"British values" and the Left posted by Meaders

(a cross-posting from Dead Men Left, somewhat updated)

Lenin comments here on Kilroy Davies' thuggish remarks about "British values":

Will I ever learn what "Britishness" and "British values" are? Will someone please illuminate me? And what exactly are "the values of the suicide bomber"? And what will dispensing with multiculturalism mean in the concrete, aside from demanding that Muslims interrogate themselves and "integrate" (translation: do as they're told), and scrapping the Human Rights Act?

Behind appeals to "British values" is a expansively mythologised version of English - not British, but English - culture: Orwell's notorious warm beer and little old ladies, gummed together with platitudes about "tolerance", "fair play" and "stoicism". Even relative to other national mythologies, it is peculiarly foolish. It says nothing at all about any England that actually now exists; it says extraodinarily little about any that once did; but it owes its existence to the exceptional modernity of English society.

There is little, or no, long-standing popular tradition in England: the English peasantry, that great repository of folk ritual and collective customs, was torn off the land decades - if not whole centuries - before its counterparts throughout Europe. An unusually successful and aggressive class of agrarian capitalists broke apart both the institutions of the "moral economy", and the cultural practices it sustained.

By the close of this process, some two hundred years or more after it began in the sixteenth century, such folk-rituals as had survived were wretched shadows of their former selves. Some were maintained around collective institutions like the local pub, or the local church; some - those more unsettling to the established order of things - were driven underground, reappearing in the mummeries and rituals of the early trade unions and friendly societies. Most withered and died, victims of an increasingly privatised culture of consumption.

The reconstruction of an "English" culture only began to take place in the later nineteenth century. David Cannadine noted how the monarchy was brought from a reviled and penny-pinching insitution in the 1810s, to the heights of imperial grandeur under Queen Victoria. The process was contested; Royden Harrison, in Before the Socialists, gives some indication of widely-held republican views in the 1870s, and the popularity of the republican movement under its charismatic leader, Charles Bradlaugh. The identifiably proletarian cultural institutions began to coalesce in the same period: with rising real wages and a decades-long slide in food prices, the space in which a cheap, accesible popular culture could flourish was reopened.

The traditional proletarian cultural environment, dissected most astutely by Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy grew not as the autochthonous expression of long-repressed radical urges, but as the slender flowers sprouting from recently-planted seeds: bright, gaudy, but lacking substantial roots. Summarised in Hobsbawm's depiction of the ubiquitous cloth-cap - uniformly visible in photographs of working-class crowds from the early 1900s to some way beyond the Second World War - this new culture combined a vehement contempt for bourgeois norms, with a pronounced deference towards them.

Perry Anderson's brilliant 1965 essay, "The Origins of the Present Crisis", developed this peculiar, contradictory combination into an historical theory to account for the dominance of Labourism: a relatively settled bourgeoisie produced a "supine, subordinate proletariat", myopically unable to see beyond its own parochial concerns: whether the inveterate economism of the British trade union movement, or the pronounced resistance to new cultural forms, Anderson holds that the British working class was perhaps uniquely, obstinately attached to a Victorian condition of life.

It is peculiar, perhaps, that as committed a Marxist as Anderson then was should attach such autonomy to the specifically cultural aspects of Britain’s malady. The theme is adopted in Martin Wiener’s thorough survey of "English ambivalence towards industry", English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980. It is noticeable that both models implicitly presume a whole series of half-counterfactuals, half-prescriptions: in Wiener’s case, the new English industrial elite should have adopted the "Northern metaphor" when thinking of England ("Pragmatic, empirical, calculating, Puritan, bourgeois, enterprising, adventurous, scientific, serious, and [believing] in struggle."); should have espied its dark, Satanic mills and declared in proudly flattened Manchester vowels that where there was muck, there was brass. Instead, it sent its sons to the archaic public schools (a particular villain in Wiener’s drama), its daughters to the altar beside foppish aristocrats, and contented itself with a dream of green and pleasant lands; the "Southern metaphor" triumphant: "romantic, illogical, muddled, divinely lucky, Anglican, aristocratic, traditional, frivolous and [believing] in order and tradition."

It is the modernity of both that stands out: a fug of half-remembered, supposed "traditions" hides the truth of a radically (and uncomfortably) modern society of atomised individuals. Latter-day appeals to "British [sic] values" have this same double-sided quality: confronted with a Britain that looks dramatically unlike its own grand myth, an imaginary description of England turns rapidly into an agressive prescription: if we find our little old ladies, not cycling to communion, but attending mosque, we should close the mosques. The redundancy of appeals to "British values" are what gives them their bite. There is little to be gained, for the Left, in an argument over "English culture": we will be fighting with a will o' the wisp, a formless spectre still able to cause much harm.

Yet for too long, the Left has conspired to prioritise "cultural" questions far, far above the economic, with the absurd result that a supposed "anti-capitalist" like Paul Kingsnorth complained, in the New Statesman last year, of GAP's "American" advertising, ahead of its actual exploitation of its sweated workforce; or, in a similar vein, that prominent liberals could claim cluster bombs would bring liberation, ignoring the US military's role in the economic structures of imperialism.

"Culture" here dominates to the extent that a bloody reality is simply wished out of existence. A critical part of rebuilding the Left internationally is the construction of credible economic alternatives to neoliberalism; part of that effort is the reclamation of economic questions from the grip of the cultural. It is completely debilitating to do otherwise. Tom Dispatch has provided a useful summary of Thomas Frank’s essential What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.. Frank sees the loss of once-progressive Kansas to the Republicans as a synecdoche for the collapse of the left’s working-class base across the whole country:

Somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency, and we can say that liberalism lost places like Wichita and Shawnee, Kansas with as much accuracy as we can point out that conservatism won them over.

This is due partially, I think, to the Democratic Party's more-or-less official response to its waning fortunes. The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry McAuliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are liberal on social issues… Such Democrats explicitly rule out what they deride as "class warfare" and take great pains to emphasize their friendliness to business interests. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues off the table. [emphasis added]

This is, indeed, "criminally stupid". For the British Left, a similar stupidity would be for an allegedly "progressive" government to be seriously talking about loyalty tests, or reinforcing "Britishness", whilst making quiet mewling noises about "tolerance": New Labour does not want to ask hard, economic questions of itself, beyond a few easy soundbites about the New Deal and the housing market, and so it is left with a platitudinous authoritarianism. Decoupling the cultural from the economic allows the Right to seize the political reins; David Davis and his bootboys, like Bob Spink and Gerald Howarth, have already grasped the opportunity. The real Left, whilst defending the idea and the principle of "multiculturalism" from the Right, needs to move beyond liberal quietism, to asking those hard, economic questions: about discrimination, about poverty, about exploitation, about – above all – class. To do so is to win back the idea of a society that has been immensely enriched by immigration, and to tie support for it to onto the firm base of class interests.