It's Not the Economy

The nation state is at the heart of this election campaign.  Not the wrecked economy but the boundaries of the economy that has been wrecked since 1997.  If an ideology of trans-national boundaries in economic administration or, for socialists, planning, is the bedrock of economic understanding, then  measures of failure distort and even disappear.  And in doing so the charges of incompetence, malevolence, unmandated political direction and the implementation of elitist agendas embedded in immovable supra-national institutions fall.  If the nation state is defined as the root of all evil we attack too the democratic individualism that overthrew emperors and monarchs, popes and tyrants, tsars and eastern potentates.

When we identify ourseves with England or Scotland we  identify our political society with our democracy  which defends our commonality of interest and sets the standards of policy and behaviour for our elected representatives.  We choose people of our kind to look after our interests and maintain decent relations with similarly organised but different peoples.  Our democratic nation states may have  parties within them standing for  alternative understandings and actions to make a good society but we should be able to be  sure that these parties are standing on the same ground, of nation and of state.

The dismissal of Italy as merely a geographical expression roused  such ferocious expressions of nationalism and cultural identity as to bring down at least two European empires.  New Labour's attempts to dismiss England (and the other countries of the United Kingdom) as merely a geographical expression, a north western European province whose administration falls in with parts of France and parts of Scandinavia, denies cultural and political coherence even to the misty romanticism of the British Isles.

'Let us assume'  begin so many economic arguments and analyses.  The economic argument with which Labour intend to pursue us in the last phase of the electoral campaign assumes priority to the building of global governance, the regulation of the globalised economy, to the irrelevance of the confines within which the last thirteen years of financial and economic policy can be defined as abject failure. 

In truth,  placing our economy at the centre of attention   places  betrayal at the centre of discussion and consideration, for it places our democracy and our nation state there too.