 Felly, wnawn i chi mwy ffawr, dyna'r drws i'r ymdd strengthaeth,ddau nad o ffawr cyflawn ar hynny, wedi'i pethau i ddim yn yw erfod yn ynchynig oedd y pwylltau oedd yn unrhyw o'r cyflawn a'r rhaid yn ymgwrdd i'r Ysgrifennu Aberchu? Maen nhw John. Ymgwrdd i'r Ysgrifennu Aberchu, a'r referendum ysgolwyddiadau ymlaen, y gweithio ymddianol ymddianol yn ddechrau'r clorol ac yn yw'r Brexit yw'r hynny'n lle o'r hynny. Dyma'r dweud ymddianol a'r hynny'n ddigon o'r cyffredinol yn ymddianol i'r hynny'n ffordd o'r ysgolwyddiadau. Yr hyn yn ymdwylliant ymddianol ymddianol o'r cyffredinol yn ymddianol i'r cyffredinol, a'r ysgolwyddiadau, ddylai'r rhai o'r nasholism yn y ddweud yng Nghymru. Ddylai'r ddweud yng Nghymru yn ystod yn cyfnodd yn y Llectorat a'r ddweud yng nghymru yn y ddweud yng nghymru yn y cyntaf o hytyn sylfaen. Rwy'n ddim yn dweud y sylfaen i'r ddweud yng nghymru ar y ddweud. Rwy'n iawn ymdweud y panlyst, ac mae'n ddweud yng Nghymru, wrth gwrs, rydyn ni'n gweithio'n ei ddweud. Rhaid i chi. Rhaid i chi, rhaid i chi. Rhaid i chi, Ash Sarkar, cyfan yng nghymru sydd y cyfan yng Nghymru ac ymgyrcheddau yn gyflawnol o'r Polio a'r Anglia Rawskyni a'r Samburg Instadir. Rhaid i chi, Kojo Karam, ymgyrcheddau a'r lectora yma'n Llaw Sgol Berkbeck ac yma'r rhaglenau ar y cyfnod yma o'r Llaw Gweithio, Rhaid i'r Rhai. Rhyw gynllun Morys Glasman, yng Nghymru Pethol Lleidwyr i'r bydwyr Lleidwyr, a'r Ymddeithas Ddenham, Rhyw gyrsloes yr Oedig Lleidwyr, ac ymddych yn Gweithgwyr Lleidwyr. Ash, yna'n golygu'n gweithio. Rhaid i dda, yn ymddangos, mae'n gweithio ddim yn ei hun, yw'r Ynglish, ac yn gweithio ar gwyfaint o'u, a myndwch, ydych yn ffordd, a'u'n ffordd, ac mae'r rhaid i'r ddweud ddigwyd. Dyna'r ddweud o'ch cyfnod o'r llwyddoedd, ac rwy'n mynd i'n dechrau. Rwy'n gwybod nid i ddweud i ddweud o'r ddweud. Rhyw gwaith ymlaen i dda'r ddweud o ddweud, ac mae'n gweithio'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Rwy'n gweithio'r ddweud i ddweud o ddweud i ddweud. Rwy'n gweithio'r ddweud o ddweud. You want to identify yourself as British, go for it, you want to identify yourself as English, go for it, you want to identify yourself as European, a citizen of nowhere, part of the People's Republic of Palmer's Green, even better, go for it, to me that is not either an interesting or a powerful question because it's a question which on some level doesn't need to be asked or challenged. In people, where do you belong? The answer is obvious, the answer is wherever it is we find ourselves, how we identify ourselves within the community in which we live. For me the much more interesting question is not where do we belong, but how do we belong? What do these processes look like? What are the mechanisms of exclusion? And then perhaps there's a backdrop to it which I know that comrades, co-joke around will elucidate on that length as well, why do we belong? What are the historical forces that shape it? On this question of how do we belong, it's never quite as simple as simply being born in a place or being able to move to a place. I'm not an immigrant, I was born in North London, I've hardly ever moved from there apart from one brief sojourn to South London and then no one came to visit me so I moved back. But still I am racialised as a migrant. The process of racialisation doesn't care about facts, it cares about a structure of feeling which has had decades if not centuries to be formed. Similarly when we think about this process of racialisation, how arbitrary it is, I think about what it means to be racialised as a Muslim. So I'm a Muslim, I've never claimed to be a particularly good or observant one and wait until I hit 30 and then I'll change my ways. But I'm still racialised as a Muslim in this country, in other countries that I go to, I'm not racialised as a Muslim. An example of not having to be Muslim to be racialised as one is John Charles de Menezes, shot and killed at Stockwell Station, not a Muslim but brown enough to die as one. And this is really important for thinking about the nation state, for thinking about how these arbitrary processes of racialisation which fundamentally aren't about how we see ourselves, but how we are seen by the state apparatus, by how we see one another and how we construct a social reality. All of these things affect whether or not the nation state is itself a malleable enough container for a progressive or indeed a radical politic. The reason why I focus so much on race when I talk about the nation state isn't because I think that nation states are necessarily inherently racialised, but because in practice and in history nation states are, the formation of nation states and the formation of race as a technology of governance, these things happen at roughly the same time in history. And what's interesting to me isn't just the twinning together of race and nation states as both fixed categories, but that both have been remarkably kaleidoscopic, they go through periods of change and transformation according to different social, political and economic needs at different points in history. And I think that since the end of colonialism, the end of empire in this country, there has been a trauma, a collective trauma from which this country has never really recovered. And in the words of one of my esteemed panellists, Kojo, and also a friend of mine called Cremnage and Jolu, it is the trauma that Britain had its ass handed to it by peoples that it considered racially inferior. So immigration becomes a much more loaded question, one not about our identity and how we see ourselves, but how we are seen by the rest of the world. It is a constant reminder of this trauma. The idea of these people who had handed Britain its ass coming to this country, making demands of it and demanding to be seen as citizens and not subject is inherently a challenge to British national identity and how the state functions. And so then we see these processes which inhibit our ability to belong as citizens like anyone else. Some of these social processes are informal, if not explicitly backed by the state or sometimes policed by the state. So we are thinking about racial harassment, racially targeted hate crimes. These are crimes, but we know that these crimes aren't taken nearly as seriously as crimes against other members of society. I think here of Bijan Ibrahimi killed in Bristol a few years ago because he was racialized as a Muslim. He was racialized as a migrant whose very presence was an inherent threat. And so after being targeted and harassed by pretty much his whole estate, he was murdered. His lawyer accused the police of institutional racism in this regard. So here is an informal but deeply powerful, deeply violent social process which inhibits our sense of belonging in the nation state, the experience of racism and violence. And then there are laws which are shaped and not necessarily inherently racialized, but in practice they are racialized. So something like the prevent agenda, which to me will for me hits particularly close to home because as a teacher, as someone who lectures, it inhibits my ability to have open and frank and direct conversations with my students in teaching. I'm scared that one of them might end up getting reported to police or I myself might end up getting reported to police. We know that disproportionately the prevent agenda affects our ability as Muslims or indeed people racialized as Muslims to exercise that foundational premise of democratic participation, freedom of expression. And then there are processes which are formally racialized processes. And here I'm thinking in particular of immigration, detention, deportation. We remember the new labor era as an era of cosmopolitan values where there is a state multiculturalism in which we can all feel represented. It's an inherently diverse project. And there are things that I think we should look back on and celebrate. The McPherson report was a huge step forward. The Race Relations Act 2000, another huge step forward. But one of the funny things about the Race Relations Act 2000 is that a certain group of people were made exempt from it, so in a sense could racially discriminate. Those people were immigration enforcement. The Race Relations Act 2000 was essentially calling open season on Tamil migrants, on Somalian migrants, on Afghan migrants. So these are all things which inhibit our sense of belonging. So what's our solution to this as leftists, as progressives, as people that want to see, as all of us want to see on this panel, a Labour government? Is it fighting anti-racism in terms of what you can or what you can't identify as? Is it merely a project of endless critique and analysis? No. We want a point of traction, right? And I think that that point of traction for us and our central demand will have to be a reinterrogation of citizenship itself. How can you make citizenship, which so far has been a process of excluding many people of colour and people who are racialised as other in different ways from the body politic? How can you make it a much more inclusive project? Well, perhaps rather than thinking of citizenship as a set of rights conferred by a state, as a set of obligations that we all have to our community and to our society. Rather than thinking of citizenship as something that you pay for, quite literally pay for, we could think of it as a mandatory obligation which you have after a certain amount of years in residency. Now, this was once a core part of anti-racist movements demanding residency rights, not just citizenship rights. And then we can think of what some of those politicised obligations that we have are. Perhaps it is making sure that your tax money is paid in the United Kingdom here, and then we can start calling into the question the citizenship arrangements of those financial elites who seek to benefit from our society and yet not pay into it. This is the kind of bold anti-racist policy making that the Labour Party should be embracing. We can't just tinker around the edges of an unjust immigration system. We have to strike at the very heart of it and upend what it is it's meant to do. Thank you so much for listening. Up next we have John. OK, thank you very much and very pleased to be here. I want to make four brief points. One to agree with Ash before almost completely disagreeing with her on the question of identity, not in what she said about fighting racism but on the identity issue. The point that I agree with her is there is no right or wrong and there is no must about identity. If it doesn't matter to you, it doesn't matter to you. If you're not English or British, that doesn't matter. It's not saying there should be an identity that everybody has to sign up to. But in terms of whether the left should respond to these questions of identity, we do disagree, which is why I'm here I think. I want to argue that the left and not just in this country but certainly right across Western Europe needs to learn to argue its politics in part at least in the language of progressive patriotism. Secondly I will make a few points about the evolution and importance today of British and English identity and I want to share some thoughts finally about the left's response. I start from this point. If our politics are for the many not the few, it raises the question of who are the many. The many to people on the left, to people who are socialists, can't be a statistical construct. Just a list of all of those who are not part of the 1% or part of the 5%. For democratic socialists, the many, if we're going to change society at all, must have a sense of who they are as the many. They must have a shared identity, a set of responsibilities towards each other and a determination to work together to build a different society. This is not a matter of simply electing a government that's going to make things better, even if you can get the government elected in the first place. For much of the left's history, the core of that many, that sense of shared identity, was born in the unionised industrial working class and the communities and collective identity that they shared. But because of economic change, not political change, that core class of consciousness is today much weaker and shared by fewer people because fewer people have that experience. But people in societies across Western Europe, being people, still crave a sense of shared identity. And if you like whether we like it or not, increasingly that identity is expressed as the identities of nation of people and of place. And the problem is that the left across Europe has failed to respond or engage partly because of its distrust of patriotism and of national identity. It's been left to the right to engage. So the right have been allowed to define nation as something inward looking and hostile. The people in ethnic terms, and it's taken root most in places and amongst people who feel that they have lost most from globalization. And the failure to engage is a real problem because of a fundamental feature of democratic politics. Before many people would engage with policy or ideology, they ask a much more visceral question. Can I trust this person? Can I trust this party to stand up for people like me? So if people feel patriotic and whether this audience doesn't really matter because most people do feel patriotic and if there are rather more people in England who feel English more than they feel British and if Labour comes across as anti-patriotic, if Labour seems to ignore English identity or worse disparage it, then we fail to make that very important initial connection. These people they think will fail to stand up for people like me because they are not people like me. And of course Labour often does come across like that. No, not everybody feels like that of course, but many people do. And very often they are people that we should want to represent because they are the people who have suffered most from globalization. And we actually need them to vote for us because they live disproportionately in the smaller English towns we must win at the next election and they make a larger part of the electorate there. So if Labour does not come across as a patriotic and English party, and not saying that's all we should be of course, but at least in part we will do badly, we will probably not win. But that means thinking about our identity more cleverly than we often do. Because identities are complex and both our major identities in this country, English and British, which are the most commonly held, they are both contested. They are both contested between right wing exclusive ideas and progressive inclusive identities. Now I would argue, we will see what others say, that compared with 40 years ago we have had significant victories in the argument about Britishness. And I would argue that we are much closer to winning arguments about Englishness than many on the left assume. Let's remember that 30 years ago many on the left argued that Britishness would never be open to non-white communities because of its association with imperialism and racism. Yet today it's black and minority ethnic communities who are if anything more likely to identify with Britishness than the country as a whole. And that change was largely brought about not by the goodness of white liberals, but by people who are not white demanding the right to be British on an equal status to everyone else. Now Britishness of course, and we've touched on this, is partly an argument about an equal citizenship in which everyone is fully included. Englishness is not a citizenship because you cannot be an English citizen. So it's more of a cultural struggle. And partly because English is not a citizenship, it has become widely understood as something you get from being born here. Not being born to white parents, but by being born here. So it's not as easily available to new migrants. As we saw this summer with the football, the idea that you have to be white to be English is very much a minority view unless so amongst the young. The left by ignoring these questions has actually made things worse. We allowed the far right 40 years ago to take the Union Jack and we're in danger of allowing groups around Tommy Robinson to claim the St George Cross. Yet 80% of the people who live in England say they feel strongly English. Now that either means there's an awful lot more fascist than most of us have been counting on. Or actually there's an awful lot of people who feel English are proud to be English who aren't associated with the far right. And a final point, if we don't engage with Englishness because it does have some right wing associations, we cut ourselves off from the radical elements of English history and so, as I get in the nod, I'll make this the last point. This is probably my 42nd Labour Party conference. It's extraordinary really if you put it like that. But when I used to come in the 1970s and listen to Tony Ben, you often got in part a lecture about English radical history, about the levelers, the chartists, the peasants' revolt because they were an explicit part of his socialism. And if we cut ourselves off from Englishness because of its right wing associations, we also cut us off from part of our own history which can still be part of our own inspiration. Thank you very much, John. Next up, we have Kojo. Brilliant. Hello everybody, thank you for having me. This is actually only my second Labour conference, so not up to 42 at the same levels as John. So in terms of electoral strategy, I will probably defer to my other panellists, but what I instead want to talk to you about is to share with you a little bit of my analysis of the way in which the narrative around Britishness and the way in which the narrative around our own national history is often a missing part of our understandings of the potential potency that nationalism can be as an organising political principle. Specifically what I want to focus on is the extent to which an imperial amnesia tends to colour in our understandings of what Britishness is and what it can be in the 21st century. I hope to win you all over to this argument. Firstly, because Ash has introduced me as someone who goes around bragging about how I handed English people their arse, and I grew up around these areas, I know how dangerous talking about handing people's arse can be. So I want to first of all qualify my understanding of that a little bit further, but also because I think it's an important part of trying to understand what this particular political moment is within the United Kingdom. So it's interesting to be here talking about nationalism again as an academic. It wasn't so long ago that with the rise of globalisation, it was commonplace for academics to talk about the end of nationalism, a rise of integration within different countries, bilateral and multilateral trade agreements such as NAFTA, ensuring the most greater economic coherence between nation-states. The supposed promise of supranational organisations like the European Union, like the Organization of American States, like the Economic Community of West Africa seem to indicate perhaps nationalism no longer being a significant question in the 21st century. But when academics often name something the end of, whether it's the end of history, the end of nationalism, that's often the kiss of death. So if you ever see anyone name anything like that, it might be about to make a political resurgence, and that's what we've seen with nationalism everywhere from the Philippines to France, from Turkey to the United States. And so I think that leads us here in the United Kingdom, a country that has always had a certain distaste for overt flag-waving kind of accru nationalism of places like the United States. It leaves us with a question of how is this going to influence and infect politics within this particular country? And for me, when thinking about nationalism within the United Kingdom, I think you have to start by understanding that the project of Britain was always an imperial project. It's not accurate to describe the idea of Britain as a nation that had an empire. It's more accurate to think about Britain as being constituted by the empire itself. From the act of the union all the way through the allegiances between the different functions of the United Kingdom, the imperial project both produced and sustained the United Kingdom up until decolonisation in the mid-20th century, an ease of transition into supranational organisations like the European Union, and you could even argue that at this particular historical moment we are actually wrestling with the question of what it means to be an independent British nation for the very first time. Why that's particularly relevant is because I think it runs completely counter to the narrative of Britishness that we all often accept. Due to a perception of an island nation, due to a history that's in fact marked by moments of ideals of anti-imperialism as opposed to imperialism, Britain has a quite distinct national story from its perhaps recorded history. If you think about the most familiar moments of national history where they're talking about the defeat of the Spanish Armada, where they're talking about the defeat of Napoleon and Waterloo, where they're talking about the narrative of Britain standing alone against the fascist threat in the Second World War, these are ideas of an independent island nation state standing up against an imperial aggression, and I think this is something that the Brexiteers understood very well, that's how they narrativised what the Brexit moment was, the idea that Britain needs to be independent again against the imperial ambitions of the European Union. That's a pretty unique national story, and a pretty confusing national story for a country that had the largest empire in recorded history in terms of scale, population, in terms of land mass, and I think that this is something that's very much erased within our own understandings. Something I like to do with a few of my students to show the extent of which we have a certain imperial amnesia as opposed to the debate around whether we should be proud of our imperial past or whether we should be ashamed of our imperial past, I argue to my students, we don't know about our imperial past, it's completely erased, I'm just going to take a couple of minutes, or just a minute in fact, I don't have a couple of minutes left, to share, to see whether this thing works out with this audience. It doesn't work out with my students, but you know they're young undergraduates, I'm sure the savvy, well-transformed audience will be able to overcome this, and it's a very simple game I play called, Did Bring Colonise or Not, where you offer two different countries, one of which was part of the British Empire, one of which wasn't, and to see how many people able to identify the right country. So I'm just going to start off with a couple of examples that we're running out of time. One example is a combination between Q8 and Qatar, one of them was part of the British Empire, one of them wasn't. Could I just get hands raised for who thinks Q8 was part of the British Empire? Can I get hands raised for who thinks Qatar was part of the National Empire? Better than usual, so it was Q8, correct, Q8 is a majority, absolutely. Can I ask another one? Lesotho or Gabon? Can I ask hands up for Lesotho, which is part of the National Empire? Can I have hands which think Gabon was? Again, the majority do choose Lesotho, but a few people did, of course, choose the wrong countries in both examples, and a lot more people decided not to put their hands up because they were like, I have no idea. And I think that that reflects, like I say, this amnesia that we have about what Britain has been and where Britain has been. And without an understanding of the scale of the British Empire, I think it's very difficult to try and use nationalism as a vehicle through which to understand a lot of the problems that are facing this country today. Without a full interrogation understanding of the scope of empire, I don't think we can understand issues such as the crisis around the Irish book question that we're facing at the moment, without understanding the British Imperial History. Without understanding what is the trajectory that even makes the stage have the demographics that it has today, what is the trajectory that brings people from Ghana, or from Bangladesh, or from Egypt, or from Jamaica to the United Kingdom today, where are those perhaps coming from? What is the economic division of labour that led to the kind of separation and wealth that we see between the north of England and the south of England? What are the cities like this city, Liverpool, like other northern industrial cities that were built for specific purpose, suffering with industrial decline in the post-imperial stage? Without a full understanding of British Empire, I don't think we can answer those questions, and I think that that should be something that anchors any debates that we have around what it means to be British or English. Thank you. Thank you very much for that, Kojo. Closing these opening remarks, we have Maurice Gladzman. And thank you. I'm really lovely to be here, even better, because I just found out that spurs have gone one up. So that's an unusual thing. And my head is sort of exploding with things. So I'm just going to just begin with a couple of thoughts that I pick up. So I'm very uneasy with this word progressive as a way of talking about this. I tend to think that it's quite an evasive term. I usually say it's the last thing you want to hear when you go to the doctor, isn't it? It's progressive. And that's just to pick up on this idea that perhaps the least true thing that was ever said in a political campaign was things can only get better, right? It's just not true at any level. And that's what progressive is, this idea that there's this arc of history and things are going to get better. And I think that what we're confronting now is a genuine threat from the right, a real populist threat from the right that has to be understood democratically and has to be understood in class and race terms. And if we can't get to grips with that, we're really going to have a progressive illness where we are going to gradually die, really, without really being able to understand why. So the first thing I wanted to say was that when we're talking about this stuff about the nation state and the construction of the nation, we've got to look at the stakes that are involved because if we can't advocate a democratic and inclusive democratic politics that can engage in the resistance of the domination of capital and at the same time articulate a generous democratic politics that all can participate as citizens, we've lost it because there's what Gramsci would call a war of position on. And John and I are old enough. It's very nice that you're not. But we're old enough to remember when we lost the war of position in the 70s. It was full of energy, it was full of ideas. And then when I was 18, Thatcher got elected and she still is in power. It goes on for ages. So that's where I just wanted to begin. The second is, you know, I'm really interested in engaging cojo in what you said, there's different types of imperialism. And what's really the invisible thing in British imperialism is the distinctive role of the maritime trade of the city of London in particular and the particular forms of capitalism of globalization that it engendered. And that makes it different from the more territorial forms of imperialism under Spain and France. And that opened up a whole different dynamic and degree of space. So I want to go there. So the first distinction that I want to make really is between internationalism and globalization. And then if we start thinking that internationalism is global capitalism is enforced by treaty law through multilateral organizations, we're stuffed. And that's a really important thing to grab hold of. The second is the distinction between nationalism and patriotism which is worth investigating and looking at. Because nationalism is the absolute supremacy of a single usually ethnic group. Patriotism is more like how do we live in a shared polity that can be better than it is? How can you be part of something good? So that's where it stands and the real nature of the issue is a class issue. So Labour does very well at the moment among middle class people with degrees. And there's a huge amount of skepticism to Labour from working class people who don't really think, as John put it, that we're on their side, that we're really engaging with them. And that's why I'm really hoping that we can articulate a genuine democratic vision of how Brexit can work because that's one of the key default issues. In relation to citizenship, which Ash mentioned, for me it's just a set of relationships with people who share a fate and a set of political institutions. That's citizenship based on the liberty and equality of each person in that. So that's a very open thing and how do we develop the relationships between communities as well as individuals? So that's where I would say, and this is a really boring way I'm going to put it, but I can't put it another way. I think you're right about identity and epistemological terms but not in terms of ontology. People feel part of things and act as part of things. And sometimes, like with the nation state, it's just something you inherit. So the distinction that I would make to you, the reason I don't like to describe myself as progressive is because I'm socialist. And socialist means that you recognise that there's a social inheritance, that we are social beings, that there's attachments and sense of belonging between people that is deeply political. And if you can build a wide solidarity around that, then you can win. So there's an element in which the relationship between groups is vital in developing. And that's where, with the progressive thing, it's much more of an enlightenment idea that we all do exclusively as individuals. When I would say that if we look at ourselves as social beings, we think much more about coalitions between classes, coalitions between groups. And the key challenge before us is precisely how to build a genuine coalition between migrant communities and the descendants of migrant communities and the working class that was here before 45, that that coalition is the most vital aspect. And that's precisely, for example, where the ultimate progressive, Hillary Clinton, completely blew it. She couldn't make that coalition. Okay, so I've just been told that it's two minutes. So I've got to kind of concentrate on how to finish up. So I think I'll just do it there, not to be afraid of this conversation, not to be afraid of the possibilities of democracy that emerge, that the key miracle of labour historically, people don't recognise this. In 1889, in the Docker strike, which founded the labour movement, there was a coalition, which maybe would mean something in Liverpool and perhaps Glasgow, but probably nowhere else in the country. There was a coalition between Catholic workers and Protestant workers, which had never existed before. That's the formation of the labour movement. Catholic workers were from the northwestern from Ireland, and they'd come down. A lot of them bought in as strike makers, Protestant workers overwhelmingly from the southeast. What was distinctive about labour was that it brought those two communities together in a movement to protect the dignity of people that they're not commodities. This was the language of it. So you had people like William Booth from the Salvation Army, Cardinal Manning from the Catholic Church, marching with the dockers, and in the end they won recognition from the dock owners and they created the labour representation committees. In other words, labour has been that movement that builds a common institution between people through which their humanity can be preserved from the domination of capitalism, but also from the state, from the oppression of the state that it exerts. So my heart is really full of hope about this. We know how to do it and we've done it before, and I think we're just going to have to do it again. Thank you very much to all our panellists. I'm going to start by getting us all warmed up with a few questions that popped into my head and that I've prepared before, and then we're going to move on to the floor. I wanted to talk about this idea of winning elections, because the argument around this idea that we need to embrace nationalism or patriotism is that labour needs to frame itself in these terms in order to gain back voters, or in order to get voters that we are not getting at the moment. So I just wanted to see what the panel thought of whether or not you ever worry about the voters that you might lose should this particular kind of patriotism or, as many people would argue, a patriotism that is inextricable from particular racialised and gendered power relations. How do you feel about these kind of communities like young people, queer people, people of colour who, for good reason, do not feel represented by these narratives? Do you ever worry that we might lose those votes, especially considering that they were so integral to the gaining of seats in the last election, and also the fact that the Tories alienated those people was so integral to their loss of seats? So I just wanted to know what the panel thought about that. I mean my aim is to construct a politics that includes those who feel that I was particularly talking about people who feel English, that includes that within the many. They feel excluded from it at the moment. Now the challenge is to avoid exactly what you said, to do that in a particular strident way or to use images and practices of Englishness that would be alienating to people and the same would be of Britishness too. My real issue at the moment is that we almost willfully leave England out of the story. It's not that we go overboard in bringing England into the story. I'll just give you a classic example. Today we're going to nationalise the water industry, but that only makes sense in England because it's not run for profits in any other part of the union. Why don't we say England when we mean we're going to nationalise the water industry in England because that's the only place we're going to do it? We're going to have a national education service. What nation? Not Wales, not Scotland, not Northern Ireland because they run their own education system. It's England, so very simple. What I'm calling for is actually not incredibly radical. It's actually thinking, calling things what they are, but it matters to those people who currently feel excluded. Now, I think there's a really important discussion here. I mean, I can't go into details in a lot of time, but I mean, Sir Hampton, I have four years of experience working with others to run an inclusive St George's Day festival precisely because I didn't want to be involved in a St George's Day that was for one part of the community because this is a national day and to do that you have to construct a story about Sir Hampton and Englishness and it being built by all the people who've made their lives there. And then you do get participation from all communities and people are pleased to be asked. You look at a lot of St George's Day ceremonies on websites, including English Heritage, you won't find a single non-white face anywhere in their publicity. That is damaging. That is the wrong sort of thing to do. So I don't argue we have to have a really important debate about the practice of doing this, but if you say to me, can it be done in a way that doesn't alienate those people and say, well, actually this stuff doesn't get to me on at all, yes, I think we can do that. So, I mean, so you believe that we can. Ashok Odo, do you have any responses to this idea? Do you think it is something that can be reclaimed or is it sort of from its genesis constructed in that particular way? So when you say can this be reclaimed, you would say, well, reclaimed by who and for what purposes. So this is what I mean by my focus here isn't on policing people's identity. So me and Kojo are both avid grime fans, and I'm sure that Lord Glassman here is as well. And what has been really striking, and this is something that we've talked about a lot, is that in grime there is a space for a particular subversion of Englishness. You listen to Wiley's early work, and he sounds like a geezer. Do you know what I mean? You listen to AJ Tracy, and it's like Stuart Hall's been writing a 616. He's talking about, you know, in Trinidad Fam, I'm English, right? So it's actually about this kind of hybridised identity, and it's there. So my issue isn't it with that. I find that tremendously inspiring. For me, the issue is, is what do you mean when you say in English radical history? What do you mean when you say in English history? Is it history that has happened to have taken place in England, or is it the history of England as England? And for me it's the England as England bit, which is the tricky part. And this is kind of why I'm calling to Grime and also thinking about Stuart Hall, that there is no history of England as England. As Kojo says, it's been constituted in the international. And even before 1945, with the significant presence of working class people of colour in this country, we were here in the form of commodities. This is the famous bit from older new ethnicities, older new identities by Stuart Hall. I'm the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. What do you know about the English? The English cup of tea, others, if you're from Sri Lanka or India, you're the tea itself. You're the outside history in the inside history of the English. And for me, the issue is when you try and turn these things into political projects within these bounded forms, then you start cutting off that history. You start cutting off a history which has often been antagonistic. And you cut off, I think, some of the cultural richness forms like grime. Aggy is all get-out. And you make it sort of a bit like, oh, let's put some brown faces and samosas in a St George's Day celebration. I think it loses the thing which is... I think you lose what's exciting about it. There wasn't a samosa inside. No, no, no. No, the point... Just quickly, because this is actually crucial. Because what we said, look, Southampton's an English city that's always been built by all the people who've made their homes there. That was an explicit story of an English history that set out to include it. So how did we do it for four years? We told the stories through videos, through performance, through drama of all the people who had made Southampton what it is today. So English history, yeah, it happened in England, it's not a defined set of certain things. Cable Street, let's not argue about this, English or British, Cable Street is part of that history. The Bristol Bus Boycott, where passengers from all backgrounds joined the boycott of the buses because the Transport and General Workers Union refused to let any black get a job on the buses. That's part of English history. And you see, if we don't deal with this, we can't make this part of our story today. I'm not a grime fan, but I'm one of those people of my age who sort of come across it. It seems to me it's the first authentic English or British folk music since punk. It's actually couldn't have been produced anywhere else in the world. That's part of our story. The last thing I would do is have a politics that shoved that into a corner somewhere. Sorry, that's a bit unfair. And sort of drawing on that and kind of picking up on some of the things that came up there, another kind of inflection I wanted to put into that is, Morris, you spoke a lot about how we need to bring people, like this idea of unity, we need to bring people together because that is the only way that we can defeat global capital, which is what we all want, right? Hey. But global capital is that. It's global. So if our primary way of thinking about ourselves is through a nation, how does that connect us to the working classes globally who we need to be in solidarity with in order to defeat global capital? Okay, so that, you know, that's the number of it. How do you resist global capital? And I think we've reached the end of the road in thinking that this can be resisted through the rule of administrators and lawyers in undemocratic and unaccountable multinational organisations. It's got to be built, ultimately, on the building of relationships between working people of different backgrounds and generating a labour movement that can resist. That's the key distinction between internationalism and solidarity. So that, in a way, is fundamental. Just to go back to Cojo, there was one event you missed out because in the distinction between is the Norman Conquest, you would have thought, just to say, campaigning in the referendum, you would have thought that the Norman Conquest sort of happened yesterday, as well. And that's an English story above all. So I've got a heretical view that the English history is more radical than British, that the British is the imperial story with the formation of the global empire and then the integration of Scotland in particular against France in that competition. But English history is a gradual, you know, one of the lines is, in 1066, 98% of the land was handed over to 12 French men, you know. It's been pretty much uphill ever since. That's a framework within which you can understand dispossession, you can understand colonisation, you can understand the incredible importance to English people in particular of land because it happened again in the enclosures. In the enclosures there was the absolute assertion of freehold title over customary practice and the English peasantry was completely expelled from their land. That's another fundamental origin of the Labour movement was to reclaim some home in the world food democracy. So the answer to your question is the absolute solidarity with all democratic Labour movements all over the world with unions, but the idea that you can resist this without having those movements with power in the country is a shimmerer and the second is to assert and here I'm with Ash about the subordination of the primacy of identity to issues around democratic coalitions around class. That's an incredibly important part of that. So the choice before us is not a sort of liberal administrative progressive internationalism which doesn't exist. The choice before us is in the democratic frame are we going to have a nasty xenophobic right wing nationalism that is in fact controlled by capital or are we capable here of regulating a democratic politics that can give inspiration and institutional support to other movements in the world. Kojo, would you like to come back on that? I mean it's not the first time I think that we've heard this claim and this campaign the idea of reclaiming a radical particularly English history in opposition to the imperial legacy of the British Empire. This is something that you can see from great backgrounds of left wing socialism from E.P. Thompson's. Not only particularly as I say the peculiarities of the English is one thing that's fantastic where he talks about the idea of the English sensibility being particularly agreeable to revolution. You can think about George Orwell and the lion and the unicorn socialism and the English genius, so again very humble in its articulation. I mean there's no denying of course that there's a radical history of things that have happened within the landmass of England, you know. And you can trace that, you can trace John Ball and the Pest of Revol, you can trace Gerald Wyn Stanley and you can plot together another national story that's more parochial, more kind of connected to the land and struggle and use that as a replacement of a national story. My main issue with that is it goes back to the point that I'll say it initially is I don't know if it takes us closer to understanding the legacy of the British Empire for forming the political institutions and communities that we have today where it allows us to actually escape from those. It actually allows us to say oh no that wasn't us, that was the British Empire and ignoring the significant role that England had within the configuration of Britain so something that you mentioned a little bit John was the silence of the idea of England when we talk about Britain the silence when people talk about national projects but ignoring the fact that they're only reflecting in England and that is definitely true, there's no doubt that often legislation might be passed that's only going to affect England but it's articulated as being a British issue but that is because of the supremacist role that England played within that political configuration. The reason that there is a silence around England the reason why there's not an English parliament and there is devolved governments within the other regions of the United Kingdom isn't simply because Englishness has been suppressed but because Englishness has operated with such power that that power has been silenced and invisibilised and so I think to simply to try and reclaim that and not ignore the way in which Englishness has been synthesised with imperialism is dangerous on both levels and particularly on a level which I think both of you made something that's a key concern of yours in your presentations this idea of constructing allegiances and constructing forms of bonding and when I think about the idea people want to identify as English, I think that's fantastic and like Ash said I think it's great when you see a Kano video and he's in an East London greasy spoons and he's got a mug with a St George's flag on it is exciting in its own way but if we make that the kind of driving vehicle of our politics I think there's a concern about what happens to those who have allegiances that exceed the national boundaries and it also for me does a disservice to that radical history of English socialism which was always explicitly internationalist in a lot of ways when you think about the commitment of those working class communities in places like here to go and fight in against the Spanish freshest forces in Catalonia when you think about the way in which the anti-apartheid movement found its home here in England I think it's the political coordinates of English leftism have not often been English and I worry about making them so there's a huge amount there that I agree with and let me tell you how I square the circle and do it both in terms of identity and democracy which Morris raised it's worth remembering in our history that in the 19th century and into the 20th century with the ILP socialist conceived of the English nation meaning the people not the state important distinction as a focus of opposition to capitalism and imperialism and so the ILP talked about England as the place that could challenge capitalism and imperialism we've forgotten that from our from our history but the particularly important thing you write about is our institution and I've written this in several things our institutions were created for empire and part of the crisis that is particular to the UK at the moment is that with the unwinding of empire we are left with a set of imperial institutions that no longer have the empire to function and actually from the partition of Ireland in the 1920s through to Scottish of wealth evolution this has been a process of unwinding an imperial set of institutions that no longer work or give people a reason to be in one single state I would argue that the particular crisis of England is England is stuck with the same imperial institution no longer lauding it over everybody in a way that undoubtedly happened in the past but the only path of the UK that is run by the UK government rather than democratically by the people of England I would argue that the reason it was England not the rest of the UK that provided the lion's share of the Brexit vote to a limited degree at least Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been able to imagine themselves as modern 21st century post imperial nations in a way that England has not been able to do because we have no forer in which that discussion takes place now the solutions we need and you use a really important point about not making this a central point of our politics I entirely agree ultimately the political answers we come up with have to work democratically for the majority which are things that Morrison and I have both said but if we don't include the people who do feel English in that project we will lose part of our core constituency so it's about inclusion of Englishness not basing our politics around either a British or an English politics as though all the other things that we bring us to this conference don't matter to us because they do it's a vehicle for achieving that change sorry I would like to posit some questions and these are intended as provocations as well as questions which is what is Englishness without whiteness what is Englishness without supremacy do we have models for thinking these through in any meaningful way and models of these identities which can reconcile themselves to Britain's changing role in the world so they can no longer sort of keep enjoying it's like wake up still drunk from the night before and that's shortly before the hangover hits that's like Britain enjoying its colonial legacy on the world stage now we're in the hangover period we're not just still coursing through on last night's Ray and Nephew what conceptions of these not just collective models of identity but democratic institutions, social institutions political institutions do we have without those things I don't think that they've been thoroughly imagined I think what we have had is instead attempt to define these things into being in a way which is still I think very much hoping that it will be taken as a lip surface to the patriotism which is inherently linked to a sort of imperial not just amnesia but nostalgia the longing for something which is lost and very much tied to the patriotism of a hope to return of domination and I think that as leftists whether you're a socialist or you call yourself a progressive whether in my case you call yourself a communist we end up in a strange position where we say yes we want to show that we are hearing you forgotten englanders screwed over by deindustrialisation in which people of colour are only ever an emblem of globalisation and not demographics also affected and shaped by globalisation in this country where all we do is try and posit our politics as a form of lip service of a yes I'm hearing you while then reassuring that anti-racist left communities of colour but this won't actually mean anything Can I have a go? Can I have a go? My plea as much as anything is not to say I've got every single answer to that English story but this is a story from which I understand the left must not take a position of saying until you've answered all my questions I don't want anything to do with this because the world is changing these identities are contested it's up to us to decide whether we want to help resolve that in a way which actually produces the inclusive out what we want or we don't and the world is changing I just is actually a bad choice of afternoon because I went to watch Southampton play Liverpool I should have done something else called John Barnes When John Barnes played for England and scored many English supporters refused to count his goals as English goals because he was black you saw it was different this summer people are working out and sport isn't everything a different form of English just now we have an opportunity to include our radical history and the one things we want to see and the anti-racist struggles as part of the tail living that we want to have and if we just abstain because there's some difficult bits we end up with a politics which doesn't include people that we do need to include