Union Jacked

• Fabian Review, Winter 2005, London

Gordon Brown, Britain's finance minister and likely next prime minister, has always been the left-wing conscience of Tony Blair's centrist New Labour project. But in the past few months, he has been wrapping himself in the British flag. In January, the Fabian Society, the oldest think tank of the British left, sponsored a conference a month after it published a special issue of its quarterly journal, Fabian Review, devoted to the issue of British national identity. In a speech at the conference, Brown asked: "What is the British equivalent of the 4th of July, or even the French 14th of July for that matter?… [W]hat is our equivalent of the national symbolism of a flag in every garden?" The terse response two weeks later from David Cameron, the young, new leader of the Conservative Party, was: "We don’t do flags."

On the face of it, this is an odd political role reversal. Europe's political left has traditionally had an ambivalent relationship with national identity and nationalism. Rah-rah patriotism was at odds with the left's class-based view of society, pitting "instinct" against the left's "reason." The horrors of aggressive nationalism in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, followed by a combination of European integration and the arrival of more multiethnic societies in the 1970s and 1980s, seemed to confirm the intellectual and political redundancy of the nation.

The British left has felt this ambivalence more acutely than most, as Britain seemed to evolve from an imperial to a postnational sense of itself without passing through the popular national revolution to align the nation and the state, as classically exemplified by France. Until recently, this fuzziness about national identity was considered a blessing. But suddenly the celebration of postnational, cosmopolitan Britain has been eclipsed by the return of "security and identity" issues, which explains Brown's new enthusiasm for the idea of national solidarity. Several developments have propelled these issues to the top of voters' concerns: a sharp rise in asylum-led immigration starting in the mid-1990s, continuing arguments over European integration, the developing story of Scottish and Welsh devolution, the 7/7 suicide bombings and anxieties about Muslim integration, and the fear of violent crime, among others.

One reason that Labour has had to reconsider its traditional inhibitions about banging the national drum is simply that it has been in power while these social developments have played themselves out. For example, in response to anxiety about asylum-related immigration, David Blunkett, the former home secretary and a blunt "man of the people," attempted to raise the visibility of British national identity by introducing citizenship tests and ceremonies for prospective British citizens.

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