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Progressive Nationalism Citizenship and the Left As ties of religion, class and ethnicity weaken, national identity may be the best way to preserve the Left’s collective ideals… Progressive Nationalism Citizenship and the Left David Goodhart About Demos Who we are Demos is the think tank for everyday democracy. We believe everyone should be able to make personal choices in their daily lives that contribute to the common good. Our aim is to put this democratic idea into practice by working with organisations in ways that make them more effective and legitimate. What we work on We focus on six areas: public services; science and technology; cities and public space; people and communities; arts and culture; and global security. Who we work with Our partners include policy-makers, companies, public service providers and social entrepreneurs. Demos is not linked to any party but we work with politicians across political divides. Our international network – which extends across Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, Brazil, India and China – provides a global perspective and enables us to work across borders. How we work Demos knows the importance of learning from experience. We test and improve our ideas in practice by working with people who can make change happen. Our collaborative approach means that our partners share in the creation and ownership of new ideas. What we offer We analyse social and political change, which we connect to innovation and learning in organisations.We help our partners show thought leadership and respond to emerging policy challenges. How we communicate As an independent voice, we can create debates that lead to real change.We use the media, public events, workshops and publications to communicate our ideas. All our books can be downloaded free from the Demos website. www.demos.co.uk First published in 2006 © Demos Some rights reserved – see copyright licence for details ISBN 1 84180 159 3 Copy edited by Julie Pickard, London Typeset and printed by Upstream, London For further information and subscription details please contact: Demos Magdalen House 136 Tooley Street London SE1 2TU telephone: 0845 458 5949 email: [email protected] web: www.demos.co.uk Progressive Nationalism Citizenship and the Left David Goodhart Open access.Some rights reserved. As the publisher of this work,Demos has an open access policy which enables anyone to access our content electronically without charge. We want to encourage the circulation of our work as widely as possible without affecting the ownership of the copyright,which remains with the copyright holder. Users are welcome to download,save,perform or distribute this work electronically or in any other format, including in foreign language translation,without written permission subject to the conditions set out in the Demos open access licence which you can read at the back of this publication. Please read and consider the full licence.The following are some of the conditions imposed by the licence: G Demos and the author(s) are credited G The Demos website address (www.demos.co.uk) is published together with a copy of this policy statement in a prominent position G The text is not altered and is used in full (the use of extracts under existing fair usage rights is not affected by this condition) G The work is not resold G A copy of the work or link to its use online is sent to the address below for our archive. Copyright Department Demos Magdalen House 136 Tooley Street London SE1 2TU United Kingdom [email protected] You are welcome to ask for permission to use this work for purposes other than those covered by the Demos open access licence. Demos gratefully acknowledges the work of Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons which inspired our approach to copyright.The Demos circulation licence is adapted from the ‘attribution/no derivatives/non- commercial’version of the Creative Commons licence. To find out more about Creative Commons licences go to www.creativecommons.org Contents Acknowledgements 7 Summary 9 1. The rise of security and identity issues 10 2. Reclaiming the national story 13 3. A new Britishness ‘contract’ 21 4. Different kinds of Britishness 28 5. The welfare state and majority reassurance 36 6. Policy implications 42 7. Conclusion 55 8. Responses to David Goodhart’s essay 59 Neal Ascherson 59 David Blunkett 64 John Denham 68 Philippe Legrain 71 Bhikhu Parekh 74 Notes 78 Acknowledgements This pamphlet has been brewing for almost 18 months and is, in part, meant as the political coda to the issues raised in my Prospect essay ‘Too diverse?’ (subsequently reprinted in the Guardian) of February 2004. Thanks are due to many people – some of whom are listed below – who either read and commented on the pamphlet itself or said useful things on the broad subject in private conversation or seminar rooms: Vidhya Alakeson, Douglas Alexander, Rushanara Ali, Christopher Caldwell, Matt Cavanagh, Linda Colley, Barry Cox, Jon Cruddas, Geoff Dench, John Denham, Patrick Diamond, Bobby Duffy, Catherine Fieschi, Charles Grant, Krishna Guha, Robert Hazell, Lucy Heller, David Herman, Will Hutton, Robert Jackson, Sunder Katwala, Eric Kaufmann, Lucy Kellaway, David Lammy, Anatol Lieven, Michael Lind, Alex Linklater, John Lloyd, Michael Maclay, Denis MacShane, Kenan Malik, Ehsan Masood, Tariq Modood, Anshuman Mondal, David Miller, Geoff Mulgan, Toby Mundy, Kamran Nazeer, Paul Ormerod, Bhikhu Parekh, Nick Pearce, Trevor Phillips, Michael Prowse, Robert Putnam, Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, Ben Rogers, Ann Rossiter, Bob Rowthorn, Shamit Saggar, John Salt, Roger Scruton, Paul Skidmore, Adrian Smith, Danny Sriskandarajah, Peter Taylor-Gooby, David Walker, David Willetts and Mari Williams. Thanks, in particular, to the team at Demos – Tom Bentley, Catherine Fieschi, Sam Hinton-Smith and Julia Huber – for publishing the pamphlet so professionally. David Goodhart May 2006 Demos 7 Progressive Nationalism 8 Demos Summary Politicians of the centre-left in Britain, and elsewhere in Europe, are trying to raise the visibility of national citizenship in response to growing anxieties about identity and migration in our more fluid societies – but they often do so defensively and uncertainly. Britain does need a clearer idea of citizenship and a robust protection of the privileges and entitlements associated with it. Indeed, an inclusive, progressive, civic British nationalism – comfortable with Britain’s multiethnic and multiracial character and its place in the European Union (EU) – is the best hope for preserving the social democratic virtues embodied in a generous welfare state and a thriving public domain. This pamphlet seeks to establish a more coherent and confident basis for centre-left thinking on the nation state and citizenship. It then sketches a framework for conceiving national citizenship in Britain today and how it might be revived, with a central role for the welfare state. It ends with some general policy suggestions. Demos 9 1. The rise of security and identity issues In the past few years the cluster of issues that are grouped together under the heading ‘security and identity’ have started to matter more to voters and politicians across Europe. The category includes (with different emphasis in different places) terrorism; asylum and immigration; the integration of minorities, especially significant Muslim minorities; the power of the EU, national sovereignty and regionalism; violent crime (or the fear of it); rising incivility; and the changing character of local communities. The security and identity issues in Europe are not an invention of the media; they have emerged in response to real events such as economic globalisation (and cultural Americanisation), the recent terrorist attacks in Europe, the sharp rise in asylum-led immigration starting in the early 1990s, the continuing arguments about the speed and desirability of European integration, devolution within many of the historic nation states of Europe, and most recently the place of Islam in Europe. The higher profile of these ‘who are we?’ and ‘how can we live together?’ issues also reflects the declining force of class- based distributional issues and the state versus market cold-war- related conflict that dominated European politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Indeed, partly thanks to the new salience of security and identity issues and the populist parties that have emerged to exploit them the main political party of the left no longer 10 Demos The rise of security and identity issues commands a majority of the working-class vote in Belgium, France, Italy or the Netherlands. Fears connected with external competition and migration were also central to the ‘no’ votes in the EU constitution referendums in France and the Netherlands. A ‘new politics’ that cuts across established left–right boundaries has emerged. In Britain there has been no equivalent of Jean Marie Le Pen or Pim Fortuyn but here too security and identity issues emerged from a position of very low visibility ten years ago to fill two of the top three places on voters’ lists of the ‘most important issues’ in 2005 (according to MORI the most important issue was defence and terrorism, the second most important was the National Health Service (NHS) and the third most important was race and immigration). The British National Party (BNP) won more than 800,000 votes in the last European elections, and it is common to hear Labour MPs worrying about the attitudes of their ‘left behind’ white working-class constituents – and all this at a time of unusually benign economic conditions. (This pamphlet went to press before the 4 May local elections in which the BNP was expected to perform strongly.) Less dramatic than the rise of the BNP is the prospect of a slow but growing divergence between London (and thus the national media) and a few other big cities, which are significantly and, in the main, comfortably multiethnic, and whole regions of the country (such as the north east and the south west) plus small town and rural Britain, which remain ethnically homogeneous and far more culturally conservative.
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