The first time I left Britain on my own I was 19. I got the ferry to Dieppe and a train to the Val d’Oise, where a French miner handed me a badge saying “Nationalité: proletaire”.
I’ve lost that badge, but a part of my psyche still wears it. Because, in the 20th century, to be opposed to the excesses of capitalism meant being opposed to nationalism. It was something the far left shared with the moderate left, and much of liberalism and conservatism, too.
From the Boer war through to the liberation of Belsen, our grandfathers had learned how dangerous the nationalism of the ruling class can get; how aligned it can become to imperial fantasies of white supremacy; how often it comes attached to the demand for working-class people to accept lower wages “in the national interest”.
So the nationalism we are being asked to buy into, as Brexit triggers parallel identity crises for the nations, regions and classes of the British Isles, is not old. It’s new. And as far as it moves from rhetoric into practical consistency, it is rancid.
Theresa May’s bizarre Facebook post on Saturday contained an extraordinary claim. Jeremy Corbyn, said the prime minister, “doesn’t understand – or like – our country … He accuses me of wanting to wrap myself in the Union Flag, as if that were a term of abuse.”
At the precise moment May’s underlings published this, Corbyn’s name was being sung by 20,000 rock fans at the Tranmere Rovers stadium. They understood, implicitly, that there is something worryingly un-British about the “anti-patriotic” vilification campaign against Corbyn.
The post-war order is long gone. But the key global institutions it produced survive: the United Nations, Nato, the Geneva conventions, the international financial architecture and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In a multilateral order, with transnational production chains and a multinational workforce, wrapping yourself in the national flag can only be seen as gestural. Those who get to do it literally, like victorious athletes at the Olympics, wait only a few moments before hugging their defeated rivals, clutching different flags.
Commercial brands, while they play on national identity and pride with great subtlety, understand that every functioning human brain on Earth exists within an ideas space that is essentially global.
Likewise, those whose job it is to think – rather than gesture – in the worlds of military operations or geopolitics understand the world is essentially multilateral: nations and identities are nodes in a highly connected world. You only have to watch Nato’s latest advert to see its essential similarity with an ad for Nike or Apple: the soldiers depicted look generic; the captions deliberately multilingual.
Only rightwing populism is in revolt against this reality – of connectedness, tolerance, respect for difference and mutual obligation. To see the Conservative party flip from pragmatic globalism to crass economic nationalism in the space of 12 months has rightly sparked concern among centre-right politicians across Europe.
Because the logic of wrapping yourself in the Union flag is now unfolding, as the Conservatives come under pressure in the polls.
Corbyn is attacked not just as someone who “does not understand or like” Britain. He is labelled a threat to national security.
Aided by the BBC, whose news broadcasters ritually read out the morning’s headline smears, the rightwing press is trying to conflate Corbyn’s support for human rights during the long, dirty Irish war with support for terrorism.
The logic of this attack has been implicit ever since May’s 2016 conference speech, which labelled Britons who see themselves as “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere”.
Yet we are citizens of the world: our universal rights as human beings are upheld by a global treaty; the survival of our planet likewise. Our banks are solvent because a global alliance of central banks keeps them so. Our credit cards and mobile phones work abroad because a complex global architecture makes it happen.
It’s good to love your country. But it’s also fine to sometimes dislike what it does; to criticise it; to hold it up to global standards and – when it commits injustice – to demand its punishment and sanction within the global system.
For the left, there’s no more “proletaire”. Not in the way there was in the late 1970s, when I got that badge. Instead, from the US to eastern Europe, Australia and the UK, a distorted remnant of working-class culture has become associated with rightwing nationalism.
In its place, it is the culture of what the management theorist Peter Drucker once called “the universal educated person” that must be our bulwark to nationalism, exclusionism and theories of ethnic supremacy.
That is the culture in every service industry, every globally focused manufacturer, every software and technology company, every university. It is the culture at the hairdressers, the care home, the hospital ward and the coffee bar. It is even, with some exceptions, the culture on the football terraces – where not only the players and increasingly the fans are multinational.
So it is May who doesn’t understand Britain. If she met any of its ordinary citizens, I doubt she would like them either.
Because we are a people who, while once possessing the biggest colonial empire in the world, tried to maintain a sense of decency and restraint.
Our national flag was something you carried to the North Pole, flew from the mast of frigates defying fascist navies and before that the navies of slavers and despots. It is the flag you waved when a monarch got married – not something you shoved in the face of your political opponent. Winston Churchill’s generation understood this just as much as Clement Attlee’s.
In 1919, after the British army massacred Indian protesters at Amritsar, those MPs who demanded justice were labelled “un-English” by Tory and Ulster Unionist MPs. Churchill reminded them: “Frightfulness is not a remedy known to the British pharmacopaeia.” It’s a reminder May’s inner circle would do well to heed.
