p. 10 Put simply then, nationalisation means making the state more national… The concept developed in this book has two inspirations. The first is in the historical and sociological scholarship on nationalism, which situates it as a general feature of modernity. The second is Britain’s unique history of capitalist development through empire, and its post-imperial experience of ‘nationalisation’.”
p. 15 Nationalisation… to reuse Gellner’s working is the process in which the boundaries of the state are made more congruent with the boundaries of the nation. This process cannot be reduced to either cultural or economic forces. The redistribution of resources (which might typiucally be though of as economic) cannot work or make sense without the formal and informal boundaries of the nation (which might typically be thought of as cultural).
p. 18 It might seem off to describe the NHS as a founding myth to a nation that has existed for centuries. It might be more accurate and specific to instead characterise the NHS as a founding myth of post-imperial Britishness. The shift from empire-state-nation to nation-state produced Britishness as a kind of national identifiy we recognise today. It is a national identity made through the Second World War – the so-callled People’s War, where plucky Britain stood strong as Europe fell, with Britishness coming to stand for anti-fascist, tolerant and ordinary – and thereby conveniently placing colonialism and empire to one side and out of the picture. Post-war nationalism was not just for the British people then, it also helped cement the British peoples, shorn of empire. This is part of the meaning and significance of the National Health Service for a declining imperial power: it was as much a post-imperial project as it was a post-war project.
p. 23 Austerity was also nationalising in the way that it stoked social conflict over the distribution of resources. In short, existing conflict over who gets what, when and how – including struggle over the boundaries of the nation – intensidied. If the state governs on the basis that there’s not as much to go around and that failing to get spending under control is a matter of national survival, then there are going to be effects… Those with resources – ranging from the tangible, such as wealth, to the intangible, such as whiteness – worry that they will lose out, either by falling down a rung in social status or by losing out to others. People wonder where the money went, and which people – or what types of people, more accurately – took the money.”
p. 24 “For this post-crash situation, two or possibly three viable nationalisation projects emerged… The first… is obvious enough: Brexit…. Eurosceptic elites developed a nationalising narrative that mobilised a unique coalition of voters through concerns over inequalities, including with immigration. By claiming to speak up for the ‘left behind’, those elites could tell a compelling nationalist story about how leaving the EU would take control back from the so-called metropolitan elite. By detraying the left through their pro-immigration and out-of-touch metropolitan values, thise metropolitan elite also betrayed whiteness and its links to the British, and especially English, nation.”… The second… Scottish independence. The third, .. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party … able to mobilise through the sense that stagnating growth, low wages and years of austerity meant that some parts of societty were losing out and staying poor as a feature of the system … the most high-profile policies .. invoked post-war and post-imperial nationalisation, especially in public ownership of key industries such as railways and increased profressive taxes.”
p. 185 new opportunities for nationalist, or class, political mobilisation. Based on the conflict of the last decade, mobilisation against inequality is more likely to take the form of fiscal populism through wealth taxes – in which the nation reclaims its rightful wealth from a small, immoral elite that have cheated their way to riches – rather than through rejigging capital-labour relations to redistribute resources through the social relations of employment… This kind of revenue could help fund a Green New Deal in the style of President Biden’s American Rescue Plan and American Great Jobs plan. The potential for nationalisation here is evident.”
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