English radicalism needs to recapture the spirit of Blake

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/02/english-radicalism-william-blake-politics

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Not since the late 1960s has the gap between imaginative and practical politics – the politics of the soul and the politics of the brain – been as great as it is today. Most attempts to bridge the gap, as in the 1960s, are fantasies, doomed to fail in the short run. Yet the gap is a reprimand. It wounds our shared life.

Britain faces this divide in a particularly difficult way. In one part of the country, Scotland, the gap between imaginative and practical has narrowed. Many Scots feel close to living the political dream. Elsewhere, and in much of England in particular, the gap remains immense. The implications of this divide for the British project are very threatening.

Faced with the continuing rise of Scottish radical feeling in the old year, how should the English progressive respond in sustained ways in the new one? The most important answer as 2015 dawns is to respond a lot better than in 2014. A more romantic answer, stimulated by a visit this week to the current William Blake exhibition in Oxford’s Ashmolean museum, is for English politics to somehow reawaken the spirit of Albion.

This may seem a quixotic suggestion for a country facing a tough and gritty general election year. But the 2015 election will be tough and gritty, in part, because such questions have been much neglected. The political wing of the progressive project in England has become almost wholly detached from the imaginative wing. The prospects for a sustained revival of the progressive cause in British politics will remain hugely handicapped until the two are brought into closer harmony again.

Let us get rid of one issue right away. The rise of Ukip is not the English equivalent of the rise of the SNP in Scotland. The two parties have flourished for some related reasons, but no English radical or progressive identifies with Ukip in the same way that so many Scottish radicals and progressives have currently embraced the SNP. Those who pretend that Ukip is in some sense the true voice of English feeling and of the English disadvantaged are deluding themselves, and us.

How, though, does a distinctively English radicalism find an authentic voice which can simultaneously offer a coherent alternative account to Ukip south of the border, reanimate the English progressive movement from liberal across to labour in the way that nationalism has done in Scotland, but at the same time speak across the border to Scotland in non-nationalist terms which make shared sense within a working British state?

This is a big question, largely unaddressed by civic England, insofar as such a thing can be said to exist. Getting the answer right matters enormously for the future of shared English life. But it also matters because the English progressive tradition urgently needs to find a way of communicating convincingly with Scotland – and Wales and both parts of Ireland too – in shared not confrontational terms. Without this, the nationalist fantasy – that Scotland’s problems will be solved by throwing off the English yoke – will only prosper.

English progressivism has failed to find a true and consistent voice of its own for two main reasons. The first is because too many now see the solution to the UK’s disjunctions in purely instrumental terms. Give England its own parliament, say some. Regional devolution is the answer, say others. Revive local government. Cap it with a federal upper house at Westminster. Once this is done, the argument runs, the current constitutional and democratic asymmetries — and the grievances to which they give rise — will have been dealt with.

This isn’t wholly wrong. A version of it is largely right. But the problem facing English life is not primarily constitutional. It will not be solved even by the most perfectly designed systems of government. The larger problem facing civic England is cultural and imaginative. It is about better articulating English feeling in a progressive, open and modern yet vernacular way – if such a thing can be done – and then reuniting it with practical, achievable politics.

English progressivism is confused about this. It fears that English feeling is, not very deep down, reactionary and supremacist. It fears that attempts to give England a national voice will be eclipsed by dark forms of Englishness that are marked by racism and xenophobia, and by post-imperial and triumphalist nationalism. Progressivism fears the lordly and the lumpen alike. But it also fears the rural and parochial.

These issues cannot be merely wished away. But the choice facing English progressives is whether to bow the knee, and accept that the English people are part of the problem; or whether, bit by bit and by an imaginative effort, to promote a different better and richer national feeling in which the English people are part of the answer. Which is where Blake and the spirit of Albion come in.

Blake himself does not provide the whole answer. But he stands, in this argument, for a tradition that matters. He possessed in spades the things without which any progressive project will always eventually founder. He had an imagination. He was a dreamer. He was impassioned. He loved the land as well as the city. The injustices of the world caused him to weep and made him eloquent. He was a rooted and historically aware English radical. And yet politics was not the focus of his rich life.

True, Blake was a man of his times, not ours. True, he was a one-off. True, his visionary world was expressed in myriad ways that were wholly his own. He was as far from being a practical politician as it is possible to be. You would never want him to run the railways or the NHS. Yet he had a vision of humanity that still connects to the digital age. What Blake embodies more than anything else is politics as a form of religious faith, not politics as system or science.

We inhabit a world in which politics is calculated, targeted and practical, constrained by the possible, fearful of failure and inevitably modest in its goals. Blake stands for a completely different, idealised vision of politics. He is the poet of that part of the progressive organism that dreams of heaven on Earth, building the new Jerusalem, the new moral world and a restored Albion of free and equal imaginations.

In one sense, well articulated by Tony Blair this week, all this has nothing whatever to do with success in practical politics. Blake’s visions won’t win the election. Yet without some form of that vision, practical politics is as dry and distant as so many now believe. Without the dream of Albion, how can England arise and Britain come together again in the common cause?