Reclaiming Britain - a response

By engaging directly in a discussion of nation-building it tackles a problem than many avoid. Fear that nation-building must inevitably collapse into nationalism has dogged the left for too long and has put progressives outside a discussion that is commonplace for citizens and voters. This failure has weakened the left’s ability to resist the national populism of Reform UK. Labour’s recent tendency to mimic Reform UK talking points only highlights its own lack of a persuasive narrative of nationhood.  

Patel and Garland’s focus is on ‘Britain’ (rather than its nations). But it is important to see our challenges in a wider European context. National populists hold power in at least seven European states and threaten to gain power in many others. It is an international phenomenon but everywhere is expressed as the politics of the nation. National populism’s appeal has grown in the gap between the expectations electorates have of nation state governments and what those governments can deliver. While nation states have been weakened by neo-liberalism, voters have become more sovereigntist – insisting that key decisions be taken at national level and increasingly sceptical about international institutions and international law. The failure to manage migration and to create cohesive societies has added the question of ‘who belongs to the nation’ to the failures of nation state governments.  

While an exclusive ethno-nationalism is important to its base, national populism offers a much broader appeal to ideas of the nation as sovereign, democratic and prioritising its own people. It frames the nation as the place to resolve every grievance, including economic insecurity, migration, cultural change, institutional authority, legal constraint, and political accountability. All become symbols of national disempowerment. The roots of national populism lie in the weakness and incapacity of democratic nation states, not in the malignancy of its advocates. Unless this is recognised and tackled head on, national populism will continue its march. 

So, nation-building should rightly be at the heart of the ‘decade of national renewal’ as proposed by Patel and Garland. ‘Reclaiming  Britain’ set out a clear ambition: ‘The work of nation-building comes down to two things: binding the people into a nation and translating the nation into a state.’  It’s good starting point but the challenges involved and the implications for Labour are more complex than the report is able to explore. The formation of national identities and their relationship with ideas of nationhood and the role of the state is not a simple process. It cannot easily be understood from a few opinion polls which can provide a superficial and misleading basis for understanding the challenges we face.  

The report makes three central claims. First, that an ethno-centric form of British identity is seeing a sharp increase.  Second that there remains, nonetheless,  a greater public support for other forms of national institutions and values. Third, that this civic idea of the nation can be successfully mobilised by better handling of issues like immigration and by ensuring that the state is able to deliver policies that support shared public priorities. 

Claims of a sharp rise in ethno-nationalism are based on analysis of British Social Attitudes Data and new IPPR/YouGov polling. These appear to show a sharp rise in a year of those saying you must be born in Britain to be ‘truly’ British rather than being able to become British by ‘making an effort’. It is worth noting that NatCen’s own analysis of the BSAS survey highlighted how the proportion of the population who thought it is important for someone to have been born in Britain to be ‘truly British’ had fallen from 74 per cent in 2013 to 55 per cent in 2023. Similarly, the proportion who believe it is important for someone to have British ancestry has dropped from 51 per cent to 39 per cent.  

While it is possible that there has been a sharp dramatic reversal of such long-term trends, we should be cautious relying on a couple of data points in two polls conducted by different organisations using very different methodologies. Most of the available data suggests that both Englishness and Britishness have become more open and less reliant on birthplace in recent decades.  

The words ‘truly’ and ‘making an effort’ are also doing a lot of heavy lifting as ciphers for the process by which someone is authentically entitled to a national identity. The formation of any real national identity is a complex process.  In European (and many other) nations, place of birth is frequently a qualifier of identity, although usually one that is less important than speaking the national language and observing local customs and traditions.  National identity almost always involves elements of heritage, birthplace, cultural, language, values, institutions and ideas of sovereignty and democracy. These  conceptions of nationhood carry some narrative sense of who the people are, how they came to be here and what they hold in common. We should neither be surprised nor hugely concerned that ‘being born here’ is one qualifier of identity. Other polling suggests that being brought up here is also seen as an identity entitlement.   

In general, UK polling suggests only that, for most voters, national identity cannot easily be acquired very quickly – in contrast to obtaining citizenship - but also that most voters are lowering the barriers to belonging. This is especially true when we recognise that only very small minorities – typically 10 per cent or less - regard Englishness or Britishness as ‘white’ identities these days, and that these numbers have dropped sharply in recent decades. 

A central contention is that public support for ‘civic’ rather than exclusivist values can be a rallying point for the nation. ‘Paying your taxes, working hard, and obeying the law’ poll strongly while the paper notes that support for shared national institutions like the NHS, the BBC and parliament remain strong.  However, it is not clear that these comprise a powerful alternative story of nationhood.  All are now at the centre of contested ideas of nationhood: who is paying the taxes and who gets the benefits? Why do I work hard and others (asylum seekers?) get benefits?  Does obeying the law mean the laws made by our parliament and our judges, or foreign treaties and foreign courts? Support for the principle of democracy is strong but so is the corrosive lack of trust in politics and the desire for ‘strong leaders’ and majoritarian authoritarian democracy.  The NHS reflects deeply held values - ‘we all pay in and it’s there when we need it’ – but is not immune from questions about who ‘we’ are and ‘who’ should be entitled to access it. Is the BBC as trusted as it once was? 

These national values and institutions are important, but they neither self-evidently defend themselves, nor answer fundamental questions about the nation and nationhood.  

International polling also suggests that support for a genuine ‘civic identity’- citizens bound together solely by adherence to fundamental principles of law, support for democracy or national institutions – is rare in most nations and is restricted to small numbers of highly educated liberals. This suggests we  would be better off trying to build richer and inclusive ideas of nationhood than to rely on civic nationalism. We certainly can’t expect ‘deliverism’ of policy to be so quickly successful as to push questions of the nation to one side. 

So long as national populism is the only politics that appears to take the nation seriously as a governing framework, it will continue to shape political debate — even when it does not win power. As Patel and Garland suggest, the democratic response, therefore, must reclaim the nation as a legitimate democratic object, rather than hoping politics can be conducted above, beyond, or around it. The challenge is increasingly urgent. The populist right has been emboldened after the Southport riots and fuelled by the overt support of X and other social media. The recent fall in net immigration may provide some breathing space but does not, of itself, answer questions about who belongs to the nation and on what terms. 

Across Europe a new paradigm of democratic politics must respond to the many pressures on the democratic nation state. The change should be as profound as globalisation, neo-liberalism, the ‘Third Way’ and European intergrationism have been in the past. Governments need to regain a significant level of national economic sovereignty. They must forge an inclusive and cohesive nationhood. Pluralism must be established as to the national interest of European nations. Those nations need to define the boundaries between the exercise of national sovereignty and the reach of international agreements across democratic, legal and economic institutions. The assumption that international treaties and shared sovereignty must always be preferred to national autonomy needs to be re-thought (and reflected in Labour’s approach to close EU links). It is only by clarifying the role and remit of the nation that a new basis for international cooperation can be laid down. 

Clearly the progressive nation state is very different to that sought by the national populists, but that does not mean avoiding the issues they raise. It must embrace diversity and inclusion, but this will mean addressing the difficulty issues of who belongs, on what basis and what expectation we have of each other. It cannot simply be a liberal invocation to tolerate difference.  Nations can no longer avoid questions of citizenship, diversity, multiculturalism and the alienation of large sections of the white working class. Rather than making an appeal to the most reactionary elements of the white working class, a rejuvenated multicultural nationalism should recognise white working-class voters as an integral part of a diverse nation. 

Remarkably, since the UK government officially abandoned multiculturalism in 2011, there has been no state strategy for cohesion. Despite the Southport riots and the asylum hotel protests, the Labour government has as yet had nothing to say. The IPPR report rightly praises Keir Starmer’s September 2025 party conference speech, but there is an incongruous clash between its inclusive rhetoric and the language and policy of Starmer’s Home Secretary. 

The progressive nation must defend pluralism, not simply as a protection of minority rights but as something of inherent value to a healthy society that wishes to make the most of its people. State policies should be designed to strengthen social solidary. Social security policies with a high degree of universalism and an emphasis on procedural fairness are more unifying than the high levels of means testing in the UK system. Rather than rely on the ‘Byelorussian’ defence of the ECHR, we might engage in a serious discussion of the interaction of international law, national courts and parliamentary democracy.  

‘Reclaiming Britain’ has a focus on British identity, but Britishness is not a unifying national identity across the island of Britain (let alone in Northern Ireland). It means different things in the different nations – not least about the Union, national sovereignty, and England’s position within the UK. Scottish and Welsh identities are as important in those nations, while Englishness is as important as Britishness. In England it is those who are most patriotically British who tend to emphasise their English identity and are most likely support Reform UK. In Wales and Scotland Reform UK taps into elements of British nationalism and Unionism.  

This is not nit-picking: it is hard to talk about nation-building when we are not clear what nation we are talking about. The UK Labour government cannot impose an overarching British identity on people who attach importance to other national identities too. Progressives needs to talk as comfortably about Englishness as they do about Britishness, and to articulate the aspirations of Wales and Scotland within the UK. 

‘Binding the people into a nation’, as IPPR rightly want to do,  will mean shaping a narrative about Britain, its individual nations and peoples and about national democracy and the nation state that is more rich and powerful than that offered by the radical right.   

John Denham is professor and director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics at the University of Southampton. He was MP for Southampton Itchen 1992-2015 and served in a number of ministerial roles, including as secretary of state for communities and local government.