The battle for a positive identity

Nations, as historian Benedict Anderson argued 25 years ago, are "imagined communities." But whether they are imagined in progressive or regressive ways matters, because the hold of national identity upon people and society continues to be a strong one.

So, although Billy Bragg said that he was "only looking for another girl" in his New England song of 1983, he and others in a new collection called Imagined Nation: England after Britain are looking for whether there can be a progressive version of English national identity.

The left is well aware that English national identity continues to be associated with British nationalism, which, in turn, continues to be associated with fascist parties, imperialism, whiteness and xenophobia.

But, under pressure from developments towards devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland and Gordon Brown's backward-looking crusade for Britishness, the notion of what it means to be English is coming up for debate.

Therefore, it is refreshing that Mark Perryman, a writer on Englishness and English football, has brought together an array of different authors, including important thinkers such as Tom Nairn and Paul Gilroy, to examine whether the left can and should try to shape what is meant by English national identity.

They are not the only ones thinking like this - George Orwell thought along these lines in his Lion and the Unicorn of 1941 and anti-globalisation activist Paul Kingsnorth has just published a new book called Real England.

The contributors to this new collection begin by making it clear that English is not Britishness and Britishness is not Englishness. They consider why and how national identity in England, of England, can be formed as a means by which to express progressive politics - of tolerance, multiculturalism, social provision, compassion, peace and equality.

Their starting point is that national identity is the product of the changing social relations that are made and unmade by people. They argue that it does not have to be the politics of either alleged victimhood, like the "disenfranchised white working class" of the recent BBC TV series, nor the politics of oppressing others.

The question of why they do this is important. It is not because they have given up on left-wing politics and now espouse right-wing politics.

Rather, it is because of the destruction of social democracy at the hands of the new Labour project and because of the weakness of the existing left response to this.

In other words, the contributors see that the left is unable to adequately answer the pressing questions of our times and/or mobilise people behind its answers.

This perspective needs to be given serious consideration, not just because it says 'don't leave issues of English national identity to the right,' but because it also says that national identity can take progressive forms under certain conditions.

Here, the contributors are all well aware of the relative advances made in Scotland and Wales in resisting new Labour.

The other reason why these arguments must be seriously examined is that, if the left in Britain is to be truly internationalist, it will need to understand the relations between nations and what role national identity will play in forming what the dominant values of these nations are.