As my plane glided lower across night-time neon-lit London, something cracked in my psyche and was replaced by a kind of aching for home which took me completely by surprise. I glimpsed the Millennium Dome and the Eastenders theme song began playing in my head. The dark vacuums of the commons conjured up memories of drunken Sundays and bumping into friends whilst jogging. South Western railway carriages triggered a pang of nostalgia for the monotony of my old commute. The Eye, Parliament , Buckingham Palace, stood proud and indifferent.
Leaving terminal two closed a romantic circle: last time I had done this, I was arriving in London for the first time to start my job post-university. This time, I was arriving to something that wasn't quite home, after the first semester of my PhD abroad. But the distinct smell of the noxious London air hit me in the same way. Pretentious pseud that I am, I recalled Orwell's essay, "England, your England" and wrote a sickeningly self-aggrandizing facebook post:
"When you come back to England from any foreign country, you have immediately the sensation of breathing a different air. Even in the first few minutes dozens of small things conspire to give you this feeling. The beer is bitterer, the coins are heavier, the grass is greener, the advertisements are more blatant. The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd."
Orwell was a socialist, an internationalist, and could easily have been a Corbyn supporter were he alive today (though he might have had something to say about Corbyn's tacit support for undemocratic regimes). But in this passage, he captures the very human affection that being a member of a nation engenders. You don't love your country because you're proud of it; you don't love it because you think it's "better" than other countries; you love it because it's yours.
This has significant political implications for any political movement that believes in "real change". Voters will often support change; they have at many points in history. But all change comes with loss, and nostalgia is a powerful political resource too. Orwell knew this and sought to manage it, writing, "The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children's holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same." Beautifully written, and something I suspect has never been properly respected by the British left. I can't help but feel that this politics of home knee-capped the 2019 Labour election campaign. Voters liked Labour's pledges to increase spending on public services and infrastructure; in fact the party they gave 43% of their votes and a landslide majority to ran on just such a platform. The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the Conservatives' plans could raise spending to levels not seen in 40 years. John Curtice's analysis post-election was fairly explicit that the policies themselves were popular, and recognised by the public. How is it then that the party leader who embodied exactly these domestic policies was the least popular opposition leader in recorded history? From the murky mess of incredible claims about Corbyn's past acting as an agent for Czech spies to the much more plausible claims about anti-Semitism and apologies for extreme, fascist ideologies emerges a sneaking suspicion that he may not like Britain very much. I have no proof that this is why he was unpopular. Perceived incompetence may have at least as much to do with it. All I can say is that this is quite plausibly a factor.
The most powerful political movements in the UK in the last ten years have been for Scottish independence and Brexit. At least the second of these leans heavily on the sentiment that social and economic change is happening too quickly and is undermining communities which are home to many voters. "Take Back Control" was a powerful slogan because it tapped into feelings of insecurity and loss aversion. Yes, part of this was economic insecurity, and yes, as Dominic Cummings noted after the fact, giving people an opportunity to vote for the NHS may have swung the referendum. But will anyone deny that concerns about immigration, underpinned by Labour's deliberate policy of allowing Eastern European accession countries free movement to the UK years before it was required to, was not a factor here? And we know, furthermore, that in general voters' concerns about immigration are not exclusively about economic anxiety; they are driven by cultural insecurity too.
The left can acknowledge this and then dismiss it as parochialism. This is a recipe for never winning another election again. There is no mileage in pretending that the politics of belonging is, if not innate, then at least deeply imbibed in all of us. And there is a significant part of the population who have a deep attachment to a particular region or town. David Goodhart notes that over 60% of people in the UK live within 20 miles of where they lived when they were 14. These people are rooted in their communities, and they will vote for a party which pledges to defend them. This includes when their communities change rapidly due to a large influx of people.
To sneer at this is also hypocrisy. I am, self-consciously, a jet-setting cosmopolitan "citizen of nowhere", but the pang of nostalgia I felt for my London is the same as generations before me feel for a London which no longer exists, transformed within a couple of decades by a plutocratic housing splurge, Corbyn-voting Oxbridge-educated gentrifiers, an almost deliberate policy of social cleansing by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition and, yes, a wave of migration. London was never a happy city at ease with itself. The poster child of cosmopolitan liberalism is less ethnically integrated than the rest of the country and the most popular party amongst the white population in 2014 was UKIP, where privately educated graduates in marketing jobs are served coffee by Eastern European immigrants being paid below the living wage and housed in overcrowded accommodation run by tyrannical exploitative landlords. When Laurie Penny wrote, "I want my country back", the day after the referendum, it was this bourgeois playground she was mourning. The thing is: I know this, and it never stopped me missing it either. And if (more likely when) in the future, my plane touches down in a London which I no longer recognise, it will hurt.
A left-wing movement which does not tap into this politics of home, then, will both fail to connect with the people it needs to vote for it, and will reek of hypocrisy. There is another path for the left, though, which draws on its existing traditions to create a narrative of protecting home. It is no accident that Labour leaders have tended to find that the only attack line which still cuts through is about protecting the NHS from Conservative governments. Many (though not by any means all) of the left's greatest causes draw their strength from the sentiment attached to protecting one's community: the miner's strike, "gas and water" socialism, the Black Power movement, the anti-apartheid movement, anti-colonialism, even the modern struggle for the rights of Palestinians. Moreover we can see from these examples that the tension between the politics of home and internationalism may be slacker than it might first appear. Indeed, we may find that communities given control over the pace and pattern of immigration will be more supportive of it. In any case, the tension between the politics of home and internationalism need not be any more corrosive than the tension between, say, autonomy and equality, or self-determination and cosmopolitanism, which need to be managed. This is not a proposal for the left to drop its uncompromising support for the rights of refugees, anti-racism, a fairer international trading system and effective development policies. It is a proposal for the left to rediscover a part of its tradition which taps into what appears to be a powerful sentiment.
How much of this is universal? In other words, is Orwell right to say that the nation (and other territorial identities) will survive socialism? If we take seriously the idea that identity is socially constructed and also a function of material circumstances, almost certainly not. In fact, as Hobsbawm demonstrated, the nation is a modern phenomenon. However, cultural identity is not. While previously existing "ethnies" might not meet the egalitarian, exclusive and universal standards that modern national identities do, there is no denying that previous generations had identities which were powerful and based on territory. In the middle ages, concepts such as "Christendom" were widely referenced and apparently had some relevance. So we should not be surprised if whatever the next stage of economic development is does not fully dispense with similar identities, even if the national ones which are predominant wither away. In any case, the left aims to gain power within capitalism, and in order to do that must engage with voters as they are, and not as they may be in the future.
I honestly have no idea how far the politics of home contributed to Labour's defeat in 2019, and would be highly sceptical of anybody who says they know. It strikes me that this is an underused weapon in the social democratic arsenal, though, and one that the right has been using to devastating effect of late. And Labour surely needs all the help it can get right now.