Nationalism, Inequality and England's Political Predicament by Charles Leddy-Owen

Author:Charles Leddy-Owen [Leddy-Owen, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781351617659
Google: oW2PDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-28T03:46:33+00:00

4.3 Nationalist political solutions among the overlooked

These participants’ core ideas for what should be done about the contemporary political malaise were also fundamentally nationalist in character. Immediately after accusing immigrants of urinating in her daughter’s tower-block lifts, Hilary stated that this was ‘just wrong. You know, this is England. Let us be English’. She later claimed that if immigration was halted ‘we can start being English again’. In both quotes Hilary passionately makes a claim for the legitimacy – or superiority – of the stake in politics and society she feels that her Englishness enables or should enable. Here, as with all nationalist politics, the legitimate demos of the state is defined as the nation, and the central mission for politics is to ensure that this legitimacy is (re)instated – after having been, for Hilary, breached by immigration. In terms of specific policies, Hilary advocated the closing of national borders and the expulsion of ‘terrorists’ (she felt the latter policy would significantly reduce the number of ‘immigrants’ in Britain).

All of the other participants who articulated ardently nationalist political outlooks expressed a similar desire to either halt or drastically curb immigration, with some also arguing for the removal of specific categories of non-nationals (such as ‘illegals’, criminals and terrorists) already living in Britain. All voiced, at the very least, some attraction towards UKIP (see quotes from Amy, Julia, Bernard and Dennis in the previous chapter) and the party’s ‘common sense’, anti-establishment and nationalist airing of grievances. Populist politicians ‘tend to be adept at exploiting … [the] rhetorical possibilities’ of ‘the people’ as an ambiguous concept and referent in politics (Canovan, 1999, p. 5), with ‘[t]he step from “the nation” to “the people” … easily taken, and the distinction between the two … often far from clear’ (Mudde, 2004, p. 549). Through this kind of ambiguous blurring of ‘people’ and ‘nation’ – muddling purported description with political prescription vis-à-vis the demos (Breuilly, 1993, p. 381) – we find a basic explanation for how populism with a nationalist ideological basis can become appealing, and indeed might feel intuitive, for those who feel politically marginalised. If we consider the national community to represent the authentic political community of the state (the people for whom ‘our’ politics should be concerned), and if this nation, its culture and way of life, is deemed to be a victim of injustice, thanks in part to the actions of the nation’s ‘own’ unresponsive, alienating political elite, then nationalist principles and populist political rhetoric can, if suitably mobilised and diffused, interlock and become self-referentially reinforcing. Here, nationalist populism seems to provide both a diagnosis and an apparently straightforward, common sense political solution to the current political malaise and to personal feelings of political alienation and socioeconomic marginalisation.

Before exploring this basic structure of nationalist principles combined with an oppositional populist framework in more depth, for reasons that will become clear it is first important to demonstrate how, although nationalist diagnoses and solutions were at these narratives’ core, their accounts of politics

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.