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. 

Moreover, part of that process was precisely using literature — the words through which people explained their world and envisioned something better. 

Most recently, Tony Benn’s Writings on the Wall: a radical and socialist anthology 1215-1984 aimed to demonstrate “the radical and revolutionary tradition which we have inherited from those who went before us.”

Yet before Benn’s book was a still more thorough collection — A Handbook of Freedom published in 1939, and republished in 1941 as Spokesmen for Liberty and edited by Jack Lindsay and Edgell Rickwood. This takes a journey through the grand sweep of history from Caedmon and Alfred the Great to Siegfried Sassoon and Willie Gallagher, delving into all the nooks and crannies of English literature through poetry, speeches and writings “to catch the facts of history alive” and to “serve as an essay towards an understanding of the strategy of social advance.”

Like Benn’s collections it sought to establish some awareness and sense, not of “Englishness” per se, but of a national history shaped by radical agitation and class struggle. 

Nevertheless Lucas has stumbled, completely unconsciously, on an important point, which was made forcibly in the 1930s by none other than Georgi Dimitrov. He argued in the 1930s against “national nihilism” in which the failure “to link up the present struggle with the people’s revolutionary traditions and past voluntarily hands over to the fascist falsifiers all that is valuable in the historical past of the nation.” Such an approach probably inspired much of the extensive cultural work of the CPGB at that time.

The kernel of Lucas’s book is a recognition that England’s history is complex and contradictory; like any other country’s in fact. She is to be congratulated and encouraged in bringing to the attention of her fellow Remoaners “Another England” of the radical and progressive traditions in its history and literature: it is in fact a small move towards countering the national or historical nihilism which is so alive today.

Unfortunately, stood against the hearty soups provided by Rickwood and co, Another England is but cabbage water. 

Her interest in “Englishness” arises from her hopes and assumptions about the future position of England in relation to the rest of Britain and Europe. She draws on English literature, specifically “the classics,” to help “identify how another England might look”, a process which could have the potential nevertheless to lead us back “to Europe.”

At the same time she seems convinced that the break-up of the UK is inevitable and even desirable, so arises an urgent need to understand “Englishness.”

Literature is not explored but inserted here and there as she considers three “great challenges” that “England” faces: “how to reform our political system so that accountability, fairness and respect are at the heart of how we govern ourselves;” “how we can live well within the constraints of a finite planet,” and “how we can become a more open and confident nation, celebrating difference rather than seeking to suppress it.”

Thus the approach to the literature is, as she herself admits, eclectic. A verse from a  Robin Hood ballad is used to demonstrate English myth-making, whereas for Rickwood and Lindsay he stands as the archetypal “social bandit,” “a figure of protest and vengeance — for all his jovial ways.”

In other chapters Edward Thomas and the poem “Adlestrop” demonstrate the importance of a sense of local identity; brief quotations from Blake, Dickens and Gaskell protest against social division and inequality; land ownership and love of landscape is explored using John Clare, Oliver Goldsmith and a bit of Wordsworth and Chaucer, and colonialism through an extended discussion of The Tempest.

Some of this is quite well-handled, but only in the conclusion does Lucas gives some sense of the long history of struggle, with the briefest of mentions of the peasants’ revolt, the English Revolution, the Diggers, the Chartists and the Suffragettes, and none of anything more recent. 

The book is more properly understood as a vehicle for policy prescriptions — on the environment, racial equality, “worklessness”, and colonialist attitudes. There is in fact little that is radical in her ideas, which are mainly superficial fixes advocating better rules and regulations and targeted taxation. 

The chapters on the land are some of the best: the poems are well-chosen and the policies get closest to reasserting the rights of the “commons,” both for the countryside, and public assets such as the NHS. Yet even here direct inroads into private ownership are eschewed in favour of a comprehensive land register, better education and taxes on wealth.

My main conclusion from reading Lucas’s book is that there would be no better way of envisaging “Another England” than to reprint Spokesmen for Liberty. It may serve for others as it has for me, as the finest and most inspiring introduction to our radical past.