Citizens of Nowhere

Paul Embery, a 'Blue Labour' activist who has gained particular prominence for his opposition to Freedom of Movement made the following statement yesterday on Twitter:

'A nation is not a home.'
I fear this encapsulates the divide in our society - between a rootless, cosmopolitan, bohemian middle-class (in this case a bloke who used to sing folk songs on the BBC) and a rooted, communitarian, patriotic working-class.

This rightly attracted a large amount of criticism, as he used the same juxtaposition of the words 'rootless' and 'cosmopolitan' as Stalin during the antisemitic campaign of 1948-53. His claim that this was a coincidence would be a little more convincing if these terms were themselves part of the every day political vernacular. But let's say for a moment we give him the benefit of the doubt. Even if he was not aware of the antisemitic connotations of the phrase, this does not make it benign. It still appeals to the narrative of disloyal internationalists undermining the nation state. It still separates society into those who have roots, who fit into the community, and those who do not. It still seeks to otherise people who may easily be fitted into the latter group in a way that can pave the way for genuinely troubling developments. This is made particularly clear by their contrast with a ‘communitarian, patriotic working class’, itself a kind of mythologised infantilisation. If nothing else, this is exactly the kind of thought process which at some stage may lead back to antisemitism, though it is quite possible to imagine other groups of people fulfilling the same function in this kind of narrative.

This is equally true of Suella Braverman's use of the term 'cultural Marxism'. The term is very much an antisemitic code on the alt-right, and to unapologetically use the term anyway, and double down once this has been pointed out is quite shocking. But even if it were possible to separate the term from these connotations, and even if she were not using the term with these connotations in mind, it still appeals to this same troubling narrative of the third column of internationally minded intellectuals undermining the nation state. Theresa May managed precisely this, in her famous 'citizens of nowhere' speech to the Conservative Party conference in 2017, echoing David Goodhardt's distinction in The Road to Somewhere. That she did so did not make her speech benign.

The point here is not that the antisemitic connotations of these terms are not troubling. They are very much so, many who use them do so with that explicit intention, and those claim they do not do not seem sufficiently bothered by the knowledge of this once it is pointed out. But even if there was some extent to which these narratives were no longer uniquely a means of expressing antisemitism, they still appeal to a similar narrative of the enemy within and still fundamentally have the effect of otherising a section of society as somehow not of the nation. Even if the similarity of the terms used to historical ones is not conscious, that does not necessarily make that similarity coincidental: it may suggest similar thought processes behind them. I don't know which 'somewhere' this is the road to, but I for one don't want to go there.