Wes Streeting’s Attempt to Merge Reform With the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Sinn Fein into a Mega-Threat of “Nationalism” Falls Flat

In his recent resignation speech in Parliament, outgoing health secretary Wes Streeting told us – with the annoying self-righteousness one expects from the Left – who henceforth must be seen as the good guys and who as the bad ones. The good guys like him are patriots who are outward-looking. The bad guys, like Reform, Plaid, SNP and Sinn Fein, are wicked nationalists who look inwards. He didn’t include the Greens but given Zack Polanski’s open support for Scottish independence they are presumably also part of the “existential threat… to the future of the UK” from which Streeting would defend us were he to be Prime Minister.

Apart from independence for the Welsh and the Scots and reunion with the rest of Ireland for Sinn Fein, which are implicit, Sweeting did not explain what he meant by “nationalism”, except inaccurately and disgracefully implying that in Reform it is all about “blood and soil”, and, laughably from a governing party presiding over rampant ‘two-tierism’ in our judicial and policing practices, that it is “divisive”.

What stands out in a  speech designed as a bid for party leadership was how he linked quasi-biblical warnings about Reform with the other three parts of the UK. Although keen, like most (if not all) English people, that the British state is not unpicked into its component parts, I find it understandable that many people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland might wish to regain their independence. It is counter-productive to imply that there is anything vicious about this, and politically foolish, I would have thought, for Streeting to link the three ‘peripheral’ nationalisms to the party (Reform), with its implied British nationalism, that Labour is repeatedly demonising as an Antichrist leading us down ‘dark paths’.

The three ‘Celtic’ nationalisms

Scotland was an independent country for many centuries before it joined England in 1707, which in terms of the history of these islands is not that long ago, and did so, significantly, via a Treaty of Union, which led to separate Acts of Union in the two parliaments. Through language, culture and legal and educational systems it has continued, before and after devolution, to be an identifiably separate nation even when no longer a separate state. Having, as an Englishman, taught history for 15 years in a Scottish educational institution alongside SNP-supporting colleagues, I fully understand, as if from within, the wish of many Scots for a return to independence. What I do not understand is how Scottish nationalists can want to be ruled by the kind of people who in recent years have led the SNP or to replace being run from London to being run from Brussels. But this is a matter for the British state to persuade the Scottish people of the benefits of a wider British identity alongside a Scottish one, and ultimately for Scots to decide, and for which one needs language less explosive than Streeting’s “the fight of our lives against nationalism”.     

Welsh nationalism can be more intense than Scottish nationalism but is more thinly spread and the prospects of a majority vote for independence much more remote even than in Scotland where, both in the 2014 referendum and in the majority of polls before Labour came to power in 2024, people have voted against breaking the link. In both cases, especially given the current lack of majorities for the major nationalist parties in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, apocalyptic language that makes the situation worse seems less than statesman-like.  

Where the threat of secession is greatest is Northern Ireland, but here again seeing the shift in the balance of power between Unionists and Republicans as part of a wider nationalist threat to the existence of the UK, with Reform at its centre, rather than as a new iteration of a longstanding and specifically Irish problem, is unhistorical. The troubled relationship between Britain and Ireland has its origins a millennium ago, if not earlier, and that between northern and southern Ireland a particularly problematic one long before the creation of an independent Irish state after the end of the First World War. If Gladstone could now be remembered not just as the member of a family that had once owned slave plantations but as a three-times Liberal Prime Minister who struggled to move Ireland towards Home Rule we might look at Northern Ireland’s current relationship with the rest of the UK with a bit more nuance. 

As he positions himself within the struggle for Labour party leadership, Streeting may therefore come to regret linking Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland with Reform as part of a joint nationalist threat to what he thinks the country stands for. The use of “nationalism” as a term of abuse – and rejection of any British or English version of it – is by now well-established on the Left, though the three ‘Celtic’ nationalisms have traditionally been exempt from major criticism partly because on other issues nationalist political parties have tended to support the Left’s radical progressive priorities and, among the oikophobes of the more extreme Left, because the British state is seen as intrinsically oppressive and ripe to be broken up.

The British Left’s traditional support for nationalism 

Seen from a long-term perspective the Left’s blanket dismissal of nationalism is odd. In the 19th century it was often conservatives who were sympathetic to continental Europe’s multinational monarchical empires, with liberals and radicals supporting the nationalist movements pulling these empires apart. The Hungarian nationalist Kossuth was greeted like a rockstar when visiting Manchester in 1851, as was the Italian nationalist Garibaldi, with a crowd of half a million on arrival in London in 1864. In the 1870s it was Gladstone, with backing from liberals and radicals, who agitated for Bulgarian independence in the 1870s (the Conservatives supported its Ottoman rulers). In the first quarter of the 20th century Britain was similarly one of the leading powers championing the new nation states that emerged from the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires at the end of the First World War. Even today most of the Left endorses a Ukrainian nationalism determined to win back its lost patrimony despite its Russian aggressor remaining proud of a Soviet past that many elderly British Left-wingers were still blindly supporting well into the last quarter of the 20th century .

It was fascism and Nazism and their wars of aggression that finally gave ‘nationalism’ a bad name, with the Left associating it with evil and the Right, at least in some countries, ceasing to make use of what had become a poisoned word while holding on to the notion that the world was one of nations and that nations had the right to put their own reasonable interests first.  

In Britain’s case ‘nationalism’ also came to be associated negatively with an imperial past despite its empire having been dismantled peacefully in most cases and handed over to peoples keen to develop nationalisms of their own. Having spread the nation state around the world, the post-imperial West turned against it at home, enthusing about global citizenship, supporting wider powers for international organisations and, more recently, embracing mass migration, multiculturalism and, in Europe, a gradual drift away from nationhood towards an increasingly federal European Union.

Patriotism

The last century’s disparagement of ‘nationalism’ also gave ‘patriotism’ a bad name. Why else have St George’s flags over the years caused such offense to Labour grandees like Emily Thornberry and Geoff Hoon? It is only recently that the current Government has rediscovered patriotism and surrounded itself unconvincingly with national flags. Streeting, in his resignation speech, jumped on this bandwagon, talking about Labour’s “fight for the soul of our country” as one of “patriotism” and “hope” against “nationalism” and “hate”.

But don’t be fooled. He doesn’t  mean by “patriotism” anything like the Last Night of the Proms, but one that does penance for our Brexit “mistake”, rejoins the EU, is “internationalist”, “progressive”, “not rooted in the fear of change”, in other words one that enthusiastically accepts the ongoing mass migration that is making our country unrecognisable and the loss of sovereignty that being back in the EU and strengthening the role of international organisations would involve.

The key giveaway as to what Streeting means by his party’s discovery of patriotism is the statement in his speech that it is “not about who you exclude”. This may sound nice and cosy but a nation state is most effective when it represents a single nation – which may include people who live well together on the same soil but whose ‘blood’ differs – rather than the kind of society that the Indian political philosopher Amartya Sen has called a “plurally monocultural” one, such as Lebanon, in which identities are so diverse that both the nation and its state barely exist. What does it mean to make sure this does not happen, for the sake of the wellbeing of the nation and the effectiveness of its state? It means that those who cannot or will not assimilate (or integrate) must not be granted citizenship. Far from being “not about who you exclude” patriotism requires exclusion where people are unable or unwilling to become part of the nation.

It is the failure to see this – alongside his careless declaration of war on four very different “nationalisms” – that makes Streeting’s first attempt at a leadership pitch so deeply unconvincing. Andy Burnham has so far largely held his fire on these issues, perhaps wisely, but they are bound to re-emerge in any future leadership contest.

Dr Nicholas Tate is a historian who has been an adviser to English and French ministers of education and is the author of The Conservative Case for Education: Against the Current and Seven Books that Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does.