You can tell that Britain’s liberal intelligentsia is having an identity crisis by the number of opinion pieces devoted to the need for a new “national story”. Last September Andrew Marr wrote in the New Statesman that “no country which lacks an agreed national story can feel complete”. Weeks later a column in Prospect solemnly declared that “Labour has to start telling a story about Britain’s past, present and – more importantly – its future.” At the end of January, the Guardian registered its first twinge of editorial concern over Keir Starmer’s leadership of Labour, exhorting him to “tell a story about why Labour is better for Britain than the Conservatives”.
But it is writers, not politicians, that are supposed to be the nation’s designated storytellers. Their public legitimacy is built on the idea that they are not simply telling the national story but, in doing so, giving some kind of deeper, shared meaning to national facts. Now that the facts are glaringly incompatible with any kind of hopeful, progressive national story, those writers are left begging their politicians – Starmer in particular, whose technocratic posturing leaves little room for poetry – to intervene.
Content from our partners
