Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story
Caroline Lucas, Penguin, £10.99

THE dustjacket promises much: a new look at “Englishness” through England’s literature and its hidden history of popular struggle. 

Yet the book starts with two dubious assumptions. Firstly, Caroline Lucas tells us that we need to reclaim the notion of “Englishness” from “the cheerleaders for Brexit,” that is, that the Brexit vote was an expression of “imperialist nostalgia.” Such might be an attitude she encountered in the Commons bars and tearoom but, as Lucas herself later states, when she decided to visit Brexit-voting areas and listen to ordinary people she found that their vote was a protest against loss of economic security and the sense of political powerlessness.

The second assumption is Lucas’s claim that the “left ... have failed to offer their own, alternative vision of what Englishness means.” Again while the “progressives” of Caroline’s social circle might be ignorant of alternative histories it is certainly not true of the communists and radical socialists of the first 50 to 70 years of the 20th century. Christopher Hill, Rodney Hilton, AL Morton, Eric Hobsbawm, the Hammonds, GDH Cole and EP Thompson were all engaged in the process of establishing and explaining the history of radical and working-class movements and struggles.