Just came across this very good (and very brave) article by Dominic Chave-Cox (@MusingsOfDCC) from a few years back which raises a number of very important points. Here are some of the article’s key arguments (slightly edited quotes):
bbench.co.uk/single-post/20…
bbench.co.uk/single-post/20…
[Appeals to progressive patriotism] look to many on the left like an attempt to fight full-blooded nativism with half-hearted, insincere nativism. And if that was genuinely what was being proposed, then we would be quite right to utterly reject it.
But that analysis would be a gross, knee-jerk caricature which misses certain hard truths that the left in particular needs to confront itself with, and bases itself on a worldview which is intellectually lazy and only superficially principled.
One of the left’s delusions is that all concerns about immigration are rooted solely in economic anxiety. But if these concerns had originated entirely in anxiety about living standards, they could never have mutated so strongly into an expression of anti-immigration sentiment.
No, something else is at work. There is a sense among many working class communities that their identity is being eroded by large numbers of people moving to the areas where they live from other countries…
… opening shops designed predominantly to service new minority communities, and yes, in some areas undercutting wages.
These concerns about a loss of identity may surface disproportionately among people on lower incomes, but that too doesn’t make them a simple proxy for economic anxiety.
If, for some reason vast numbers of middle income Poles and Lithuanians decided to move into Britain’s leafy suburbs on the same scale as their poorer compatriots, I would expect to see significant (if less overall) grumbling from those communities as well.
It would be easy to write all of this off as racism, easier still when many people who have these concerns about immigration do then openly engage in racism. But there is an apparent paradox underneath all of this which we need to pay attention to.
If we are internationalists, and want to move gradually towards a world with fewer barriers, we have to control the pace of change. In many policy areas (not just immigration) the pace of change in western societies in the last few decades has been breakneck.
This has felt fantastic for those able to benefit, and many of the victories secured such as increasing recognition of women’s’ rights and gay rights are to be celebrated. But we ignored the complaints of the “left behind” about “political correctness”, laughed at them even.
We should instead have been working out how to bring the “left behind” with us. On immigration, that would have meant more robust and long-term transitional controls on freedom of movement, and a willingness to use them on the part of EU governments.
Defending freedom of movement will only exacerbate working class disillusion with the left, and that will not help anyone either here or abroad in the long term.
It strikes me that the best left-wing solution to global poverty would surely be something which fixed the problem at its source, rather than shifting it around through mass migration of labour. Most people would much rather stay at home if they could earn a decent wage there.
The other delusion we have is that we should either not engage in identity politics, or that the only kind we should engage in is the celebration of minorities. Human beings feel a need to belong. We simply cannot avoid noticing features we share in common with other people.
We cannot avoid building up customs, traditions and institutions which are more local than universal. I defy even the most committed internationalist to avoid doing this.
The ideological struggle we should be having with our opponents is not over whether to acknowledge group identities that take the form of “national” identities, but over whether to acknowledge our more universal ties as well.
We need to take pride in flags and national anthems again, rather than allowing others to take ownership of them and infuse them with intolerant connotations.
To be left-wing is to believe that the individual does not benefit from competing with everyone around them. Co-operation brings rewards. But this logic is buttressed when we form attachments to a community.
We should continue to work through international institutions in the character of “global citizens”, but we must also acknowledge that at this moment in time planet earth is too disparate and remote a community to give most people the feeling of attachment they need.
That means that at the same time we are working together with others around the world and emphasising our common humanity to help us deal with global problems like climate change and tax avoidance…
… we also have to reinforce ties closer to home so that we can solve more local problems like the housing crisis through a renewed sense of solidarity.
END OF THREAD
