Much of the discussion of Ed Miliband’s Labour Party conference speech has rightly focused on his audacious appropriation of Disraeli and the rhetoric of ‘One Nation’ Conservatism. But Miliband’s speech has historical roots on the left as well as on the right: patriotism has long been an important theme for progressive leaders seeking to make the case for social reform and national renewal. From this perspective, the key passage in Miliband’s speech was this:
‘In One Nation responsibility goes all the way to the top of society. The richest in society have the biggest responsibility to show responsibility to the rest of our country. And I’ve got news for the powerful interests in our country: in One Nation no interest, from Rupert Murdoch to the banks, is too powerful to be held to account.’
Miliband’s juxtaposition of the vested interests of the powerful with a broader public good has a long and resonant lineage in progressive oratory. Reforming leaders of the left have always couched their appeal in populist and patriotic terms, seeking to mobilise low- and middle-income citizens against powerful elites. Here the most useful precedent is not Disraeli but his chief antagonist, William Gladstone. Gladstone famously drew the electoral battle-lines in the late nineteenth century as ‘the classes against the masses’ or ‘the classes against the nation’. Gladstone contrasted the sectional interests of privileged elites – ‘the classes’ – with the national view taken by the majority in the vintage nineteenth-century battles over parliamentary reform and home rule for Ireland. Later liberals and socialists developed this theme by focusing on the sectional interests of wealthy elites who opposed measures of social reform designed to meet the material needs of the majority.
Perhaps the greatest exponent of this style of rhetoric was Franklin Roosevelt. In his scintillating acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination in 1936, Roosevelt drew on the struggle for American independence to establish a parallel between the British royalists who had tried to deny American democracy and the ‘economic royalists’ who now threatened economic and political life. The wealthy, ‘the privileged princes’, were ‘thirsting for power’ and trying ‘for control over government itself.’ This ‘small group’ had ‘an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labour – other people’s lives.’ In short, the United States faced ‘economic tyranny’ from ‘the forces of selfishness and of lust for power’. Roosevelt’s attack on ‘economic royalists’ embedded his economic reforms within the broader narrative of American history. He drew on a perennial republican theme, deeply entrenched in American political culture: the danger posed to the common good of the republic by the accumulation of power and influence in the hands of a self-centred minority. Opponents of the New Deal were now depicted as un-American, a point Roosevelt later made more explicit when he linked the American Revolution, a struggle for ‘democracy in taxation’, with the introduction of a more progressive income tax structure during the New Deal. Taxation according to ability to pay, argued Roosevelt, was ‘the American principle’, and the New Deal had ‘Americanised the tax structure’ by introducing greater progressiveness. As a result, Roosevelt concluded, his administration had created ‘a safer, happier, more American America’, offering ‘fidelity’ to the true meaning of ‘Americanism’.
Although this patriotic idiom might seem more obviously in tune with American sensibilities than British ones, similar ideas recurred on the other side of the Atlantic in the 1940s as the British welfare state was constructed. William Beveridge argued that his report on social security embodied ‘a peculiarly British idea’. He added that his report should not be seen as his own work but as an expression of the British people’s deepest convictions: the Beveridge Report was ‘the British people become articulate’. Labour’s 1945 manifesto took a similar approach: it argued that the economic slump before the war had been the result of ‘the concentration of too much economic power in the hands of too few men’, who ‘felt no responsibility to the nation’. Instead, Labour promised ‘to put the nation above any sectional interest’.
By invoking the nation, progressive politicians located their politics within an inclusive shared identity that transcended class loyalties and contrasted with the exclusive privilege enjoyed by a minority. The speeches of Roosevelt, Attlee, and others did not disparage the ambitions of working families who sought to improve themselves. On the contrary, they spoke in terms designed to construct a political coalition between low and middle-income voters. Once the welfare state was put into operation, argued Herbert Morrison in 1947, ‘the middle classes as well as the working classes will have reason to bless these services.’ As Morrison added, this illustrated that the Labour Party ‘stands up for all the useful people’. Social reform was not presented by these politicians as advancing only the interests of the working class or the poor, but as a majoritarian project that improved the economic position of the average citizen and was opposed by a powerful minority pursuing its own sectarian agenda.
So while the interest of Ed Miliband’s speech stems in part from the ground it claims from the Conservatives, it also stems from his resuscitation of the language of social patriotism. It is this second aspect of the speech that opens up space for a serious debate about the responsibilities of those at the top.