Over the past few weeks there’s been a great deal of commentary marking the first anniversary of Keir Starmer’s leadership of the Labour Party. Critics and supporters have variously assailed or hailed the ways in which the party has changed since Starmer took up the reins. The prevailing assumption is that for better or worse, change there has been. Yet from the perspective of those interested in the “territorial politics” of the state, there’s more continuity than change: most strikingly, Labour still has a giant England-shaped hole in its thinking.
That Labour finds it difficult to talk about England is not much of a secret. Emily Thornberry’s defenestration during the Rochester and Strood by-election after she had tweeted a photo of a house adorned with three St George’s cross flags in 2014 remains emblematic (no pun intended) of the party’s discomfort faced with the spectre of Englishness. But perhaps a better illustration of the party’s inability to think coherently about England is to be found by comparing its 2017 and 2019 manifestos.
In the former, Labour pledged to create a “Minister for England” who would “sit under the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government” and “work with the Secretaries of State for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.” But what she or he would actually do in that role was unclear. One might also question the symbolism of a reform that would still accord lower status to England than that enjoyed by other constituent territories of the Union. Nonetheless, the proposal at least had the virtue of indicating that someone close to the manifesto process realised that Labour needed to say something constructive about the subject.
By 2019 that pledge had vanished. The only remaining sign that Labour was willing to recognise England in any positive sense was a restatement of the 2017 pledge to establish a St George’s Day bank holiday as part of a package of four patron saints holidays, from which we can only conclude that, in relation to some matters, memories in the Labour Party are very short indeed.
Only four years previously, Labour had been undone by a Conservative campaign that focused relentlessly on the dangers of an Ed Miliband minority government propped up by the SNP. It was a message brilliantly if cruelly distilled in the Saatchi-designed poster portraying Miliband in Alex Salmond’s jacket pocket. Testimonies from the campaign—from Labour, Liberal Democrat and Ukip campaigners alike—all acknowledged the effectiveness of the Conservatives’ fearmongering on the potential influence of the SNP.
There can be no doubt that the Tories were not only seeking to mobilise negative sentiment around the SNP—this was a deliberate attempt to mobilise English national sentiment against Scotland. In the aftermath of that election, Jeremy Sinclair, then-chairman of M&C Saatchi marketing group, mused on success of the campaign: “We hate being ruled or bossed by foreigners. French, Germans, Scots, anyone—and it looked as though we were going to be run by Alex Salmond… it is a most powerful thing when people are threatened by government by outsiders.”
Englishness was mobilised so successfully that the Conservatives returned to power. Since then, successive general elections have seen the Conservatives make further inroads among voters who strongly identify as English. And of course English nationalism played a central role in the Brexit referendum that was the direct consequence of that 2015 victory.
If there was ever a prospect that Labour might be able to form a minority administration, the Tories would simply re-run that 2015 campaign. Anyone in the party who believes otherwise is surely kidding themselves. Moreover, barring an unlikely collapse in SNP support, and with possible boundary changes reducing the number of MPs from Wales by 20 per cent, any road to a Labour majority can only lie though England. Of this, at least, Labour is aware. In its 2019 election post-mortem, the party acknowledged that trends in Scottish voting meant it would need to take North East Somerset from Jacob Rees-Mogg to win a majority.
Yet bar some hand-wavy stuff about patriotism—which is, of course, entirely focused on Britain, with England never even recognised let alone addressed—Starmer’s Labour Party is no further forward in thinking about how to engage with the politicised Englishness that has transformed Britain since the middle of the last decade.
Indeed, there is every prospect that Starmer’s championing of “radical federalism”—a strikingly vague formulation which appears to be aimed at regaining ground in Scotland while assuaging the Welsh Labour government—could end up making matters worse. This is because any form of semi-federalism depends on a regionalising reform in and of England. And what we know about public opinion in England is that, without exception, when forced to choose between options for constitutional reforms to regionalise (however framed) and those that treat England as a single unit, the latter are always more popular.
If Labour heads into a future election arguing for “radical federalism” while continuing to ignore England itself, it will be presenting an open goal to the Tories. Those Saatchi adverts will practically write themselves.
Like it or not—and of course, we know that many in the Labour Party won’t like it—there’s no avoiding England and Englishness. Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that it’s only when Labour starts to engage seriously and creatively about Englishness that the party is serious about power.
