St George’s Day is a moveable feast: this year marked by the political world on its traditional date, rather than on the day next week chosen by an increasingly irrelevant Church of England. But it also shifts in terms of its meaning. A year ago, I remarked that the ghost of English ethnic nationalism, so often fearfully invoked by its detractors, was remarkable mostly for its dormancy. Yet other interpretations are available: just a few months later, Northern England was shaken by its most violent ethnic riots in decades, casting a cloud of doom over the new Labour government from which it has never yet emerged. Today, the country is in an unhappy state, the air heavy with the pressure of a storm about to break. Mild-mannered Telegraph columnists write anxious premonitions of approaching civil war, while the nation’s second city slips beneath the basic expectations of First World governance. Civil war may be unlikely, but that the very idea can be seriously entertained by credible people demonstrates a growing fissure entering British life, one which will take serious political reform to avert disaster: requiring a capacity, and appetite to undertake that the Government does not appear to possess. Translating the nation’s febrile atmosphere to an American audience, the writer Dominic Green observes in the Wall Street Journal that “The mood in England today is eerie. The government can’t govern. The police menace law-abiding people for speaking their minds. The borders are open. The country feels as if it is one Islamist bombing away from eruption.”
Just as with Easter, marked this year by booming church attendance and a perceptible new air of politicisation, the day when the English people take stock of who they are has taken on a new political salience. Politicians now both chase, and attempt to pre-emptively shape, a public mood very different from that of our recent past. A close reading of St George’s Day political messaging, ahead of the Government’s inevitable drubbing in next week’s English local elections, reveals a population increasingly ruled by Westminster as a sullen and borderline rebellious tribe.
For the ruling Labour Party, St George’s Day was commemorated as an apotropaic ritual undertaken to ward off evil. “There are people trying to sow division in our communities, people taking the red and white of our flag with them, as they throw bricks at businesses and our police,” Starmer lectured the nation, with all the stern appeal of a substitute teacher faced with an unruly class. His reference to his predecessor as “an English Hindu” was an explicit nod to the weeks-long debate earlier this year as to whether or not Rishi Sunak is meaningfully English, a topic of political discourse unthinkable just a few years ago, and the product of the newfound ethnic consciousness unwittingly accelerated by mass immigration and its advocates.
Indeed, the governance of Britain in recent decades has functioned as an unintentional experiment in forging an angry ethnic nationalism where none previously existed. Like Sunak’s place within the English nation, what until recently seemed settled certainties have become, for the first time in my lifetime, sources of contestation. Accusations of two-tier policing and anti-white racism levelled by the Conservative opposition, chasing the public mood, have the air of a civil rights movement for what is still, for now, the majority in its own land. Catastrophic misgovernance has brought us here: progressive overreach has brought about reaction, and perhaps soon overreaction; while uncomfortable truths left buried to maintain social order now threaten to emerge in an uncontrollable form.
The most violent scenes in last summer’s riots took place, after all, in Rotherham, a name now indelibly associated with state failure. There, the British state’s apparent collusion in a decades-long campaign of sexual exploitation approaching the scale of war crimes, the product and accelerant of a Northern English urban landscape as segregated along ethnic lines as that of Ulster, has placed a time-bomb beneath the foundations of its own legitimacy. For its own survival, torn between a controlled explosion now, or an uncontrolled one later, the governing party can neither reveal the full extent of the horror nor long actively suppress it. Labour’s Mirpuri vote bank has now outgrown the party, while the buried secrets of its once-unchallenged Northern governance have made fertile ground for a growing nationalist Right. Soon, the party looks destined to be ground to dust between the tectonic plates of these two newly assertive identities.
“Labour looks destined to be ground to dust”
For Sadiq Khan, whose video’s chosen imagery of elderly Pearly Kings and Queens in their tribal finery conveyed much the air of an American land acknowledgment, footage of multicultural celebration sat uneasily with a sombre warning against “the rise of populism and prejudice around the world”. Instead, “our patron saint,” Khan told us, “stood up for what he believed in” (whether this meant Christianity or killing dragons went unexplained). “England is a tapestry of different cultures, faiths, histories and ideas, woven together to tell one story,” Khan intoned, as the video showed his “London Welcomes Refugees” posters on the Tube and a happy multiracial crowd dancing hokey-cokey in the spring sun. As with Starmer’s attempt to divert English identity onto the more comfortable plane of football and Fabian decency, or the almost parodically bloodless patriotism of the Dover MP Mike Tapp, endlessly shrouding himself in the Union Flag and Brown’s state-mandated British Values, the ruling party’s St George’s Day communications were simultaneously anodyne and heavily politicised.
All of this was the direct product of Labour’s fear of a growing Right flirting with ethnic nationalism to chase the public mood. Writing for Labour List, the Blairite former MP John Denham, long an advocate of a Fabian English nationalism kept within careful bounds lest it escape onto more volatile territory, made the implicit anxieties marking Labour’s St George’s Day explicit. “The Southport riots and grooming gangs have disturbed our cohesive society, requiring a new national story,” Denham wrote. “As we confront the populist right [a bracket which for Denham, perhaps correctly, now includes the Conservative Party] we can’t be spectators. Whose idea of England will win?” Judging by the polls, the answer is not Labour, with the party of government now hovering as England’s third most popular. Like the intellectual Left, reduced by historical circumstance to writing footnotes on a newly-energised Right, the governing Left is pursued by an amorphous, rapidly evolving Right whose deathly grasp it cannot escape. As for a character in an M.R. James ghost story, doom approaches with the awful, slow-motion certainty of a nightmare.
For a decade now, the country has been engaged in a slow-burning, chaotic period of democratic revolution, from Brexit’s violent rupture with Westminster’s decades-old political consensus to the electorate’s wild and desperate lurches between any party pledging to break the trajectory of decline. Northern England has emerged as the neglected kingmaker in British politics, delivering ephemeral landslides to Johnson’s Tories and then Starmer’s Labour before violently rejecting each in turn. Soon, if the polling is accurate, it will be Reform’s turn to be rewarded, and perhaps rejected, by this volatile and angry electorate. A Westminster lobby entranced by the drama of the new party’s rise has yet to grapple with the consequences of its likely failure.
Writing in 1977, the Scottish nationalist writer Tom Nairn foresaw a future where the pressures building up beneath a Westminster system shared between two parties of only cosmetic difference, incapable of reform, would eventually lead to that system’s breakdown. “Only the combined pressures of external collapse (e.g. the breakdown of the currency) and internal upheaval (whether as nationalist or as social revolt, or the two at once) will be enough to unseat this resistant system,” Nairn wrote. The immediate result, he believed, would be a new “Gaullism” of the English Right, which “while of course manipulating the symbols of tradition and extolling the ancient virtues, will be forced to go beyond a transitional, or ‘caretaker’ role. It will desert the sacred continuities even as it hymns them.” For “its principal purpose is laid down in advance: the forcible, breakneck achievement of that successful modernisation which has eluded all United Kingdom governments in this century (except in time of war). For this, a new constitution and state are needed (even if they retain some vestments of the old).” For Nairn, “this will be that long-awaited ‘revolution from above’”.
This is not the cause of Nigel Farage, the genial, careless Mr Toad of British politics, but it does speak to a growing current on the Right. Nairn’s prediction of a modernising, “Gaullist” English nationalism, which remakes a sclerotic Westminster state whose ancient essence it claims to defend is perceptive: it is, perhaps, an Anglofuturism avant la lettre. The St George’s Day messages of the Conservative Party’s most energetic asset and de facto leader, Robert Jenrick and of his ideological ally beyond party lines, Rupert Lowe, speak to this current. In Jenrick’s video, England is not just “a great nation” but “a great people” too: an appeal to an identity Labour cannot comfortably utter. Its paeans to historical glory, a modernity-defining legacy of scientific and technological advance, and unapologetic declaration that remembering England’s past “will give us the dare and determination to build a better England still” are a spine-tingling reflection of this developing political current. Its pointed inclusion of Cromwell is both a hint of the almost revolutionary nature of the necessary reform, and a nod to the internet Right increasingly driving mainstream conservative discourse. In the same way, Lowe’s video, made by the anonymous propagandist of the internet Right “Brewgaloo”, prominently features Jenrick over Lowe’s stirring speech calling for a Great Repeal Act of Westminster’s maladaptive laws, as the first act of “national restoration”. Concorde, red squirrels, Glastonbury Tor and King Alfred whizz past, near-subliminally: this is what Nairn predicted, and feared. It may yet be what the nation demands.
Writing now, in the quiet lull between St George’s Day and England’s local elections, the political contours of the near future are taking solid form. If Reform is ascendant now, few seriously see in Farage’s charismatic solipsism a serious party of government: instead, Reform’s historical purpose is to break Labour, just as last year it helped break the Tories. The Conservative Party has found a new voice, if only to rail against the consequences of Conservative governance. In its Jenrickian incarnation, allied with its fellow traveller Rupert Lowe, it speaks to a project beyond mere conservatism, but instead of systemic reform in the service of national restoration. Where Labour seeks anxiously to divert this energy towards its comfortable, chosen ground — the now nostalgic Fabian multiculturalism of the Blair era — this ascendant Right seeks to ride the bottom-up nationalist wave created by decades of state failure. For the first time in living memory, this St George’s Day felt different, energised, as English politicians addressed their rebellious people. Like the May elections following at its heels, it was a way-station on the road to a different England — one way or another.
