general the English live in a miasma of what Isaiah Berlin called “negative liberty”: their collective aim is to be free of interference, not to define the future. “Negative liberty” has become the currency of the dispossessed – “whatever”, say the English today when they’re told something they don’t like, and “whatever” is exactly what they get and what they are ready to accept, so long as everyday life lies undisturbed.
There is the idea, certainly amongst the Left, that English nationalists are chauvinistic, belligerent and xenophobic; that England does not stand for anything; that the English are bereft of a national myth and a spirit of fraternity, and as such incapable of articulating a positive national identity based upon common understanding and national solidarity.
Yet somewhat contrary to that idea there is a concerted effort by the UK Labour Government and Progressive Left to articulate a national identity for Britain, the vast bulk of which is England, based on the common values, bonds of belonging and shared beliefs of a fuzzy and, as yet, undefined “Britishness“.
There is a political conversation about what it means to be British, but what it means to be English is largely, or completely, ignored. What does England mean to you? Is there an idea of England, and can English nationalists be mobilised to fight not only for English governance but also for the very idea of England itself?
British nationalism
It’s commonly observed that the ‘war on terror’ and flight into fear has resulted in policies that have led to the progressive erosion of civil liberties. But it’s not just terrorism that is the threat. The British state, The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, is wobbling; challenged from within by a weakening of British identity and the growth of nationalism in England, Scotland and Wales.
The Government’s response to these threats has been a head-long flight into a bizarre chimera of prescriptive British nationalism and state authoritarianism. Curbs on immigration. British citizenship exams and ceremonies. British jobs for British workers. ID cards. Restrictions on free speech. Data mining and data sharing. A British national football team. Databases. Surveillance. Powers to stop and search. Detention. Britishness Day. Rendition. Communication monitoring. British oaths of allegiance. A British statement of values. Citizenship initiatives. Extraordinary powers. A flag in every garden. Curtailing the right to assembly and protest. Control orders. A British Bill of Rights.
In attempting to link the debate on civil liberties and citizenship (rights and responsibilities) with the debate on national identity (Britishness) the Government is guilty of confusing citizenship with national identity, State with Nation. This begs the question: Does that make those of us opposed to Brown’s British nationalism, those of us who do not share his idea of British national identity, enemies of the state? News that MI5 and special branch infiltrated the SNP would suggest that it might.
In reaction to David Davis’s principled stand, Anthony Barnett, Co-Director of the Convention on Modern Liberty, argues just this case.
“This is why we should have the confidence to celebrate the fact that a leading politician is taking issues of principle and government to the people, irrespective of his party politics.
“Especially in Britain (or should I say England, as arguably Alex Salmond has already done this in Scotland).”Naturally, I see this caveat – “or should I say England” – as key. You won’t see Scottish or Welsh nationalists mounting your barricades, as they’re not interested in building open, representative and constitutional democracy.
The way I’m interested in framing the issue is as follows: is the British state and parliament losing its democratic legitimacy as a of measures such as 42 days and identity management; or is its recourse to such measures a consequence of the fact that it is losing its legitimacy? One of the truths that the database society manifests is that government no longer trusts the people; and it no longer trusts the people because it has lost the trust of the people.
But it’s not just about government but about the state: the British state, in particular. You’re right to link the ‘transformational government’ programme to the break down of the unitary state that the Labour government itself initiated through devolution. The whole British establishment knows that it is engaged in a battle for its very survival and that its legitimacy to represent and speak for the different of Britain has been fundamentally and fatally undermined.
And this is why, in more than a merely metaphorical or rhetorical sense, every citizen becomes a potential terrorist: someone whom the government suspects of wishing the British state as presently constituted to fall apart – which growing ranks of its citizenry do in fact wish. 42 days and systematic identity management across all government departments are of a piece, in that they are about – as you put it, quoting from ‘Who do they think we are?’ – discovering the “deep truth about the citizen (or business) based on their behaviour, experiences, beliefs, needs or desires”.
In other words, it’s about finding out who is an enemy of the state: the enemy within. For most of us, ID cards and CCTV surveillance are ’sufficient’ for the state apparatus to reassure itself that we are not a serious threat. For the rest of us, there’s 42 days. But the danger is in the blurring, in the eyes and state machinery of paranoid control, between legitimate, democratic antagonism towards the state, and illegitimate, physically violent hostility: terrorism.
I’m an enemy of the British state, in that I’d like to see it replaced by a federal state or abolished altogether (i.e. through Scottish and English independence). And if we had a federal state, this should have much less central power, with most of the national-level decisions taken by an English parliament a much stronger local-government sector. Does this make me ’suspect’ in the eyes of the database state? Probably, yes: and therein lies its true danger.
But we need to be clear that the fight is not just with ‘the state’ in some universal sense; but with the state. And this is because it’s primarily an English struggle, as the Scots and Welsh are pursuing their own paths towards constitutional democracy. And what will emerge, if the libertarians are successful in the present fight, will almost certainly not be a new written constitution, bill of rights and representative democracy for but for England. Indeed, it’s fundamentally because the people of England have lost their faith in the legitimacy of the British state to govern them that the government is so concerned to manage and orchestrate their identity in the first place.
And it is to popular English national sentiment, and to the sense of our traditional liberties, that the libertarian cause will have to appeal if it is to touch the hearts and minds of the Sun-reading class.
If the English have lost their faith in the British state and demand a new form of governance, then will the British state be able to justify its existence? If the British State loses competence over health, education, planning, policing, transport and housing in England, then is a British Bill of Rights superfluous to the EU’s Human Rights Act and simply a way of reinforcing British national identity and conferring upon the State certain rights to intervene in devolved areas? Is a British Bill of Rights as much about protecting the state from internal pressures (nationalism, terrorism, policy divergence) as it is about trying to protect the individual from the British state?
Is Britain to be Big Brother to England?
Gordon Brown demurely refers to himself as a unionist, and he is. But he’s much more than just a unionist, he is a British nationalist, and it’s his British nationalism rather than his unionism that is damaging to England, and which I think the Campaign for an English Parliament should oppose. His Britishness rhetoric is not just about a fight for a political union, it is a fight for British national identity, because he believes that without that linchpin of identity there can be no meaningful political and constitutional reform; and no almighty authoritarian British State.
National identity is an historical relationship, not a set of values.
National identities are often cemented in adversity. As Linda Colley has described a reactionary British national identity was forged by war with France and Protestant fear of Roman Catholicism. This British identity (I personally prefer not to refer to it using the ludicrous neologism “Britishness”) was later cemented on the idea of English liberty at home and pride in Empire abroad. We are no longer a British nation bonded by war with France, a Protestant faith or pride in Empire. What’s left?
English liberty is what’s left. Gordon Brown’s Britishness agenda is more properly called British nationalism. He’s engaged himself in the creation a national “Britishness” myth to reinforce British national identity, and the myth that he’s chosen is (along with tolerance) one of liberty.
Brown claims that there is “a golden thread which runs through British history – that runs from that long ago day in Runnymede in 1215; on to the Bill of Rights in 1689 where Britain became the first country to successfully assert the power of Parliament over the King”, and that “Voltaire said that Britain gave to the world the idea of liberty”. He also maintains that an appeal to fairness “runs through British history, from early opposition to the first poll tax in 1381 to the second; fairness the theme from the civil war debates”.
But that golden thread is English, Voltaire spoke of England, and it is the English sense of fairness that asymmetric devolution (and asymmetric democracy) has upset. Gordon Brown borrows from England and gives nothing back, misappropriating an English narrative to suit his statist and authoritarian “Britishness”.
It would be churlish and pointless to object to Britain as the inheritor of England’s tradition of liberty and struggle for emancipation. And I’m not going to. But Gordon Brown’s British nationalism, the Britain of his mind’s eye, is not in keeping with the England of my mind’s eye. It is an anathema to England’s tradition of liberty. It’s all very un-English, and even though an English narrative is invoked his vision is in total contrast to any notion of what England stands for.
This misappropriation of the English narrative is made worse by Brown’s denial of England, a forbidding that prevents any mention of the nation that is the bedrock on which his British Tower of Babel is built. Devolution allowed the Scots and Welsh to not only think as Scotsmen and Welshmen, but also to behave as Scotsmen and Welshmen. Devolution was an act of national liberation. But we English are denied the liberty of a forum to discuss and express English national identity, to decide what it is we want England to be, to choose the manner of governance to best reflect ourselves as Englishmen and women. Brown’s British nationalism negates England in a way that a pragmatic unionism does not.
For Brown “Britishness” is all.
“I think almost every question that we have to deal with about the future of Britain revolves around what we mean by Britishness, whether it is asylum or immigration, the future of the constitution, our relationship with Europe or terrorism. Who we are, what we stand for, what we are fighting for, is crucial to any nation’s future in the modern world. Unless you have a strong sense of shared purpose, a strong sense of who you are, you will not succeed in the global economy and global society…I want to have this debate…about whether Scotland has a different view of tolerance to England, or whether Scotland has a different view of the stiff upper lip and so on—I want to debate these things in far more detail.” – Gordon Brown, Britain Rediscovered, Prospect Magazine, April 2005
This is a very monotheistic view. For me the future of Britain rests just as much upon what we mean by Englishness, Scottishness and Welshness as it does upon what we mean by Britishness. The key question is whether the British state can adapt to accommodate the multiplicity of identities on these islands, perhaps reducing Britishness to Vernon Bogdanor‘s definition: “a wish to be represented in the House of Commons”.
The problem for Brown, in trying to forge a British nationalism and a strong British national identity, is that nationalism is territorial. Britain has no territory to call its own, which brings it into obvious conflict with English, Scottish and Welsh nationalism. Similarly it has no national narrative and history that is uniquely its own, so Brown relies on a very Anglo-centric idea of Britain, which suits just fine his vision of an Anglo-British state with devolved peripheries and centrally micro-managed English regions. Paradoxically the same plight that affects Brown’s Britishness effects English nationalism and English national identity, it is the plight of conflation – of Britain and England. We are stuck on the problem of trying to define a British national identity which is in reality a multinational State identity. Compounding this problem is the fact that the English have traditionally merged their national [English] and state [British] identities, in a way that the Scots and Welsh have not, to create a hybridised Anglo-British identity.
We see Westminster politicians blow until they’re red in the face about the attractions of Britishness; its tolerance, its liberty, its pluralism, its shared values, its common purpose. Yet those same politicians, when they are in Scotland, applaud devolution (itself a political demonstration against an all-encompassing Britishness) and pay tribute to Scotland’s distinctiveness, its difference and its national identity. In an important sense, all politicians, when they are in Scotland, are Scottish Nationalists. They all pay homage to Scotland at each and every opportunity, in a way that English MPs never do about England (but perversely do about Britain).
For all the merits of David Davis’s freedom campaign it was depressing that he could not (or would not) define his opposition to New Labour’s authoritarianism as a freeborn Englishman, to tap into that rich English tradition and appeal to his constituents’ Englishness. Would it really be too much to ask for an English MP to appeal to England in opposition to Brown’s dystopian Britishness, just as Scottish politicians have used Scotland as a bulwark against Westminster statism? To have invoked England against an authoritarian Scot would have pulled the rug from under Brown’s feet.
We must ask ourselves who is at fault for this tactical error: David Davis or ourselves?
And we should ask why the Scots debate civil liberties in their Parliament at Holyrood while the English debate theirs on the doorsteps of Haltemprice and Howden.
Discussion
As it says at the top of the page this is intended as a discussion piece. I want to hear from CEP members, but also from other English nationalists (FEP and EDP), and anyone else for that matter, about the civil liberties debate.
- What does England stand for?
- Is there such a thing as ‘English liberty’?
- Should the right to self-determination, national sovereignty, be considered a right?
- Should Scottish politicians be able to vote to abolish smoking in English pubs, but not in their own country?
- Why is it that English school children are fingerprinted and placed on a database?
- Why are civil liberties better protected in Scotland than in the rest of the UK?
- Is the most important civil liberty that a democratic people can hold the right to choose and remove their own government; and does the presence of non-English MPs in the parliament compromise England’s right to pick the government of its choosing, and lessen our chances of kicking out a government that we don’t want?
- Is the political establishment conspiring to prevent a discussion on the English question, denying us the right to express ourseves as Englishmen and women?
- Should Speaker Martin be able to ban Justice for England from marching outside Parliament on May Day?
- Should (or can) English nationalists be mobilised in defence of civil liberties, or are we entirely reactive, negative, sour and mean-minded?
Many of the Convention’s attendant organisations and their members do not associate themselves with English patriotism, and so this may seem – to some of you – an odd convention for the CEP to join. Yet, in defence of British freedoms, speakers will summon up the Peasants’ Revolt, the Magna Carta, Common law, Habeas Corpus, the Jury System, the Bill of Rights, the Levellers and the Diggers, Peterloo, the Chartists, Tolpuddle, the Match Girls Strike, Poll Tax rebels and demonstrators, the protests at Kingsnorth and Heathrow, and anti-NF/BNP demonstrations.
I believe that this is a debate for England. I hope that you do too.
Please give me your thoughts and comments over at the CEP blog.
