Stuart Hall, prelate of British cultural studies, has intervened in the Labour Party’s current debates about “Englishness.”  He is brief, but nonetheless interesting: “I talked to Cruddas about this . . . I think I understand his preoccupations rather more than Maurice Glasman’s. In a constituency like Cruddas’s, where you’re fighting the far right, you have to think about those things [English identity, immigration]. But you have to be careful about how you recruit them. He came to talk to me about the New Left, which, of course, was interested in the popular language of the nation. But I had the feeling he was raiding the past, out of context, in a way. I do think Englishness is something we need to talk about, but it’s contested terrain that is structured powerfully against a contemporary radical appropriation.”

This is perhaps a more pointed intervention than the tone of guarded scepticism would lead one to believe, since Hall was a serious critic of “old Labour” and his intellectual milieu in Marxism Today was seen as an important tributary of New Labour thinking. Hall, though he is contemptuous now, was even temporarily a supporter of Tony Blair, until it became clear that Blairism was actually consolidating Thatcherism, assuring its hegemonic status. As he says in this interview, “New Labour come closer to institutionalising neoliberalism as a social and political form than Thatcher did. . . .  With Blair, the language became more adaptive; it found ways of presenting itself to Labour supporters as well.”

Part of Hall’s critique of old Labour, and particularly of its hard left, was that it tended toward a certain type of economic reductionism, the belief that the class struggle understood in the narrow sense of the capital-labour antagonism was the ultimate historical guarantee of socialism. The cultural and ideological vapours may smell of reaction, but sooner or later the real class struggle would assert itself, and the socialist offensive would resume in earnest. Combining the strongest elements of Althusserian Marxism with a sharp reading of Gramsci, he submitted this reasoning to a strong critique in “The Great Moving Right Show.”  He understood Thatcherism as not just a type of politics or statecraft, but a popular cultural phenomenon, a moral idiom, a common sense touching on the lived experience of polyglot social layers — somehow, Thatcherism was not just a doctrine of reaction but a hegemonic project, which managed to bind the abstruse dogma of neoliberalism to concrete, deeply felt experience. And the ground work for this cultural advance had, as he and numerous coauthors at the Centre for Cultural Studies had shown in Policing the Crisis, been conducted since the late 1960s by a “New Right” personated first in Powell then in Thatcher. It had worked through a series of racial moral panics about crime, to connotatively link the experience of unemployment and depression to a wider narrative of British decline, the breakdown of law and order, the loss of imperial omnipotence, and so on. The role of nationalism, and “Britishness” in particular, was central to the Right’s appeal.