Billy Bragg
THE PROGRESSIVE PATRIOT
A search for belonging
304pp. Bantam Press. £16.99
0 593 05343 5
Although patriotism, defined broadly as love of one’s country, is inherently neither conservative nor radical, it has frequently formed part of right-wing rhetoric. The Left’s attitude to it is ambivalent. For some, it is conceptually inseparable from, and in practice often slides into narrow nationalism, representing unjustified partiality for one’s country and arousing dangerous passions. Others think that since it is a legitimate political sentiment and means much to people, the Left should acknowledge its value and use it to promote universalist and radical values.
Billy Bragg belongs to the second category. In The Progressive Patriot, which beautifully weaves together his personal and familial history with that of Britain, his basic concern is to “reconcile patriotism with the radical tradition”. Patriotism, for him, is grounded in the deepest human search for personal and national identity, “with who we are and where we belong”. A politics that ignores it fails to connect with legitimate human aspirations, and is morally shallow and politically ineffective. Furthermore, if the Left dismissed it as a form of false or misguided consciousness, the Right would enjoy the monopoly on it and there would be no check on the use it makes of it.
Bragg is aware of the dangers of patriotism, especially its tendency to demand total loyalty to the country and encourage an uncritical attitude to its past. He thinks the best way to guard against this is to embed it in a set of moral values. One loves one’s country not for its own sake but because of the values it represents. To love it is to see it flourish, to want it to be the best it is capable of, and to be proud or ashamed of it when it respectively meets or fails to meet one’s moral expectations of it. Patriotism, so understood, is conditional and critical, and capable of taking a relatively detached view of the country’s history and an enlightened view of its interests.
For Bragg such values as decency and tolerance, constitutional checks on political power, dissent, basic liberties and rights, and especially fairness are central to British identity, to “our sense of who we are”. They are the results of past struggles mounted successively by the barons, the knights, the middle and the working classes, and are embodied in such documents and institutions as Magna Carta, the Act of Supremacy that ended the Pope’s unaccountable power, the 1689 Bill of Rights, Parliamentary democracy, and the founding of the welfare state after the Second World War. Each of these struggles made the country more inclusive and united by giving the hitherto marginalized groups a sense of belonging.
Britain, Bragg argues, has always had a multi-ethnic and multicultural identity. Different groups of immigrants encountered initial resistance, but over time became part of a shared national community. Even as early as the eighth century, the Venerable Bede, in his first Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, stressed the contributions of the “three most formidable races” of the Jutes, the Angles and the Saxons, and gave each an important founding role. The current multicultural society is but one phase in this long history. It has come about not just because of post-war migration, but because the Empire rallied round Britain during its most critical period. Over 2.5 million people from the Indian sub-continent and nearly 400,000 Africans fought during the Second World War, and many Afro-Caribbeans served with the Royal Air Force. They contributed to Britain’s “finest hour”, helped develop its remarkable welfare state, and are integral to what it means to be British. It is simply not possible to define and be proud of Britain without making full acknowledgement of their presence.
In Bragg’s view the best, indeed the only, way to hold Britain together and give its diverse communities a sense of belonging is to unite them around the common values that have played a crucial role in shaping its identity. These are British values not because they are unique to Britain, nor because Britain invented them, but because they are products of its history and are embodied in its institutions and self-understanding. Rather than appeal to such “flimsy” and nebulous concepts as Britishness, we should state these values clearly, and embody them in an indigenous Declaration of Rights formulated by a Constitutional Convention. The Declaration would be an unequivocal and democratically arrived at statement of British identity, to which all are expected to owe their patriotic loyalty and subject to which they are free to cherish their differences.
Although Bragg’s book is full of much good sense and is often inspirational, it does not quite succeed in achieving its objective. Bragg rightly argues that patriotism has a legitimate place in human life, that it can be a vehicle for progressive purposes, and that a multicultural society such as Britain needs a broadly agreed statement of citizens’ rights and responsibilities based on shared values. There are, however, three basic difficulties with his approach.
First, Bragg assumes that every society has a radical tradition, which could form the basis of patriotism. Some societies do not have such a tradition, raising the question of whether and how their members can be progressive patriots. Furthermore, even a society with a radical tradition is likely to have others that are conservative. One needs to show why one stresses the former when the latter too are equally central to its way of life. That cannot be done by concentrating on the society’s identity as Bragg does, and requires a general and independent moral justification of radical values.
Second, individuals relate to their country in different ways, depending on their personal biographies, how they become its citizens, and their systems of values. Some might offer it nothing more than what Michael Oakeshott called “watery fidelity”; some others might be passionately committed to it; most others fall in between. We rightly require that all should respect a country’s laws and institutions. But Bragg is not satisfied with this, and wants to cultivate patriotism, provided it is of the right kind. Such homogenization asks for more than what is possible or desirable in any society, especially one that is ethnically and religiously diverse.
Third, Bragg makes the familiar mistake of equating identity with values and moralizing patriotism. Shared values are not enough to hold a society together. The Scottish National Party shares British values, but seeks Scotland’s separation. Quebec and the rest of Canada share common values, but that does not deter many of its citizens from seeking independence. Conversely, many Britons felt profoundly alienated from the dominant values of the Thatcherite period, and think little of Blair’s Britain, yet remain deeply committed to the country. Patriotism implies that one’s community matters to one in a way that another does not, that, as Bragg puts it, “one’s heart lies” in it and not in some other, even when one finds the latter’s values more acceptable. Patriotism includes but goes beyond shared values, and its roots lie elsewhere. It has to do with one’s attachment to the country, the way in which one is shaped by and related to it such that one cannot define oneself independently of it. One’s community is part of oneself even as one is part of it, and love of it is bound up with love of oneself.
Bragg says that he loves his country “in a similar manner to which I love my son”, and that he loves his son because he is “part of me”. Although the analogy is overdrawn, it highlights a point he ignores. One’s son may not share one’s values, indeed one may be hostile to his way or life, but one does not therefore disown him or love him less. Patriotism has a similar thrust, and we fail to understand its psychological basis if we take too moralistic a view of it.
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Bhikhu Parekh is Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Westminster. He is working on a book about reason and identity.
