Glyn Robbins ruminates on the impending soccerball championship and English identity.

With the football World Cup approaching, we have the perennial argument about what it means to fly the flag of St George. Is it a symbol of cultural superiority and oppression, or a legitimate expression of national pride that only the English are made to feel apologetic for? Supporting the England football team is one thing, but seeking to recapture or redefine a sense of national identity is another and with the English Defence League continuing to terrorise anyone they perceive as different, it’s the insidious slippage into a legitimised form of racism that is the subject of this piece.

This hasn’t happened overnight. Even apparently progressive voices persist in conflating the issues of immigration and public services, justifying this as a rejection of ‘political correctness’ and a preparedness to ‘speak honestly’.

There are a number of landmark examples. In 2006 ‘The New East End’ attracted a disproportionate amount of media attention. Although based on shaky and out of date research, it professed to articulate the unheard plight of the white working class in Tower Hamlets, where I live. As though open season to express pent up frustrations had been declared, a bevy of ‘opinion formers’ endorsed the book’s findings, despite in some cases admitting they hadn’t read it! The political mythologizing of The White Working Class, which implicitly excludes workers who are not white, has been endorsed by, among others, Billy Bragg, as part of his desire to celebrate Englishness. Why, he asks, can’t the English enjoy St George’s Day like the Irish do St Patrick’s Day? I once asked a friend of mine (who I knew was a racist) the same question. His response was ‘we’re English and fuck everyone else’ and therein lies the problem. We can’t read off every aspect of our contemporary society from our exploitative. colonial past, but the legacy of Empire is powerful and enduring and as Gerogie Wemyss[1] argues in a much more insightful account of racial politics in east London, increasingly invisible for those who want to relegate equality, religious tolerance and class solidarity in favour of ‘British Jobs for British Workers’. The bending of the stick towards legitimising racism reached its zenith when Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time with only muted objections from mainstream politicians and commentators, or for that matter, from the leadership of the trade union movement.

The roots of this dangerous political malaise and drift are fourfold. First, it relies upon a presentation of otherness as a problem. Attacks on how Muslim women dress is the most graphic example of this, but this reflects a more insidious sense of moral and cultural superiority on behalf of the ‘host’ nation. Second, it entails the construction of a hierarchy of entitlement. The apocryphal GP’s waiting room or housing waiting list tends to push to the front the notion of ‘others’ jumping the queue and ignore the background of under-investment and privatisation. Third, the search for scapegoats reflects the broader political vacuum created by the Labour Party and much of the trade union leadership collapsing into the neo-liberal consensus. Finally and linked to the latter point, those who present themselves as free-thinkers on the subject of immigration take no responsibility for developing a more progressive political dialogue. To pick on my fellow east Londoner (and musical hero) again, Billy Bragg bemoans the lack of affordable homes and the way it feeds racism, but he has done virtually nothing to help the campaign for more council housing. He’s not alone. If the ‘social commentators’ who claim to be speaking for the white working class spent a bit more time arguing for investment in public services that would benefit us all, then perhaps we could support the England team without feeling that we’re supporting bigotry.

[1]http://www.ashgatepublishing.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&pageSubject=410&title_id=8581&edition_id=11217