Why does England vote Tory?
JVL Introduction
Adam Ramsay of openDemocracy poses the obvious but seldom asked question: Why does England usually vote Tory?
Opinion polls on policy, show most people in England almost as left wing as most in Scotland and Wales.
And yet…
The defining force which shapes Britain’s politics, Ramsay argues, is Anglo-British nationalism: and the Tories are the party of Anglo-British nationalism and Empire, the party of the ruling class.
Black Lives Matter protests, jolting millions of people into an unprecedented process of teaching and learning, gives us a great opportunity to challenge our mythical national story.
And how better to do so than to confront its hero: Churchill.
This article was originally published by openDemocracy on Sun 21 Jun 2020. Read the original here.
Why does England vote Tory?
Progressives will never dominate English politics without confronting Churchillism.
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I am currently reading Reni Eddo-Lodge’s excellent book and as a white, privileged male in his early seventies I consider my real education begins here. And that’s despite all the years of joining anti fascist and racist demonstrations.
I am willing to learn how pervasive our nationalist, Imperialist culture is and how widely it extends into the fabric of my life.
This is indeed a window for change.
Why does England vote Tory?
It’s not difficult : All the widespread sources of information are about a subservient Tory narrative.
Look how easy it was to spread false accusations about anti-semitism in the Labour Party. Look at the exclusion of information about the Corona virus.
It’s known as ‘propaganda’. It may not be the whole story, but it’s a large part of it – and Jewish communities have horrendous historical knowledge of its power.
I think there is a constant ‘self blinding’ in this question.
It is time we in the uk realised there is no chance of a real fair democracy when the power in the form of immense wealth is held almost exclusively in the right. Our last election was bought and sold with all the media and press on the side of its owners and nobody challenging the lies and distortion they constantly swamped us with. How can democracy work under those conditions.
This is a truly terrible and incoherent article. It asks why England votes Tory and then proceeds to ignore England for some construct called Anglo-British nationalism. Once again a supposedly left writer cannot get to grips with England and the English. He has no problem with Scotland as the home of a Scottish nation, and I am sure he would have no problem with the Palestinians’ nationhood being respected. He must know that the Irish, across the board, share the Soldiers’ Song and don’t agonise with self hate about being Irish, while even the most left wing American will still aver that the US is the greatest country on earth – which is not about ignoring its racism, terrible taste in Presidents, bullying foreign policy, huge wealth disparities etc, or being superior towards everyone else, but Americans’ strong sense of self and of their country and their nation’s potential.
English nationalism a la Farage and Johnson is horrific – it is a nationalism of hate and brutal lack of self confidence which is the hallmark of the bully, the ignored, the sidelined. But there is a great history and tradition of English working class struggle (remember EP Thompson), of English liberation philosophers (Tom Paine anyone?), of English radical internationalism, of English folk music, of literature (the greatest playwright in the world?) of architecture, of a stunning human-created scenery, even a cuisine that chefs are now unearthing. Time for the English left to start reclaiming England and the English from the right wing crazies and xenophobes who have stolen it.
Nick Cohen is not a progressive.
I agree more with some of the comments on the article than with the article itself. As Naomi Wayne states, there is a long tradition of radicalism and protest against the status quo in England itself, and strong support for socialist policies and an internationalist outlook. But RH and Geoff Rouse explain why we are in the situation we are in today, where those traditions have virtually no voice any more.
Most people form their beliefs and attitudes on the basis of information available to them. The majority rarely check the sources of that information or how much of it is sound. Our lifestyles don’t have those habits built in. Ergo, if the main sources of information on the economy, politics, world affairs, etc., are newspapers and media sites owned by right wing billionaires and their affiliates, who have close ties to the Tory party; and the supposedly independent and moderate BBC actually also takes its lead from them, there is no need to do anything other than carry on the pretence of being a democratic society, when it patently isn’t. Problem solved for a very long time to come.
Nick Cohen a progressive? The article lost all validity after that statement.
I would differentiate between English nationalism on one hand and English history and culture on the other hand. It is not culture that underlines nationalism. Their attempt at history is rarely based on facts. It is more about symbols and myths. In addition, their history is an expression of the paranoiac position triggered by years of depravation. In this sense, the cult of Churchill is not dissimilar to the cult of Stalin in the nowadays Russia. I do agree with Naomi Wayne that the left should start reclaiming England and the English from the right wing crazies and xenophobes. Mind you, most of them are simply unaware of around 700 authentic annual folkloric events that organised by local people around the UK. Yet, I suspect that many on the left might not be aware of them either. This calls for a change.
Just to add to my previous comment, I was shocked last year when confronted with a call to vote Boris Johnson and the Tories coming from an English Romany. This was despite that Johnson’s electoral program included promises of explicitly anti-Traveller legislation. Perhaps we need to reflect on why somebody coming from one of the GTR communities does not associate themselves with the Labour and the left. Does the left value their culture? Does the left know it so that to stand for the GTR in a supportive way.
I find it astounding that no matter what conversation about Britain is taking place people like Naomi Wayne fixate on Palestine!!
In my opinion people voted Tory because they did not believe that Labour’s economic policies were practical, nor properly costed.
Andrew Neill’s interview with Corbyn exposed the latter as ignorant on economic and taxation matters with no track record of employment in the private sector and therefor viewed as unable to comprehend a budget.
nW is right to criticise AR’s slapdash impressionism. Many examples; but his uncritical reliance on the ill-thought question on the British Empire – good or bad? is a case in point. “Good or bad for whom?” is surely the point. or why not: “was Hitler right or wrong in praising the British Empire?”
The general theme is that a lot of these questionnaires rely on avoidance or repression of critical thought. It may be the case that those who set, let alone those who ask, the questions find critical thought difficult themselves.
Another good question would be “was Churchill right or wrong to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire?” (Itself uncritical enough, though a brief scan of Charmley’s Churchill – the End of Glory, should supply ammunition. Charmley quotes Chamberlain as proposing to avoid wherever possible any alliance with the US, as they would take all the gains. He also points out that far from being another of the “English speaking peoples”, the US was an alien and hostile power. Understanding the death agony of the British empire 1900-1945 (which Trotsky misread as the death agony of capitalism) is a task somewhat beyond the reach of questionnaires – and, I fear, Mr Ramsey himself. But one should at least entertain the irony that the worshippers of Churchill and the worshippers of the British empire put themselves into a cleft stick.
One of the problems many contributors as well as Mr Ramsey have is that they hoe for a progressive and friendly form of nationalism. Any progressive moment of nationalism, especially in the current UK, passed away long since. The ‘best’ nationalism can do in today’s world is to struggle to fight its way higher up in the ‘ladder’ of imperialist exploitation, as the Chinese CP is currently trying to do. (This would be true, perhaps even truer, of the ‘socialism in one country’ the Left Brexiteers dreamed of).
The inevitable result is the ever increasing tendency to war.
Gosh oh golly – what a weird criticism from Maxine Hawksworth to my earlier comment. I have no idea who ‘people like Naomi Wayne’ might be. My mother always assured me I was one of a kind, and my life experience has tended to confirm her assurances.
I am also thoroughly bewildered by her allegation that people like me ‘fixate on Palestine’. If she, and anyone else who is interested in this rather odd complaint, care to revisit my contribution, I objected to the way ‘a supposedly left writer cannot get to grips with England and the English’. I then contrasted his views of Scotland and the Scots, and gave three other examples: Ireland (where I lived for nearly ten years, so I can speak from direct experience), Palestine, because it’s nation-state status is generally regarded as a matter of left concern, and is certainly a matter of JVL concern, and the US (which has fascinated me ever since I went to a meeting as a teenager and heard a very left wing American expat speaker lucidly, passionately and for around an hour and a half, excoriate the land of her birth, and then turn to her audience with a twinkle in her eye, and tell us ‘America is still the greatest country on earth).
If one out of four counts as ‘fixation on Palestine’ I suppose I have to plead guilty. Though I can only do so on my own behalf and not on behalf of anyone else who might ‘be like’ me.
As to ‘Why England Votes Tory’, which was the subject of the article on which I was commenting, I was directly addressing the author’s argument, which was difficult, as it comprised a mishmash of commentary about British empire, Britain, the UK and England and English nationalism – none of which different phenomena he seemed to be able to differentiate from each other. But on one thing he was clear and explicit – his article was about why England USUALLY votes Tory. Why England voted Tory at the last election specifically would have been a different article, and I have no idea how, if at all, I would have responded to it.