After a summer when the far-right have managed to mobilise alienated youth and workers across many towns and cities in England, a book that sets out with the intention to “reclaim ‘Englishness’ from the Right” could be worth a read.
That’s what Caroline Lucas, who recently stood down as the Green Party’s first MP, has tried to do in her book, Another England – How to Reclaim Our National Story.
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| Published by Hutchinson Heinemann, 2024, £22. |
Sadly, however, her rambling discussion, largely based on English literature, doesn’t offer much to the urgent debate about how best to undercut the far-right by offering a working-class, socialist, alternative.
That’s not to say that the book isn’t without some interesting reflections. She acknowledges that Remain supporters like herself in the 2016 EU referendum underestimated the deep anger and alienation across working-class communities, particularly, but not solely, in England, and rightly blames successive governments for whipping up “fear and anger about immigration”.
Lucas correctly explains that “too often immigration is used as a lightning rod for the real causes of tensions over a lack of housing, transport or health care, the decline of public services… poorly paid and insecure jobs, all of which are the fault – even the deliberate policy – of coalition and Conservative governments”.
She also discusses how the idea of ‘Englishness’ has been “consciously shaped by the country’s elite into a narrative that shapes their ends”. For example, she traces how, in the earliest ballads about Robin Hood, the ‘Merry Men’ were simply outlaws, “outwitting priests and nobles”. That’s because, when first told, it was a tale of peasant resentment at the then feudal ruling-classes.
This was the age of King Richard – ‘the Lionheart’ – sometimes seen as a hero by far-right English nationalists. However, as the book explains, Richard I was a speaker of French and Occitan who mainly saw his English lands as a means to raise money to fight his wars and ‘crusades’: “Richard ruled over England but there was little sense that he shared an English identity with his subjects”.
Lucas explains how, in the nineteenth century, at a time when the new ruling-class wanted to foster the concept of a united ‘England’, Robin Hood was reinterpreted by Walter Scott as being of noble birth, as a loyal servant to the King against the evil Sheriff of Nottingham. However, the book fails to clearly spell out how this development of distinct nation states was the product of capitalism, of an economy that required a national market and the breaking down of localised customs duties and tariffs.
English capitalism of course developed into a wider British capitalism, and then an imperialist Empire that amassed even more wealth through its domination of global markets. The British capitalists’ global domination has long since been lost, but, as Lucas correctly points out, right populists like Boris Johnson still appeal to supposed past ‘glories’ and ‘British values’ to try and justify their greed and warmongering.
Lucas argues that ‘progressives’ need to put forward a different narrative of what it means to be English – like “the Diggers, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the suffragettes, the Battle of Cable Street”. She adds that “we can take heart from Robin Hood”, in the way that the story still resonates because of its “idea of redistribution, of society making sure that everyone has what they need, that someone will step forward to protect the weak and face down the bullies”.
Lucas quotes from some of the English writers that have protested at the uneven distribution of both land and wealth imposed under capitalist rule, not least Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of the Diggers: “For what you call the Law is but a club of the rich over the lowest of men, sanctifying the conquest of the earth by a few and making their theft the way of things”.
But, while not clearly spelt out, Lucas’ model of ‘redistribution’ seems to be a utopian vision of winning some kind of fairer capitalism. She explores the anger at Victorian poverty expressed by writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens and links them to the later development of the welfare state implemented by the Labour government of 1945 and beyond.
However, neither the pressure that came from the trade union movement, nor the fear of the capitalists at losing their power unless they gave concessions to the working-class, are mentioned. And this lack of a class analysis goes to the heart of the weakness in Lucas’ book and her politics generally.
She sees Britain’s “low-wage, low-productivity” economy as arising from a loss of a “focus on the importance of dignity and a living wage to working people”. No, it arises from decaying British capitalism no longer being able to generate sufficient profit through reinvesting in industry and manufacturing, and instead seeking to drive down wages and dismantle all the gains made by the working-class during the post-war boom.
Similarly, she discusses the threat of climate catastrophe, but sees the lack of urgent global action more as a question of government complacency rather than from the inability of capitalism to plan and invest on a global scale.
Lucas proposes a number of constitutional reforms – introducing proportional representation, an elected senate rather than the House of Lords, a formal written constitution, and the creation of an English parliament to sit alongside the devolved powers given to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
But the only way that any of these reforms could help challenge class inequality would be if a genuine mass workers’ party was able to use them as a platform to cut across both the main capitalist parties and the populist far-right.
More fundamentally, the answers Caroline Lucas seeks can only be found by replacing decaying capitalism with a socialist society freed from the barriers of nation state and private profit.
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This book review was published in the October edition of 'Socialism Today', the monthly magazine of the Socialist Party (England and Wales) under the title, "How not to combat right-wing populism"
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