Welcome to State and Nation – The Future Governance Forum’s new Substack. And, for many of you, welcome back.
We’ve decided to bring together our monthly newsletter and regular blogs in one place: a new home for all things FGF, where you’ll find our latest thinking on how to transform the state to renew the nation, alongside updates on our research, events and work across the country.
If the new Prime Minister – and progressive politics more broadly – is to regain and retain public confidence, we will need ideas that are not only ambitious, but implementable. That’s what we’ll be exploring here. Stay tuned for regular analysis, fresh thinking and updates from across our work.
And without further ado, here’s our first article from our Executive Director, Nathan Yeowell, on why why nationhood must be at the heart of national renewal.
The future of progressive politics starts with a simple concept: nationhood
By Nathan Yeowell
Progressive politics in the UK is at a turning point. As the dust settles on Keir Starmer’s resignation and Andy Burnham’s future as Labour prime minister seems all but assured, speculation about the future shape and direction of the government is reaching boiling point.
Whatever happens next, the country finds itself once again preparing for a new face in Downing Street – the seventh in our country’s last ten years. With this level of churn, the political stakes facing the new prime minister could hardly be higher. Labour’s prospects of a second term – and the wider electorate’s faith in the political process – now rest on the shoulders of Manchester’s ‘King of the North’. Heavy lies the crown, you might say.
For too long, progressive politicians have failed to match the scale of change demanded by voters with the same calibre of vision, allowing the populist right to significant headway, winning over voters with tales of bygone glory and galvanising them with stories of Britain’s current malaise. The substance beneath their rhetoric might be thin, but their success in opinion polls leading up to Makerfield speaks to a simple truth that government sometimes forgets: delivery is one side of the coin, but vision, and the narrative that sustains it, is the other.
Although not without reason, in recent years progressive leaders have relied too much on polling and focus groups to scoop up voters in strategically significant seats. And this has, in part, prevented them from telling a coherent national story about what kind of change is needed in Britain, and how it can be delivered.
Andy Burnham has called his victory a ‘turning point for the country’. Whether this is true remains to be seen, and will depend on more than a playbook of new policies. Steering Britain through this tumultuous chapter in our national story must begin with something more fundamental: a more unifying and coherent national story that can help build and sustain a hopeful, resurgent political project.
To do this, whoever leads Labour into the next general election must return to a simple concept: nationhood.
Understanding ‘the nation’
The concept of the nation is simple enough. It is essentially the community of people that live within our country, united by a shared culture and language, common values and shared citizenship, with a common past and a collective project for the future. Much like Marx said of class, ‘the nation’ is built when the public is aware of and accepts these attributes, binding them together in a shared national consciousness.
Crucially, the nation is not unchanging. Although slow to turn, it evolves through the political and economic choices made by politicians. It is, in short, constructed. And just as it is made, it can be remade.
From the wreckage of the Second World War, progressive politicians came together to nurture a modern, post-imperial ideal of the nation. Their vision built upon a commitment to the Western Alliance, the formation of the modern welfare state, and the creation of new, consensual, national frameworks. All of this was underpinned by a Keynesian political economy that helped remake the postwar British nation through the principles of collectivism and universalism.
This conception of the nation began to buckle in the 1970s and was remoulded across the course of the 1980s. The collectivist national frameworks that had defined Britain in the postwar era were upended. And in their place came a disavowal of the state, greater deference to the market and the primacy of the individual.
This political economy, although tempered and improved by New Labour after 1997, held until 2008 when it collapsed with the Global Financial Crisis. And with it, the prevailing concept of British nationhood went too.
Since then, we’ve endured persistent shortsighted attempts to rebuild Britain according to the same logics of a now bygone era – the results of which continue to crystallise in ever greater polarisation: Brexit, populism, separatism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and declining public trust in politics everywhere.
These grievances cannot be willed away. They are the product of specific incantations of nationhood post-1979 that have created winners and losers in modern Britain. For those that lost out during Thatcher’s Revolution only to see their wages stagnate after the 2008 crash, globalisation has cost them dearly. And as we sit on the brink of the AI revolution – one which will likely be marked by a greater number of trillionaires and a far greater number of unemployed – the defining challenge for progressive politicians will be how to steer this new, transformative chapter in our national history so the benefits are felt collectively, not channelled upwards.
Rebuilding the nation
Building this new nation does not just happen brick by brick. It starts with vision. Progressive politicians must set out the idea of the nation they want to create, and how more dynamic, structural reforms of the state can help deliver and sustain them.
To do this, we must consider five key touchstones.
Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, they must recast the progressive cause, once and for all, as the main patriotic political cause in the UK today. Somehow the populist right has been able to claim this mantle despite becoming ever further embroiled in a network of crypto-billionaries, global right-wing networks, and the wider interests of increasingly kleptocratic big global capital.
Secondly, as the era of globalisation and international peace crumbles, progressives must be resolutely committed to the security of the nation. The government’s commitment to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035 is certainly a good start, but as John Healey’s recent resignation clearly shows, defence spending is set to become an increasingly fraught political issue facing both Number 10 and Number 11. There is no Marshall Plan coming in the era of America First.
We must also think urgently about how to balance this increase in defence spending with the need to rebuild a social contract around health, welfare and pensions. This renewed social contract must speak to the insecurity facing Britain today; not the Britain of the twentieth century.
The third touchstone is a commitment to a revived, and sustainable political economy. The task here is huge, and whilst a better way is possible, there is no simple rhetorical cure. Government must learn to harness the power of the state to direct markets, rather than simply respond to their failures; they must be bigger and bolder in supporting UK companies involved in rapid technological advancements; and they must play an active role to ensure all of these benefits are realised across society. The twenty-first century must be built upon collaborative capitalism, not footloose capitalism.
The fourth touchstone is a commitment to rebuilding the bonds of our national community. While the nation can be ruthlessly engineered from the top down, it can just as easily be built from the bottom up. Giving people the power and tools to build their own communities would reground the concept of the nation in the everyday places and neighbourhoods we create together – something that has slipped away through the last few decades of globalisation.
The final touchstone must be an attempt to galvanise the public in the great mission of national renewal – as Weber might have said, to re-enchant the political process. To do this, progressives must encourage and nurture a revivalist spirit in UK politics, restore public faith in the ability of the political process to deliver outcomes that can genuinely benefit them and their communities, and rebuild trust in elected representatives.
This is the task of all progressives, whatever tribe they belong to, ahead of the next general election. We need to raise our sights, and raise our game, for the challenges ahead. If we don’t, a very different concept of the nation awaits.
