Labour's nationalist blind spot

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There is at least one thing which unites former PM Gordon Brown with another former Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and that is an astounding ability to see a huge difference between the constitutional position of Ireland on the one hand and that of Scotland and Wales on the other. It has long struck me as a curious blind spot. Brown told us last week that he sees it as entirely natural that Ireland will, one day, be reunited as a single country, but also that Scotland is “geographically, economically, socially, culturally linked to the rest of the United Kingdom”. The detailed basis for that assertion is, naturally, not detailed, but it leaves him in much the same position as Corbyn who seemed to support the right of all nations across the world to be independent unless they happened to be physically attached to England.

The argument about ‘geographic, economic, social and cultural’ links is remarkably similar to the basis which Putin uses in relation to Ukraine, although I’m sure that Brown would not welcome the comparison. There’s probably nothing that I or anyone else could say that would shift Brown (or Corbyn) from their position, because it’s ultimately not a position based on hard facts or evidence, but one based on a subjective feeling about what constitutes a nation and how we define that. To Welsh and Scottish independentistas, England, Scotland and Wales are nations, and the UK is a state, but to British nationalists, it seems that Britain and Ireland are ‘proper’ nations, whereas Wales and Scotland are some sort of ‘national region’ within a greater nation.

In truth, I’ve never been able to find a satisfactory objective definition of what constitutes a nation. Of course, things like history, language, culture, and geography play a part, but those things combine in all sorts of different ways across the world. Ultimately, no ‘nation’ exists unless its members feel it to be so, which makes nationality highly subjective. It follows that nationality (other than in the strictly legalistic sense of a passport-issuing authority) cannot be imposed on an individual, nor can an individual be told that (s)he cannot be a member of two nations (e.g. Welsh and British) at the same time. It also changes over time – here in Wales, we know that the number of people considering themselves to be Welsh rather than British has risen over recent decades, for example. Whether that reflects a change in their nationality or merely in their perception of their nationality is an interesting academic argument, but in terms of practical politics we only need to understand that it is happening.

The bigger question is whether the existence of a nation requires that nation to be an independent (in the everyday use of the term) unitary state. Nationalists (like Brown) tend to the view that it does, a tendency which tends to close minds to alternatives. Under Brown, or Corbyn – or Starmer or Burnham – Labour is very much a British nationalist party.