Cosmopolitanism in the 'provinces'

It is a truism to note that England's political culture is today captive to many tired dichotomies. Clustering around the consistently vapid distinction of 'woke' versus, say, 'common sense', many a contrived schism, always favourable to the 'culture-war' right, corrodes our political intuitions. Such ostensible divisions are today legion, ranging from cosmopolitan elites versus ordinary patriots, liberal middle class versus conservative working class, and humanities-educated Remainers versus entrepreneurial Leavers. Variations on this multiplying list can be filled in as appropriate. But still, the distinction that remains perhaps most defining of this need to cleave today's political ructions into neatly irreconcilable camps, one aloof and idealistic, the other rooted and earthy, is the one that is drawn between metropolitan cities and provincial towns.

Everywhere we are told that metropolitan liberals and their allegedly woke vanguard have embarked upon a righteous lifestyle project, one that effects an aggressive humiliation of the modest provincial majority. That this humble national collective, comprising a quiet patriotic belonging, is given a very specific provinces-versus-the-city spatialisation is important. The abstraction that all populist appeals to nation rely upon-the nation as a cultural essence anchored in a metaphysical timelessness-attests to nationalism's virtue as a poetic grandeur and sense of deep time, but points also to its frailty. This weakness stems from the nation's excess otherworldliness, which struggles for tangible coordinates beyond myth and demonisation.

It is geography that acts as the stage for national authenticity; and popular geography-as actual places, architectures and natural backdrops-provides the twentieth-century imagery that better grounds the nation. Though the nation is already a self-evident geography, indexed as it is to a territorialised unit (say England or Britain), the geography of authenticity is also internally distinguished. Certain expanses are seen as housing the national subject whilst other nodes of the country become delineated by their fraudulent, outsider excess. The city's purported ills become particularly prominent here. The city-as alienated and atomised, as feral and dense, as effete and nihilistic, and as multicultural and migrant-was a foundational preoccupation of conservative, fin-de-siecle sociology; but it has also been generally construed as a poor host for the nation's popular geography. It is instead the provincial heartlands, characterised by an unspoiled, salt-of-the-earth rootedness and figured by a quiet ordinariness, that lend to the nation its distinct sense of real peoplehood.

Back to the provinces

And though such a premise is easily critiqued, anti-nationalist critical theory has often unwittingly acquiesced to this framing, submitting to the political terms of the urban versus provincial distinction. As the geographer Ben Rogaly argues in his Stories from a Migrant City, too many researchers of cosmopolitanism have scoured only the iconic metropolitan city for its humanist, anti-nationalist energies. Of course, this impulse is a perfectly apt response to certain core realities. The modern 'global city'-as a hub of flows, propinquity, exchange and flux-is more immediately amenable to more ready-made conceptions of what constitutes cosmopolitanism.

However, the resulting analytic but also political neglect of the provincial town, the suburb and the rural has seen the cosmopolitan left cede the very ground where nationalism is most invested and most confident. Indeed, today's populist demagogues who castigate the disposable interloper populations in the nation's midst-whether its various racialised migrant-origin constituencies or their deracinated, white liberal 'champions', to quote from Paul Collier-have happily surrendered the metropolitan city when orienting their contemporary nationalist project. Instead, in a political calculation geared towards negation, the haranguing of the city as a multicultural expanse of self-satisfied 'citizens of nowhere' is the means through which the populist right seeks to make a permanent claim on the provincial white English denizen. Spearheaded by Dominic Cummings and successors, this strategy is based on the assumption that, with every seemingly progressive mantra heard from London, Bristol or Manchester, the provincial cities and towns undergo a further lurch...