Skip to main content
Gifts from The Morning Star
A curious case of aversion to popular struggles
HELEN MERCER takes issue with Caroline Lucas’s assertion that the left have failed to offer and alternative version of Englishness
WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?: Intimidating police presence, hellbent on confrontation, on the hill heading to the Orgreave Coking Plant near Rotherham, May 31 1984

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. 

The 95th Anniversary Appeal
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
Similar stories
Sports centre with the image of Che Guevara in Marinaleda, S
Books / 6 March 2025
6 March 2025
PHIL KATZ applauds the biography of a man of principle that is a vibrant excavation of the radical tradition itself
THE DISRUPTORS: Frankfurt School regulars in Heidelberg, Apr
Books / 5 January 2025
5 January 2025
RICHARD CLARKE applauds the assertion that Western Marxism represents a withdrawal from action to change the world into the academy
Pier Paolo Pasolini as Chaucer in his film of The Canterbury
Books / 16 October 2024
16 October 2024
GORDON PARSONS recommends an ideal introduction to the writer who was first to give the English a literary language
ANCIENT SPLENDOUR: The Great Zimbabwe dates back to the Goko
Books / 15 August 2024
15 August 2024
BOB NEWLAND applauds a demonstration of the existence of a substantial African history that contributed much to world development long before European colonialism