Labour and the national question after Brexit.
| Author | Denham, John |
| Position | Notebook |
Labour's electoral base has been torn apart by identity politics. Yet the leadership election over the summer showed a party unwilling to debate issues of national identity. Labour must face up to these questions, and to the fact that Labour will almost certainly have to win a majority in England if the party is to take power at Westminster again.
Labour's leadership election absorbed much of the party's energy and political attention over the summer months. This proved a significant distraction from the key strategic question of how Labour will respond to the government's travails over Brexit. More specifically, it also averted Labour's gaze from the increasingly important questions about nationhood and state that are now pressing on the UK in the wake of the EU Referendum. These issues barely featured in the leadership debates and the campaign as a whole, yet they pose considerable threats to Labour's fragile support and may lead to the further reorganisation of the United Kingdom. These themes were notable by their absence at Labour's recent annual Conference, leaving the party it seems with little to say on some of the most important and existential questions at work in British politics.
Over the past two years Labour's electoral base has been torn apart by identity politics. Huge numbers of Scottish Labour voters abandoned party loyalty to vote for separation and then to dump the party itself. In England, voters feared SNP support for a minority Labour government, and many others turned to UKIP. In a further major blow, millions of former Labour voters, particularly those who felt mostly sharply English, backed Brexit. Faced with this tsunami of political rejection, the issue was simply airbrushed out of the leadership campaigns.
Some of the entrenched regional and territorial differences were thrown into relief by the result of the EU Referendum. There is now the real possibility of a second referendum on Scotland's future within the UK, and Brexit has, more widely, unleashed demands for greater autonomy, most notably on the part of Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. There are real political, economic and security challenges associated with the potential introduction of a 'hard' border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. And there is every chance that the UK government will struggle to sell some parts of the Brexit package to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
But while these issues have all been given considerable airtime...
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