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Britain Needs Change: The Politics of Hope and Labour’s Challenge,
Eds. Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow, Biteback Publishing, £25.00.
Reviewed by David McCrone
As if by an irony, this review was written on the day it was announced that The Royal Mail was being sold off to a Czech capitalist. This means that the iconic King’s head which appears on all postage stamps is now the possession of a foreigner whose concern is with the bottom line. So what? Juxtapose that with the doctrine of the Crown in Parliament which lies at the heart of the British state. All power to the central praesidium. It is, of course, a toom tabard, an empty coat, signifying increasingly very little. If the central state network can be sold off to the highest bidder, what remains of that state other than being full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? And there must be a prize for being able to distinguish The Royal Mail from The Post Office, awarded by Vince Cable who was the minister in charge when the former was privatised in 2013.
The British state is, as readers know, a mess of contradictions. This edited book seeks to provide a comprehensive account as to why ‘Britain Needs Change’. This, in itself, is a curious title on the grounds that surely no-one can be against ‘change’ – a ‘Good Thing’, straight out of Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and all that (published as long ago as 1930). But what sort of change? Small change? (as in street beggar’s old cry to spare some, guv). No – something much grander, but curiously unspecified, possibly because there is something of a Blairite hangover in the term. There are twenty-four chapters in this book, so certainly not small change. It is introduced by Helena Kennedy, or ‘Baroness Helena Kennedy of The Shaws, KC’, as she is described here (what Shaws? Pollokshaws? Tattie shaws?).
The book bears the imprint of the centre-left think-tank Compass, and Neal Lawson who has fallen foul of the Labour party for urging tactical voting in 2023 and has described the party as run by playground bullies. Much is made, here and elsewhere, of how broad but shallow Labour’s 2024 victory was – like Aberlady Bay on the Firth of Forth– it looks commanding until the tide goes out.
Labour, the Left and its myopia on Britain
The collection is a curate’s egg, and like the proverbial egg, some of it is excellent, others not so much. To a Scottish reader, it’s a bit exasperating. We’ve had fifty years of debate and argument, not simply about Scotland, but about the UK. If this reviewer had his way, he’d insist that all contributors read carefully and take on board Gerry Hassan’s ‘Three Stories of Labour Britain’, before they committed to paper. That’s a good standard to set.
The weakest pieces are trite and vacuous (no names, no pack drill, as the saying goes), especially where they purport to be ‘discussions’, which too often come over as ill-formatted and talking past each other. Among these is the conventional sense that the United Kingdom, to give its Sunday-best title (or ‘Britain’, in its auld claes) is a nation-state. So we get mentions of ‘the country’, and ‘the national story’, as if these are singular. As soon as one says this, hackles arise, and those who object are tarred as ‘nationalist’, or even ‘Nationalist’ (the big and small N, what Tom Nairn called the ‘orthographic battle’ between upper and lower cases); that even mentioning the inadequacies of the British state from a Scottish point of view betrays one’s constitutional preferences.
Think back to David Cameron’s morning-after speech when the dust settled on the Scottish Independence referendum in 2014: that he’d dealt with Scotland, and now it was England’s turn. So he tried to introduce EVEL – English votes for English laws – only to discover that in a unitary legislature this wouldn’t fly, and it collapsed a few years’ later under the weight of its contradictions, and as is the way of the British state, was quietly shelved. Nevertheless, even raising the Scottish question (or the Welsh and Northern Irish ones for that matter) implies that those raising it are closet or not-so-closet nationalists.
However, as Michael Keating has pointed out, the problem of Union is not the peripheries, but the centre; a rigid insistence that the fundamental principle of authority is the centralised ‘monarchy-in-parliament’, the assumption that the UK is a Westphalian state, subsuming power, dominion and sovereignty at the centre. The aim of Union, Keating observed, was not ‘nation-building’ within, but the pursuit of military, religious and dynastic security without, by means of trade and empire. There has been no thoroughgoing programme of cultural integration to create a unitary ‘demos’ as in other European states. He sums it up as follows: ‘the UK is not a state, unitary or federal, but a union, and as such does not necessarily need a hard core or sovereignty or purpose’ (Keating, State and Nation in the United Kingdom: the fractured union, 2021: 50).
In a similar vein, the historian Colin Kidd observed that ‘There has been no serious attempt to understand the 1707 Treaty of Union as a fundamental ‘transformation’ rather than merely a geographical ‘extension’ of the English state. Instead, the post-1707 British Parliament is casually assumed to be ‘the inheritor, or indeed the same body as its English predecessor, essentially incorporating the Scottish Parliament’ (Kidd, ‘Highbrow Mother Goose’, in London Review of Books, 46(4), 2024).
It takes an Irishman, the estimable Fintan O’Toole, to make a similar point in this book; that the inescapable truth for Starmer is that ‘he cannot address the country’s economic failure without also confronting the profound problems of the union itself’ (p.311). One would never know that by reading the pieces in the section ‘Rethinking the Economy’, which blithely carry on as if this had nothing much to do with wider political-constitutional questions. The problem is that these questions are huge and getting huger.
Contributors are happy (sic) to speak of broken Britain, but too often these are treated as matters of culture, of economics, of values. The weakest contributions resemble those op-ed pieces in newspapers. They are also prone to sweeping statements, to take a few examples: ‘in the North of England there is an ingrained hopelessness’ (p.106) – what? all of it?, and how can we tell?, or ‘Twenty-first century systems are all about relationships’ (p.187) – presumably pre-21st century weren’t?; or ‘.. in Scotland… the proportion of citizens to elected representatives in local council (sic) is among the worst in Europe’ (p.171); some numbers would be good, as well as cognisance of that fact that we use STV, the Single Transferable Vote.
This probably sounds to you like academic nitpicking, but it behoves writers in books like this either to throw in a few references, or eschew wild and woolly statements. Truth to tell, academics come out of this better (Andrew Gamble’s piece on the Anglosphere is a model of clarity and logic), and a good few contributors should think of signing up for a course on ‘nationalism:101’, before they pontificate about patriotism, nationalism, multi-culturalism, and the like.
Still, it’s a useful collection, if uneven in quality. One doesn’t envy the editors in putting it together; like herding proverbial cats. The bigger picture matters. Perhaps in Scotland we’re a wee bit prone to be looking for the downside, in the hope that if only things got worse, those of us who would describe ourselves as nationalists or Nationalists – take your pick – expect an independent Scotland to emerge from the wreckage.
What Britain Needs Change shows, partly by intention and partly by omission as reflected in some of the chapters, is not only the limits of Labour’s agenda under Starmer, but how little comprehension there is of the nature of the UK, and the British state as the tectonic plates shift beneath our feet. Thus, despite all the rhetorical references to Britain ‘being broken’– its politics, democracy, culture and economy – there is little understanding of what this means, and particularly how economic and political power connect up. We see the deep-seated myopia in how Labour and the centre-left view Britain; an uncritical reference and nostalgia for the good times which are now long past, and which are still tied up with an uncritical adoration of Labour’s 1945 high tide. That ship has long sailed.
The problem with that is that we should be careful what we wish for. The evidence of our eyes is that in times of economic and political disjunction, the trend is to the reactionary right, not the progressive left. Sharing an island with the forces of reaction and faragistes would not be a good place to be. Whether we like it or not, our fortunes are tied into supportive progressive forces even if we think them too timid and ill-thought-through. The alliteration of Britain being broken may have entered into journalistic jargon, but we owe it ourselves and others to talk the talk. After all, we’ve been doing it for at least fifty years. Maybe nowadays others are listening, but don’t hold your breath.
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