Pro Kruger
In his lecture to the ASI last night, Danny Kruger MP – Reform UK’s Head of Government Preparation – advanced a wide-ranging argument about the fundamental compatibility of a particular kind of Smithian liberalism with a particular kind of communitarian nationalism. It was a compelling argument – and one quite far removed from the usual caricatures of both Smith and Reform.
In his speech, Danny argued that only a relatively homogenous society, underpinned by faith, could provide the necessary surroundings for the kind of ‘natural’ prosperity that Smith envisioned.
Miles Saltiel, an ASI Senior Fellow, has written an interesting blog post, objecting to Danny’s claims on this front. He says that, even if such preconditions did exist and were necessary in Smith’s time, they cannot be relied upon – or re-created – in our time. Instead, he argues, we must find something new as the basis for our shared nationality and natural progress.
But reports of the demise of the old Britain have been greatly exaggerated.
Miles’ factual claims are absolutely correct. This country is no longer – and probably will never again be – almost entirely composed of white believing Christians. Even more specifically, my beloved Anglican Church is certainly no longer the default church of everyone but a small minority.
But the reasons that homogeneity and faith matter are not specific to either race or religion. They matter because they engender trust and fellow-feeling – or, as Smith calls it in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, ‘sympathy’.
A society where everyone worships the same God, looks the same, and has the same fundamental values will naturally find it easier to trust and to cooperate. Everyone knows the rules of the game – not just the ones written on paper but also written on our souls. The famous finding of Robert Putnam, surveying thirty thousand people across forty-one American communities, that diversity undermines community cohesion demonstrates just as much.
But though religious and ethnic diversity will certainly weaken this cohesion temporarily, it need not do so permanently.
Aggressive policies of assimilation and nation-building can re-create it. The United States is perhaps the best demonstration. Each wave of arrivals – the Irish of the 1840s, the Italians and Jews of the 1900s, even the Chinese and Vietnamese arriving over the centuries to California – was declared in its time an unassimilable threat to the republic's cohesion. But a self-confident Anglo-American Protestantism was able to integrate them into a larger patriotic whole. Commerce itself was a crucial way that this assimilation occurred.
Crucially though, the American nationality to which they were assimilated was not a contentless form of ‘American values’. It was a grounded notion, built on American culture, American history – and yes, American belief.
So, Miles is right to focus on the English language and Britain’s history of achievement as a possible base for British unification. But this cannot be separated from its soul. As Tom Holland has argued, much of the West may no longer believe in the Christian God but ours is undeniably still a Christian civilisation. Equally, the spirit of modern English is to be found in the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. And our history – from the abolition of the slave trade to the defeat of Nazi Germany – cannot be delinked from its Christian motive force. Nor can either be separated from the generations of ethnically British people that constructed both.
An attempt to construct a unified British identity shorn of its roots in both ethnicity and religion will fall flat. It will be so formless and generic as to be uninteresting – and un-unifying. Worse still, it will probably be twee.
Thus, a strong unifying Britishness – capable of generating the sympathy that Smith identified – will need to be grounded in both faith and people. You need not be a member of that religion – or that ethnic group – to subscribe to that identity, imbibe its fundamental precepts, and enjoy its fruits, as Italian, Jewish, Chinese, and Vietnamese Americans have shown. But without that grounding, there will be nothing unifying to subscribe to at all.