A brief history of progressive patriotism

Labour leadership candidate Rebecca Long Bailey’s call to champion progressive patriotism at the close of 2019 led to a brief flurry of opinion pieces regarding the possible pros (and more often cons) of such a position for the party. She very quickly drew back from a detailed consideration of what such a position would look like, not least because as left-wing intellectuals discovered during the Second World War, any attempt to invoke such patriotism had to deal with an English identity that for too long had been yoked to imperial ambitions.

The most obvious—and still, in many ways, the most important—left-wing figure to have engaged with the question of English identity remains George Orwell. Editor Douglas Kerr has described Orwell as, intellectually, “a displaced person,” one who struggled against the colonialism of his upbringing. His evocation of Englishness could be a slippery one. The former police officer in Burma, who wrote about poverty in socially deprived northern England and served against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, was frequently torn by his commitment to both progressive forces and what literary critic Ben Clarke has called the rural idyll of his Edwardian childhood.

As the Second World War continued, Orwell was one of those on the left who felt that patriotism was a valuable force that could be mobilised in the fight against fascism, and he increasingly turned to what Englishness could mean, most notably in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (1941) and Notes on Nationalism (1945). In the former, Orwell argued that the outdated class system was hampering the war effort and that the country needed a socialist revolution. “Patriotism” he wrote, “has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.”

The English radical Thomas Paine might have taken issue with Orwell’s bald statement that “no real revolutionary has ever been an internationalist,” but Orwell’s emotional line owed more to Romantics such as Blake and Wordsworth. In Notes on Nationalism, he asserted that nationalism, always bound up with the desire for power, was not to be confused with patriotism—the defence of what we value, culturally as well as militarily. The preceding decade had demonstrated the very worst excesses that nationalism was capable of, yet Orwell despaired that the English intelligentsia was wrong to abandon the concept of love of place.

Orwell was far from alone in his desire to reformulate English nationalism: writing in the American magazine The New Republic in 1940, Virginia Woolf was another of those figures who sought to envisage a radical new form of Englishness beyond the exploitation of colonialism. In “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid,” Woolf argued that love of the motherland should not entail the subjugation of actual mothers, not least because old-fashioned sexism excluded women from politics and meant that they were unable to give their best to the war effort. The immediate fight was against Hitler, certainly—“Who is Hitler? What is he? Aggressiveness, tyranny, the insane love of power”—but the greater mental fight (a phrase used in her essay) was against the more permanent state of conflict that set men against women.

Woolf seems an unlikely cause for patriotism. In Three Guineas, she famously wrote: “as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.” As literary historian Katie Gramich has remarked, however, for such an internationalist Woolf was a remarkable Anglophile. She may have placed feminism before nationalism but like many among the Suffragettes before her, she recognised the importance of an emotional appeal to the women (and men) of England even as she rejected British imperial values.

Orwell and Woolf were engaging with questions of progressive patriotism in response to the threat of war. A much more extensive engagement with Englishness during peacetime, however, appeared in 1934 when JB Priestley published English Journey. Priestley, a committed socialist, was commissioned by the publisher Victor Gollancz to write an account of contemporary England. Visiting towns and cities in the north and south, he was one of the few intellectuals of the period to accurately recognise the changes that had taken place in the country since the end of the First World War. He distinguished three Englands: the Old England of cathedrals and minsters, quaint villages and manor houses, which he viewed fondly but unsentimentally as the “luxury country” for tourists; then there was 19th-century England, the cities, railways, factories, town halls and mills that provided the industry that enabled the survival of Old England.

But Priestley also recognised something new, a post-war England “belonging far more to the age itself than to this particular island. America, I suppose was its real birthplace.” This was the country of by-pass roads and filling stations, of giant cinemas and dance halls, bungalows and swimming pools—the country of suburbia. As with many writers seeking a sense of Englishness, Priestley provides lists that seek to capture the essential thinginess of the country, but what is important is that he recognises not one but multiple English identities. Priestley’s vision of a progressive patriotism (or, perhaps alone among the three figures considered here, a progressive nationalism) is far from perfect: he is scathing about the Irish and their “dirt, drunkenness and disease,” an ugly xenophobia that can mar his vision. Yet English Journey was immensely influential in offering an alternative to the right-wing nationalism of the 1930s that insisted upon one country, one people, one law. Instead, Priestley saw the possibility for multiple Englands, co-existing peacefully alongside each other. In this, he inspired Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and has even being credited with helping to bring about another transformation of the country, the 1945 Labour victory which sought, as Priestley himself believed, to build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.