Keir Starmer must forge a future-facing nationalism

Criteria for belonging can be based on the common good

Twenty conferences ago, Tony Blair said globalisation was unstoppable: “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” His accidental prescience was to indicate the seasons will change again. And so they have. Liberal ideas of a globally integrated world are falling apart; winter is coming.

At the end of globalisation as we know it, the British nation is reborn. It is not surprising that actors on the right, from Tommy Robinson to Reform UK, sail smoothly on the new winds of nationalism. They share an idea of the nation as a people – in which there are people, and others who live here but are not the people – defined by ancient rights and historical claims. They yearn to restore the state to a bygone form.

This revival must be superseded: Keir Starmer has to wear Janus’s other face. Political projects are always developed in response to the nature of the times and in a dance with the opposition, not grown out of a single word like fairness, contribution or opportunity, as though these Labour principles are mutually exclusive. The Prime Minister has to prosecute a nation-building project, a future-facing alternative to Reform’s nation-restoring one.

A national social democratic party has no choice but to marshal these forces. Nationalism has always been capable of progressive and reactionary expressions: it looks backwards to pre-modern identities and ethnic solidarities or forwards to modernising, egalitarian goals. If Labour cannot put together a tolerable theory of nationalism, nobody will.

If the government can move us from retrospective nationalist politics to truly prospective politics, it can rediscover Britain’s lost optimism. Nigel Farage suggests we are close to “civil disobedience at a vast scale”, but that is not the case every time we go to a pub, park or school. We offer directions to strangers, cook for guests and pick up our neighbours’ children. Mutuality is useful material for Labour’s nation-building.

The government has laid foundations, despite its exhausting year. It is directing the economy to the common good, with plans to invest £725bn over ten years in infrastructure, remove local obstacles to building, support and subsidise eight nationally strategic industries, expand free childcare, bring all passenger train operators and British Steel under public ownership, and create a publicly owned energy company. It has increased most existing taxes on wealth and imposed no taxes on work, while attempting to abolish the gig economy and raise the wage floor, suggesting a more thoughtful treatment of the interaction between nationality and social class than it gets credit for. Essentially, this is a programme of economic nationalism. It should find confidence to narrate in such terms over technocratic ones.

That might reframe what people are already doing as part of a collective national project, and how the government is supporting that. When we push ourselves to return to work, start a company or pay attention to our children’s education we act pragmatically in our self-interest but also altruistically in the national one. Labour could describe its policies as society’s part of the bargain in a reciprocal commitment with individuals. The right defines national interest in narrow terms. That can be contested, not just in terms of who owns it but how it is construed, to incorporate public services and ownership, national industry and tax.

The right is ahead in viewing the state as sovereign, not merely administrative. For all of Labour’s policies on delivery, it has little to say on democracy. Until that changes, its national project will remain behind Reform’s. Nationalism is ultimately a challenge to unrepresentative state structures, and so demands a reassessment of the links between people and the state.

Reform wants to make us more homogeneous and the state less pluralist, removing over a million people who aren’t white British regardless of legal status, and weakening actors that oblige government to act in certain ways, such as parliament, the legal system, Whitehall and the BBC. Its inherent contradiction is to stuff government with unelected technocrats. Do they really believe businessmen can prosecute the will of the people? Labour, in contrast, barely has a constitutional agenda. It treats asylum, immigration and citizenship as a numbers game, not a challenge of common identity. This is why it bets increasing deportations will neutralise the issue. History suggests otherwise.

Questions of membership are a fact of any national project, but the criteria can be based on common birth or civic creed. The two main approaches to settlement and citizenship, by right of blood and right of soil, come from a time when populations grew primarily through births. But over two-thirds of UK population growth over the past 20 years has come from immigration. As the right’s nation-restoring project attempts to overturn demography, Labour can take control: it should revive a citizenship agenda in which membership is earned by contributing to the common good.

Britons of all backgrounds feel powerless. That has suppressed the British reflex against radicalism. But to be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing. That’s the importance of Labour’s national renewal, and the peril of Reform’s national restoration.

[Further reading: Inside the Tony Blair Institute]