In the mid-1980s, a remarkable German television series became appointment viewing in my house each Thursday evening. Heimat, an epic portrait of the life and times of a fictional Rhineland village, tracked the inhabitants of Schabbach as they navigated the tumultuous 20th century. Across the course of 15 hours, Edgar Reitz’s drama conveyed a romantic, almost religious, sense of rootedness and love of place. As the aged local gravedigger liked to tell outsiders: “Down on earth as you all know, there’s high and low German, but in heaven – as you’d expect – they speak the Hunsrück dialect.”
Half-playful, half-serious, those words express something both mysterious and beautiful about belonging. But on the political spectrum, where does such a vision sit? James Orr, recently recruited as an intellectual outrider for Nigel Farage, would have a ready and confident answer to that question. A professor of the philosophy of religion at Cambridge, Orr has been trying to lend some highbrow lustre to Faragism. In a recent piece for the Times, he argued: “Reform is beginning to articulate what is routinely dismissed and demonised as rightwing populism, but which is much better understood as a vision animated by the politics of home.” Other parties, his column continued, have governed Britain as if it were “nowhere in particular”, managing a zone rather than cherishing and protecting a place.
Similar observations have long been circulating in the far-right salons of Europe. I remember listening almost a decade ago to Marine Le Pen’s niece, Marion Maréchal, speaking at a rally in the historic city of Sens: “For Macron, our country is not a nation, it’s a space,” Maréchal told a predominantly working-class audience. “Me, I gaze in wonder at the gothic cathedral you have here in Sens, the most splendid in France, and marvel at the majesty of Racine’s verse. But all that doesn’t exist [for Macron]. The only thing that counts is productivity, the economy, benefits.”
By this point, the hackles of many readers will be rising. In a nativist vision, home is by definition not for everyone. Reitz’s masterpiece – which was certainly not that – was criticised for playing down the horrors of Nazi antisemitism, which only rarely intrude on the lives of its characters. And notwithstanding the prominence of figures such as Zia Yusuf and Suella Braverman, Reform’s love of place carries a logic of exclusion. Orr’s intervention was written in celebration of Robert Jenrick’s defection from the Conservatives, not long after Jenrick had notoriously lamented an absence of white faces in Handsworth. The party’s candidate in this month’s seismic byelection in Gorton and Denton is Matthew Goodwin, a former politics professor turned online activist, who has implied that UK-born people from minority ethnic backgrounds might not be, so to speak, echt-British.
A still from the German TV series Heimat. ‘A remarkable [show that] became appointment viewing in my house each Thursday evening.’ Photograph: Youtube
These are repellent perspectives. Last week’s long-distance intervention by the billionaire tax exile Jim Ratcliffe, who lamented that Britain was in the process of being “colonised”, illustrated the extent to which they are gaining political traction. But moral excoriation, and edifying homilies in praise of diversity, do not cut it as a response. Watching a recent edition of Question Time, I despaired as the secretary of state for Scotland, Douglas Alexander, challenged a Reform-friendly podcaster on the panel by quoting This Is the Place, by the Manchester poet Tony Walsh. “Some are born here, some are drawn here, but we all call it home” is undoubtedly an uplifting line, but on sensitive subjects the left too often prefers preaching to analysis.
Reform is hoping to eat the lunch of both the left and right by embodying a sentimental politics of patriotic resistance, posing as a nationalist middle way between free-marketeering Thatcherism and the dead hand of a remote state that is indifferent to the struggles of real communities. Orr and Reform’s other intellectual luminary, Danny Kruger, believe this “new right” will create a new centre ground; one that unites traditional Toryism, middle England and a terminally disillusioned post-industrial working class. The coming pitch is for a deglobalised British capitalism, likely to include the taking of public stakes in key industries, accompanied by a cultural drumbeat of ethnocentrism.
The level of chutzpah is enormous. Farage identified with Liz Truss’s laissez-faire zealotry so much that he praised her government’s first and only budget as the best Tory economics “since 1986”. Orr’s new Centre for a Better Britain – the thinktank charged with policy development for a future Reform government – was founded with the help of commodity traders who drank with Farage during the “big bang” days of the 80s and 90s. These were the years when the world was made fit for global finance to plunder the planet according to its own priorities, and nobody then was talking about the politics of home.
But opportunists could not flourish without being handed opportunities. Reform is simply exploiting mainstream parties’ long complicity with a Davos-style worldview that genuflects to the markets, while remaining indifferent to the places whose fate they decide. Labour can point out the hypocrisy of Farage’s position. But in what one might call the party’s post-Mandelson era, its future relevance depends on its ability to make enemies in the right places. After all, the left can draw upon a rich tradition in which the need to resist and tame the uprooting power of capital was always well understood. Ideas of fraternity, solidarity and mutual dependence used to constitute the political atmosphere in which it breathed.
Orr’s contempt for a bloodless economic order, careless of human realities, strikingly echoes the Communist Manifesto’s description of a capitalist modernity in which “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”. Karl Marx was sanguine about the ruthlessness that overturned habit and custom in search of profit, believing that the industrial working class would eventually take back control and build a new Jerusalem. But “utopian socialists” such as the philanthropic factory owner Robert Owen, inaugurated an ethical tradition (co-ops, guilds and the postwar welfare state) which fought to insulate, protect and empower workers and families menaced by the economic forces beyond their control.
A couple of centuries on, a modern sense of heimat is threatened by a dysfunctional housing market that drives a sense of rootlessness and precarity. Town centres and high streets have been hollowed out by unmanaged post-industrial decline, and now by the digital rerouting of our everyday lives. AI threatens not only to take over traditional areas of employment; its future development will oblige us to defend the specificity and value of the human per se. Concerns over immigration are only part of this wider sense of social anxiety, which Farage has surfed to such political effect since the early days of Ukip.
Attacking Goodwin ahead of the Gorton and Denton byelection, Keir Starmer last week urged voters to choose “true patriotism” over the “plastic” version offered by Reform. Let’s hope they do. But the language is weak and banal. Unless Labour rediscovers its ethical ambition in dealing with the economic challenges of the age, and relearns a language of belonging that goes beyond virtuous assertion, such appeals risk being buried under a “unite the kingdom” St George’s flag.
