In the space of a few short days, British politics seems to have rediscovered the national interest. The government has announced that it is invoking emergency powers to take control of British Steel’s blast furnaces at Scunthorpe, pre-empting the firm’s liquidation by its Chinese owners Jingye. Over the past weekend X was flooded with selfies by Labour MPs ostentatiously explaining that they were travelling back to Westminster, despite the parliamentary recess, to vote on the government’s extraordinary session.
It is a striking departure for parliamentarians who are more used to posting and voting about climate change, Trump, Gaza, Ukraine, Pakistani airports — anything and anywhere but Britain. It is also a remarkable about-face for British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, a lawyer whose entire career, up to the age of 50, was defined by applying supra-national human rights conventions to national law. And that is to say nothing of his campaigning on behalf of the European Union after he became a parliamentarian in 2015. What happened to prompt this sudden embrace of Britain’s best interests?
Closing the furnaces in Scunthorpe would have meant the end of steel production in the country that birthed the Industrial Revolution. In a world of snapped supply chains and growing geopolitical instability, Britain’s national interest in maintaining domestic steel production is self-evident. The problem is that the more that Labour ministers and parliamentarians refer to the “national interest”, the more hollow it sounds. After all, if Keir Starmer is only now turning to defend Britain’s national interests, what on earth was he doing before? If the whole point of being a national leader is to defend the national interest, why would you even need to say it?
“If Keir Starmer is only now turning to defend Britain’s national interests, what on earth was he doing before?”
Then we turn to the steelworks. How is it in the British national interest to keep the Scunthorpe furnaces running, if it wasn’t in the national interest to save the steel works at Port Talbot? How is it in the national interest to manufacture steel without maintaining the concomitant domestic capacity to produce the coking coal that is needed to make the steel, itself made from the filthy pollutants that our new green gospel commands us to leave buried in the ground? How was it in the national interest that British Steel was privatised and sold to foreign capitalists of an authoritarian superpower?
The national interest has been conspicuous by its absence from British politics for years if not decades. The past 30 years have been the era not of Britain’s national interests but rather of Britain’s international leadership. Britain stepped into conflicts in Libya, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone; it sought also to be a leader in global efforts to tackle climate change, child poverty, the financial crisis, and terrorism. With so much leadership, so much winning, who needed the national interest? There was, to be sure, plenty of chatter across these years in think tanks and Foreign Office seminars about “our interests and values”. But it was taken for granted that our interests and values were happily conjoined in deepening Britain’s trading relationships, strengthening our global alliances, redoubling our international commitments and tackling global problems in Africa, India, wherever.
Blathering about interests and values while letting foreigners asset-strip British utilities and industries was possible for the past 30 years because we lived in a world of unipolar globalisation. In this world, US military underpinned the global security regime, and economic globalisation allowed for widespread economic growth. It was true that the mercantilist trading strategies behind Chinese industrialisation never quite lived up to the doctrine of comparative advantage on which the case for free trade is usually built. But unipolar globalisation nonetheless allowed for a fair degree of economic specialisation to develop across a global division of labour. China produced the steel, we produced slide decks on how to ensure your supply chains were gender compliant.
A few “rogue states” aside, in this old world order no one had to bother articulating a distinctive national interest. The US military underwrote national security, and everyone’s economic interests were essentially the same — enhancing global growth, deepening global trade and expanding global business. In this looking-glass world, industrialising China was in our interests because it powered global growth, letting us live by re-mortgaging our decrepit Victorian housing stock over and over again. This global compact came with the added bonus that it allowed us to substitute dirty blue-collar jobs (and people) with nice white-collar jobs (and people) and cheap foreign labour. This is a state of affairs that was foreseeable, foreseen and welcomed by both the Tories and Labour. Both parties abetted the expansion of the universities, not least in cities where industries had been gutted.
Britain had a precocious role to play in building this global world, starting with the Labour government’s soliciting of an IMF bail-out in 1976 in preference to installing capital controls. Later, in the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher endeavoured to crush organised labour — the “enemy within” — and build Britain into the European Single Market. Globalisation would never have worked had it not been a bipartisan affair. The business class wanted to restore profitability by crushing uppity unions and reaching beyond the nation-state, while the Left was less interested in representing workers’ material demands at the national level than it was in indulging in middle-class activism and virtue-signalling at the global level. For their own reasons, both Left and Right thus conspired to evade the democratic fetters of the nation-state, whether by shredding its civic representation, selling off national assets such as British Steel to foreign capitalists, and fleeing abroad on gap years to solve global problems.
Yet globalisation could work only by gouging the nation-state. You could strip it back through privatisation and transnational integration, but a shrivelled remnant remained intact. By now its only remaining purpose was to act as a footstool for ambitious elites to step on. In this way they boosted themselves into a world where they could rub shoulders with Brussels regulators, New York bankers, Californian entrepreneurs, Russian oligarchs, Saudi royalty and Chinese communist billionaires.
Not only was the national interest an anachronism, but so too was the nation itself. In this world, it was little more than a dreary hinterland of provincial towns and rustbelt communities left behind by the exuberant cosmopolitanism of a wealthy London. The capital, straining to shed its provinces, hoped to establish itself as a de facto city-state plugged into global governance networks. Its mayor seems more concerned with tackling climate change and the war in Gaza than the prosaic problems of ordinary Londoners.
If Britain had played an important early role in building this new world order, it also played a precocious role in undercutting it with the popular vote to leave the European Union in 2016 — a democratic victory that would be a point of patriotic pride for any British government genuinely concerned with meaningful British leadership in world affairs. Starmer, of course, devoted the years after the referendum to trying to overturn it, straining to keep us embedded in the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union. This entanglement would have hindered this week’s national effort to rescue British Steel.
Despite this record, the Labour government’s belated rediscovery of the national interest should be welcomed. This is because it indicates that, however weak our politicians may be, they are now being forced to turn inwards and justify their policies in reference to the British people rather than looking to solve global problems. What this means is that we now have the possibility of holding our elected representatives to account. By its very nature, the national interest is a representative claim made on behalf of a people who share the same territory and live under the same sovereign authority — the nation.
The problem for the people of Britain is that they do not — yet — exist as a nation. After all, what does it mean to speak of the national interest in a country in which the nation itself now figures so rarely? Public and municipal buildings — even the Foreign Office itself — are as likely to carry the trans pride and Ukrainian flags as they are the Union flag. Spontaneous popular patriotism would seem to be equally absent: walk around the centre of any British city and you are more likely to see Palestinian flags hanging in windows, stickered onto lamp posts, in shops, more than the Union flag or the flags of any of its constituent nations. Eurosceptic populists like the leader of the Reform party, Nigel Farage, imagined that withdrawing from the EU back in 2016 would be sufficient for the British nation to stir back into life once all the suffocating Brussels red tape had been stripped off.
But the British nation had not only been mummified but buried under the garish monuments of Global Britain. This was not the apotheosis of the British nation, but rather the British nation turned inside out — a Britain whose success was measured by how many migrants and how much foreign investment it could attract rather than how far it defended the lives of its citizens. Whatever folk memories of British nationhood may stir the masses, the fact is that the nation is long gone, like most of British industry and national assets, to privatisation, globalisation and neglect. Just as it will take more than state ownership to revive British Steel, so it will take more than selfies and nationalising failing companies to rebuild a British nation.
The greatest theorist of modern sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes, made clear that national unity can only meaningfully exist in the form of sovereign political representation. “It is the unity of the representer,” he wrote, “not the unity of the represented, that maketh the [sovereign] one.” This means that if there is to be a new British nation, it will also need a new state to represent it. The fact that the Westminster state is being forced to resume thinking in terms of national interest gives this project of national renewal greater urgency. This is because none of the established parties in parliament can be entrusted as custodians of the national interest. Already government ministers are refusing to confirm whether we can actually keep the Scunthorpe furnaces running. Once again Tory and Labour conspire against the British people: the Tories decry the Labour Party’s Net Zero commitments that make British industrial energy so expensive, yet it is they who privatised British Steel to begin with.
If there is to be a new British nation forged with new British steel — both real and metaphorical — it will require the British multitude to start thinking about what we share in common and how we can impose those collective priorities on our elected representatives. In short, we will need to start thinking like a nation. This means we will all need to make sure that we are thinking about the national interest whenever we consider any question of public life — whether it be our energy supply, educational reforms, academic freedom, individual liberty or national defence. The national interest is much too important to be left to the politicians.
