The New Left, National Identity, and the Break-up of Britain, by Wade Matthews

Abstract

Whenever the British Left finds patriotism, it thinks it is doing so for the first time. Its inability to recognise that its political thought was formed in the context of inhabiting the most powerful imperialist state of the nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century means that it is destined to see national identity as an electoral issue rather than as a core part of its being. Wade Matthews’s detailed and thorough analysis of the New Left (the group of socialists who broke with the Communist Party after 1956 to form the New Left Review) does not make this mistake and provides an impressive discussion of the way in which socialist intellectuals in Britain negotiated the relationship between socialism and nationalism. Matthews shows that, like its predecessors, the New Left did not understand the complexity of the relationship between socialism and nationalism: ‘The New Left inherited what it believed was a broken socialist vocabulary. For the most part, the British socialist tradition repudiated nationalism, but it did not reject nationality or national identity’ (p. 57). As Matthews explains, debates about national identity inside the New Left were ‘co-incident with the process that [Tom] Nairn dubbed the break-up of Britain’ (p. xiii). They were responses to Britain’s national questions. The New Left emerged in the context of the Cold War, the decline of Empire, immigration, European integration, the rise of nationalism in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and globalisation. It realised that the role of the British nation-state was crucial in this transition but was divided over how to respond to the debates on national identity that ensued. Some looked back to an Anglo-British radical tradition on which a ‘native’ socialism could be built. Others rejected nations—and the British nation in particular—and looked for an alternative theoretical socialism in continental Europe and the developing world outside the West.