Battle of the British nationalisms

LONDON — Western nations have a habit of pushing what they consider “undesirable” nationalism to the periphery of political debate. Mainstream parties sideline rivals by depicting their appeal to love of country as “narrow” or “extreme” and conveniently presenting their own comparatively “banal” nationalism as “patriotism.”

This phenomenon, first identified by British sociologist Michael Billig, is on full display in the U.K. Given that the ongoing election campaign has yet to dwell to any tangible extent on questions of public policy, claiming the nationalistic (or patriotic) high ground has arguably become the central field of battle.

Cartoonists have depicted Prime Minister Theresa May as Britannia resurgent, the only conceivable vehicle for restored British “greatness.” And in Scotland, the working assumption of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, hailed as the “Queen of Scots” by sycophantic Americans, is that independence will turn Scotland into the best small country in the world.

British conservatives like May ostensibly disdain the identity politics on the rise in the United States and across Europe. But they’re now playing that game rather well themselves — as the prime minister recently showed when she said that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn didn’t stand up for “proud and patriotic working-class people.”

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon | Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images

Similarly, May has railed against Scottish nationalism — speaking of taking action against “extremists” and “separatists” who want to “break up our country” — even as her party’s election slogans echo those of the Scottish National Party (SNP).

Where Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP leader, has claimed to be “standing up for Scotland” in the face of Westminster, May portrays herself as “standing up for Britain” — presumably against the necessary “other” of Brussels and assorted European bullies.

Naturally, both Scottish and British nationalists go to great lengths to deny that they are (undesirable) nationalists and each would shudder at being lumped in with the other. Most likely, they are conscious that the term — certainly in a European context — has negative connotations.

During the last Scottish referendum campaign, Sturgeon, not yet first minister, argued that independence wasn’t really about national identity, but achieving “social justice” for Scotland. She now depicts her party’s sense of nationalism as superior to the Tories’ appeals to national sentiment, accusing Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson of leading her party down a “hard-line, UKIP-style” path.

This makes sense in the larger British context. Since last June’s Brexit referendum, a hitherto rather harmless British nationalism has gone from “banal” to sub-UKIP mainstream, the “red, white and blue Brexit” of a thousand U.K. government soundbites.

British author George Orwell made a distinction between “patriotism” and “nationalism.” The former he defined as devotion to a particular place “which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.” The latter he called the habit of assuming that human beings “can be classified like insects” and that whole blocks of people can be labeled “good” or “bad.”

In a recent speech in London, Scottish Tory leader Davidson drew on this definition to lay claim to what she called a “pluralistic” Scottish and British “patriotism.” The SNP, she said, was guilty of conforming to Orwell’s three markers of the nationalist “mindset:” obsession, instability and indifference to reality.

In response, Scottish Brexit minister Mike Russell tweeted that her remarks were “as precise a definition of the Tory approach to #Brexit as you could get” — it was “British nationalism distilled to its disastrous essence.”

Both Davidson and Russell were right. The trouble with Orwell’s distinction is that it’s almost impossible to figure out where patriotism ends and nationalism begins.

As the writer also observed in his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” nationalists tend not to see “resemblances between similar sets of facts.” Post-war British Tories defended “self-determination in Europe” while opposing it in India, for example.

And indeed Scottish Nationalists are now complaining about being “dragged out” of the European Union while campaigning to quit the much older Anglo-Scottish Union (While British conservatives make the same mistake in reverse).

Fifty years ago, class was the basis of British party politics, as political scientist Peter Pulzer has claimed, everything else being “embellishment and detail.” Today, class has been displaced by Scottish or British nationalism. All the rest is noise.

David Torrance is a political commentator and biographer of SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon.