Issues around Englishness, identity and the BNP continue to reverberate. For my part, a meditation on root causes. Melanie Phillips has written often and at length about what she calls the ‘cultural cringe’, by which she means an instinctive, reflex aversion on the part of our cultural elites to anything that smacks of an assertive English identity. I thought it might be useful to unpack the concept a little bit, because it points to some of the root causes of voter alienation and disengagement from mainstream politics, which in turn feed directly into support for ultra nationalist parties such as the BNP. 'Cultural cringe' is something we are all familiar with. Its most visible outward sign is the way metropolitan elites maintain an air of lofty disdain for St. George’s day and the England football team.

Boisterous affirmations of identity will always offend middle class sensibilities, of course, but this is about more than simple class prejudice. And it is about more than football. To fully understand it we need to familiarise ourselves with the byzantine complexities of post-war left politics because the roots of this crisis are to be found in the philosophy and progressive politics of what used to be called the ‘New Left’. Simplifying massively, the new activism that emerged on campuses in the 1960s abandoned old style labourism in favour of gender and identity based politics. Based in part on an analysis of the role of the industrial working class in the war, the advocates of the new politics came to view the working class as a reactionary force. And so they identified instead with what they regarded as the true revolutionary-progressive forces in world politics; the independence movements, the anti-imperialists and the feminists.

This gave rise to a form of identity politics that is at the very centre of this storm. Underlying it is a set of assumptions about our history, the history of empire and our relationships with the wider world. In this new politics our national story is systematically deconstructed and in its place is put a story of grievous exploitation, cruel and wanton destruction, murderous enslavement and injustice. Such an overtly anti-Western set of ideas could never form the basis of an appeal to the electorate and so it had to be covered with a nationalist gloss. The trick was to appropriate the symbols and iconography of British or English nationalism while pursuing a radically different agenda. This meant replacing the old nationalism with the new.

So a new nationalism was needed in contrast to the old; inclusive, all embracing, unthreatening. Played out against a background of breathless renewal - a giddy, intoxicating mix of Euro ’96, Britpop and Cool Britannia - the new nationalism needed to be colourful, boisterous and celebratory to match the new mood but above all – and this is crucial – apolitical. The idea was not to take the nationalism out of politics, but the politics out of nationalism. Of course, the search for a new nationalism did not begin with New Labour. The search for a modern English identity begins with the end of Empire. Some formulations of English identity were laughably twee. But behind the risible invocations of merry old England, morris dancing and warm beer was a long-forgotten English identity struggling to express itself; unsure, anxious, at times defensive, but also scrupulously fair, aggressive in the defence of liberty, open and tolerant. But this vision was never given full expression. Buried under a mountain of Tory sleaze, John Major’s wistful invocations went the way of the cones hotline. And so it gave way to New Labour’s ghastly formulation: a carefully contrived concoction, a curious kind of pastiche, something artificial and forced, synthetic, with a transparent commercial dimension that lent the whole thing an air of superficiality and unreality - a kind of grim metaphor for the whole New Labour project. And, crucially, a cover for a new kind of radical identity politics.

This radical new identity politics was based on the most cruel and cynical calculation; that the poor had nowhere else to go. As a direct consequence, in New Labour’s shiny new meritocratic society, the working classes find themselves systematically excluded from the professions, all but barred from the most prestigious schools, disenfranchised, lacking representation and taken utterly for granted. Social mobility has declined, incomes have stagnated and jobs gone overseas. They have even had their party taken away from them - John Prescott, for a decade the token working class presence in a cabinet of shiny Oxbridge suits, held up to ridicule and contempt for his infelicities with the language; his garbled syntax and mangled grammar the occasion for endless middle-class mirth. Even their favourite sport was repackaged and sold to an aspirational middle class audience. The working class feel themselves marginalised, despised by the elites, shut out of their own traditional pastimes. All of this feeds into a palpable sense of grievance. This is a working class that feels under attack, mocked at every turn, despised and unwelcome, ridiculed in the media and wider culture, and ignored by the political class.

All this in contrast to the old nationalism. And let us be clear, the nationalism of Nick Griffin and the BNP is the old nationalism - dark, sinister and foreboding with a grizzly political undercurrent. The happy, shiny new English nationalism, repackaged for mums, grannies and nice middle class families, depoliticised and unthreatening, is entirely a creation of New Labour and it always sat uneasily with a working class that craves authenticity above everything else. In the first, heady days of New Labour, the old nationalism was very much on the retreat, but as the economy turns and in response to New Labour's failed identity politics, the old nationalism is now defiantly reasserting itself. Of course, ultimately neither is a solution to the search for a new English identity and so there is a very real need to get beyond them both. What we need is an authentic nationalism, a properly liberal nationalism, a nationalism that places the fight for democratic freedoms back at the centre of our national story.