Ed Miliband uses diamond jubilee buzz to speak up for Englishness

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jun/07/ed-miliband-diamond-jubilee-englishness

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Political leaders must do more to talk about Englishness, Ed Miliband will say on Thursday as he criticises the last Labour government for neglecting the largest nation in the United Kingdom.

In a speech marking Britain's "incredible" summer, encompassing the Queen's diamond jubilee and the Olympics, the Labour leader will say that English identity has been a "closed book" as he calls for the future of the UK to be debated across the country and not just in Scotland.

But Miliband's speech is in danger of being overshadowed after Tom Watson, the Labour party's deputy chair, described the diamond jubilee celebrations as a "show of opulence by state elites".

Priti Patel, the Conservative MP for Witham, said: "It's shameful for the deputy chairman of the Labour party to attack the Queen and the jubilee celebrations in this way. Tom Watson should apologise for these comments and Ed Miliband should condemn them immediately."

Miliband, who will be speaking at the site of the 1951 Festival of Britain at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank, hopes to shrug off the Watson row by using the aftermath of the jubilee celebrations to speak up in favour of Englishness.

"We in the Labour party have been too reluctant to talk about England in recent years," Miliband will say. "We've concentrated on shaping a new politics for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. But some people in England felt Labour's attention had turned away. That something was holding us back from celebrating England, too. That we were too nervous to talk of English pride and English character. Connecting it to the kind of nationalism that left us ill at ease.

"Somehow, while there is romanticism in parts of the left about Welsh identity [and] Scottish identity, English identity has tended to be a closed book of late. For too long, people have believed that to express English identity is to undermine the union. At the same time, we have rightly helped express Scottish identity within the union. This does not make sense. You can be proudly Scottish and British. And you can be proudly English and British, as I am."

Miliband's speech has been carefully timed to take place between the jubilee bank holiday, which he marked with his wife Justine at the St Paul's Cathedral service, and the start of the Euro 2012 football tournament and the Olympic Games.

He will highlight the contrasting approach to football, when many Scottish fans will follow the traditional route of supporting any team but England in Euro 2012, and the Olympics when many Scots will cheer on English stars wearing the GB vest.

Miliband will reject "narrow nationalism" wherever it occurs across Britain: "In Scotland, the narrow nationalists of the SNP pose a false choice. They ask: are you Scottish or British? I say you can be both.

"And here in England there are people like Jeremy Clarkson who shrug their shoulders at the prospect of the breakup of the union." Clarkson has likened Scotland's departure from the UK to "waving goodbye to a much loved, if slightly violent, family pet".

Miliband will cite his own background, as the son of Holocaust survivors who grew up in London supporting Leeds United, to illustrate his belief that there should be no "false choice" between multiple identities.

"You could say my family have not sat under the same oak tree for the last 500 years," he will say. "I am the son of a Jewish refugee. A Leeds United supporter from north London ... I am proud to be English. And I am proud to be British, too.

"To me, Britain is a country where it is always possible to have more than one identity, more than one place in mind when you talk of home."

Aides are describing Miliband's speech as a sign of his confidence after Labour's success in the local elections in Scotland where it saw off a challenge from the SNP in Glasgow.

Sources said that rather than following the obvious route of addressing national identity in Scotland, amid the debate on a referendum on its future in the UK, he had decided to speak about Englishness at the site of the postwar Festival of Britain.