9781804941591 by Smakprov Media AB

How To Reclaim Our National Story

‘Vital reading’

Robert Macfarlane

‘Deft and poetic’

Grace Blakeley

‘Visionary’

Philip Pullman

Praise for Another England

‘The author’s awareness of the complex fullness of our history is steeped in the language and the landscape, and she sees all the more clearly because of it. I was profoundly impressed.’

Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials

‘Insightful, inspiring and highly readable, in this book Caroline Lucas invites us to ask ourselves a long-overdue question: what type of country do we actually want to be?’

Kojo Koram, author of Uncommon Wealth

‘A fascinating and thoughtful reflection on one of the most fraught and important issues of our time.’

Grace Blakeley, author of Vulture Capitalism

‘I’ve been waiting a decade for someone to write this book, and now the best person possible has done so. In these timely, passionate and perceptive pages, Lucas – the most inspiring British politician of my lifetime – tells a new story about England and Englishness, and sets out the possibility for a progressive politics of land, place and nation.’

Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland and The Lost Words

‘Blending art with political analysis, Lucas writes far more forcibly than authors of Left and Right who think a nation is defined entirely by its constitutional order, or that if the party they happen to support isn’t in power, England is lost for good.’

Tim Stanley, Daily Telegraph

‘This is not just an inspiring, nuanced and deeply literate book, but that rarest of things – a necessary one.’

Jonathan Coe, author of Bournville

‘Caroline Lucas is a shining light of integrity and values-based politics . . . This is a clarion call to define England and Englishness as our common ground, and a grounding for a transformation of politics and society.’ Kate Pickett, co-author of The Spirit Level

‘An urgent, vital book for our fractured nation . . . By showing us the alternatives in our past, Caroline points to alternatives in our future . . . stories that must be heard more urgently than ever.’

Nick Hayes, author of The Book of Trespass

‘Uncomfortably honest and true . . . Another England is a book we need at this critical time when so much seems lost, when we have become so divided, and so hopeless.’

Michael Morpurgo, former Children’s Laureate

‘Progressives have for too long treated the idea of an English national identity as an embarrassment, allowing the Right to create and exploit a narrow and chauvinistic version of collective belonging. In this vivid and invigorating book, Caroline Lucas shatters these distorting mirrors and reveals a much more interesting and complex picture of Englishness . . . Engaging, illuminating and ultimately uplifting.’ Fintan O’Toole, author of Heroic Failure

‘Another England makes the compelling case that progressives need not shy away from talk of Englishness. Eloquent and persuasive, it offers a powerful new perspective on how we might make our national stories fit for the twenty-first century.’

Jon Snow, former Channel 4 News presenter

‘Caroline Lucas brilliantly draws together the narrative threads of our national stories to define some clear blue water between the British state and an England capable of being inclusive and forward looking, while at the same time bearing the weight of its own history.’ Billy Bragg

‘Not just another book by another politician; if only more departing MPs would write about Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953) . . . Lucas’s strength as a writer – and perhaps also as a politician – is her fierce reasonableness.’ Prospect

‘We can make England brutal or beautiful. To understand the choice and how we make the right one together, read Another England, a wonderful and timely book on the country we can still be.’

Neal Lawson, Director of Compass

‘More than jam and Jerusalem, Another England is a call to arms . . . When the election is eventually called and Lucas leaves Parliament, the country will have a lot to thank her for.’ Daily Mirror

‘A lucid insight into the ways the English might cultivate an inclusive “national story” . . . Lucas’ intervention is not only timely, but also imperative.’ Red Pepper

‘In Another England, Caroline Lucas sets out to start a conversation about “what it means to be English”. As such, it provides a remarkably inspiring foundation for such a conversation . . . I absolutely loved it.’

Jonathon Porritt, former leader of the Green Party

‘Poetic and clear-sighted, romantic and analytical, principled and open-minded. There’s no other politician quite like Caroline Lucas . . . She’s dug into the soil of England to find a progressive patriotic vision for the twenty-first century. What she discovers is profound, hopeful and radical. A brave and vital book.’ Ian Dunt, author of How Westminster Works . . . and Why It Doesn’t

‘Combines a love of English literature and its role in telling the story of England with what’s gone wrong in politics . . . A very interesting book.’ Alastair Campbell, The Rest Is Politics podcast

‘Politicians keep writing state-of-the-nation polemics. The former Green Party leader’s is actually worth reading . . . Reading this warm, persuasive book is to be confronted with the idea and reality of a decent, saner England. One perhaps possible in a fought-for future.’ Francisco Garcia, iNews

‘Deftly marries the political and the literary . . . Another England is idealistic, naive and freewheeling, as urgent and lively books often are. I loved it.’ Books of the Year, Spectator

about the author

Caroline Lucas is a writer and campaigner. She was elected to Parliament for Brighton Pavilion in 2010, becoming the UK’s first Green Party MP. She also served as leader of the Green Party of England and Wales from 2008 to 2012 and as co-leader from 2016 to 2018 and, before that, was a Member of the European Parliament for ten years. She holds a PhD in English literature.

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For Richard, Theo and Isaac

Preface

London at dawn. The Thames is in full flood, its muddy waters turned to a deep blue by the cloudless sky above. The rising sun is picking out every detail of the Palace of Westminster, its honey- coloured limestone now golden, transforming what is too often a museum of pomp and empty circumstance into something startlingly beautiful. I’m standing on Westminster Bridge, looking east, towards the towers of the City of London, to Essex and Kent, and beyond to Europe.

I’m there to film a short message, and now as I watch the recording again, eight years later, I realise I look like someone who has just heard of the death of a friend or a relative. I am profoundly sad, perhaps a little shocked. I am also deeply tired, because I have been up all night. I look like I don’t quite know what to say. ‘I know, like me, you will be feeling pretty devastated this morning . . .’

Just a few hours earlier, I had watched David Dimbleby report the result of the referendum on the UK ’s continuing membership of the European Union. After all the millions of words spent during the campaign, the result came at 4.39 a.m. on 24 June 2016: ‘We’re out.’

Sometimes when you’re tired, or in shock, things can gain a strange clarity.

‘People have voted the way they did I think partly because they were feeling so angry and alienated, and the divisions in this country run so deep. And if we are ever to have a chance of healing these divisions, the progressives have got to work together.’

In one way, that moment on Westminster Bridge feels a lifetime ago. Our country has gone through so much since, and if anything the alienation and polarisation are much greater today than back in 2016. But the truth was clear even then: Brexit was the result of division, and it would make those divisions worse. The fact that England and Wales voted to leave, and Scotland and Northern Ireland to stay, has put incredible strain on the myth that the United Kingdom is an equal partnership of four nations. The government in London decided what form Brexit would take without any reference to the elected governments in Edinburgh or Belfast or, indeed, in Cardiff. Unsurprisingly, support for the reunification of Ireland has grown. The pressure for a second independence referendum in Scotland cannot be ignored forever. In Wales, a new sense of national identity is on the rise. The future of the United Kingdom itself is now in doubt.

Yet we left, primarily, because of what had happened in England. Outside of the capital, every single region voted for Brexit. It is no disrespect to Wales, which voted by a majority of only 80,000 for ‘Leave’, to say that it was an English vote that drove Brexit. Many reasons have been advanced: it was because of the way communities had been abandoned when so much of our industry collapsed in the 1980s; because of the hollowing out of local democracy, intensified under Margaret Thatcher;

because the deregulated City of London had sucked more and more investment out of the regions; because the great institutions that we all shared, like the NHS, were being trashed; because the old elites of Eton and Oxford were not only strengthening their grip on the reins of power, but were now looking increasingly to tax havens and Wall Street to better themselves and their friends; and a hundred other betrayals. And, to be honest, because those who benefitted economically from all these changes, and from the UK becoming a more open and diverse society, did not do enough to share these gains fairly, and often sneered at those with a more traditional view of England.

It was this sense of division that led me to try something new. In the months following the 2016 result, I travelled to as many ‘Leave’-voting areas in England as I could, to hear from people first-hand, and face-to-face, why they had supported Brexit. Sometimes this was difficult. More often it was refreshing and reassuring because there was so much more that we agreed on than held us apart. Many people were angry. Of course they were. But if you took the time to go, and paid them the courtesy of listening, then common ground could emerge.

One theme that continually arose throughout this listening exercise (which my small team filmed and shared as best we could, and which came to be known as ‘Dear Leavers’), was people’s sense of pride in the places where they lived, but – simultaneously – their feelings of powerlessness. I was told countless times that London, and the power that was held there, was so far away that it might

as well have been on another planet. They felt unheard and ignored.

This was more than an economic complaint, however corrosive this country’s inequalities of wealth and opportunity undoubtedly are. It was also about culture and identity. Many resented how some expressions of Englishness were allowed, while others were not. It was acceptable to love the English countryside, English humour, English music and English literature, and to see these aspects of Englishness as welcoming, humane, full of energy and creativity. But the moment Englishness took a political form it became anathema. Even mild forms of patriotism were frowned upon. The English flag was acceptable fluttering from a church tower in a picturesque village, but was instantly interpreted as a form of racism if hanging from someone’s window on an estate.

It was these conversations that led me to question what Englishness is, or could or should be, and how all of us could be involved in shaping the answers. Each of us might have a different starting point. For me, it was returning to my love of English literature and reflecting on the many poets and novelists who have written about the English people and helped to shape the way we think about ourselves and each other. For others, it might be anything from the street where we live to the sports team we follow, from where our parents or grandparents came from to where we go on holiday. (Not everyone sporting the flag of St Piran on the bumper of their car is a Cornish nationalist.) I soon realised that Englishness cannot stand apart: it is wrapped up in the social and political

history of the islands of Britain and Ireland and with the many peoples from around the world who have settled here over the centuries. Most of us have a complex and multilayered sense of who we are, with multiple allegiances. And the more we can express the totality of our identities, as individuals and within society, the more we can feel we all belong, and the easier it is to manage the inevitable differences in our views and priorities.

To do this, we have to see Englishness not as something to be scared of, or suppressed within the notion of ‘Britain’, but to be understood, explored and valued. Yet there are no institutions that represent England equivalent to those in the three other countries of the UK . Nothing to give political expression to our complex, rich and sometimes raucous reality, or where differences can be expressed and, perhaps, resolved. The so-called ‘English problem’ is not only one of culture and identity, but also one – profoundly – of democracy.

So what kind of England do we want now and in the future, either within the United Kingdom or perhaps as an independent state, a reborn Kingdom of England? Will it be a smaller, diminished version of what we have now? Will imperial delusions and exceptionalism continue to shape its sense of itself? Will it be inward-looking, resentful of lost glories, held back by social and economic injustice, and run for the benefit of a narrow elite? Or could it become a genuine democracy, confident, outward-looking and inclusive? Could it include a reckoning with the realities of our past, and a recognition of a future that necessarily involves being part of Europe?

If these questions were urgent on ‘Brexit Day’, they have taken on an even greater urgency as xenophobic nationalism has continued its rise across Europe, from the success of the Sweden Democrats and the Finns Party to the growth of the Far Right in Italy, Hungary and the Netherlands. At the same time, propelled by the outcome of the Brexit referendum and the 2019 general election, in the UK the populist Right has grown in strength, seizing a powerful influence on an increasingly out-of-touch Conservative Party. If a progressive alternative to this national populist agenda is to be successful, it needs to do more than offer bolder, more ambitious policies, vital though those are: it needs to unify, rather than divide; to offer hope, rather than despair. And one of the most effective ways of doing that is by telling more compelling stories of who we are and who we can be.

On that June morning in 2016, I was looking downstream towards Waterloo Bridge, immortalised by the Kinks in their 1967 release ‘Waterloo Sunset’. Ray Davies’s lyrics are elusive, deceptively simple, but the song seems to capture something of the quiet optimism of the post-war period: how England could be a place where everyone felt safe and sound, and could have a moment in paradise. But this isn’t simply misplaced nostalgia. It speaks to something essential. When Davies performed ‘Waterloo Sunset’ at the 2012 London Olympics, it complemented the vibrancy, confidence and diversity of the extraordinary opening ceremony: maypoles and James Bond, Suffragettes and steelworkers, the NHS and Mr Bean, a celebration of a Britain that was,

as the journalist Steve Rose later wrote, a ‘diverse, multicultural, imaginative, inventive nation comfortable with its identity and capable of reconciling its contradictions. We were traditional yet modern. We were powerful yet caring. We were orderly yet anarchic.’1 Looking back over a decade and more of bitter political divisions, such a moment of national pride and unity can seem like a relic from another world.

Yet it’s worth recalling that the backdrop to the 2012 Olympics was one of harsh austerity, following the financial crash, and the brutal hollowing out of public services. The ceremony’s director, Danny Boyle, wasn’t producing a documentary, he was telling a story of how some things are and, crucially, how they could change, something he acknowledged in the programme for the event. ‘We hope . . . that through all the noise and excitement that you will glimpse a single golden thread of purpose – the idea of Jerusalem – of a better world, the world of real freedom and true equality . . . A belief that we can build Jerusalem. And that it will be for everyone.’2

Identity is essentially about storytelling – and Boyle’s was an attempt, in Rose’s words, ‘to tell a fresh, inclusive story about what Britain was, is and could be’. Over a decade later, we remain in dire need of such a story. All of the nations within the UK are having to reimagine themselves and retell their stories. And the task of reimagining other Englands is the most urgent and acute. I say ‘Englands’ in the plural, as there is no single national essence to be disinterred and imposed. Rather, there are myriad stories – of an England at ease with itself and

with its past, forward-looking, open, more equal, diverse and multi-ethnic – each of which might shed a different light on who we are. Rediscovering those stories – and identifying the policies that can help to realise them – has become a political priority.3 England may have put Brexit on the agenda but the UK ’s political leaders have been too cowardly to return the compliment and put England itself on the agenda.

A country without a coherent story about who and what it is can never thrive and prosper, and it certainly cannot rise to the existential threats of our time – the climate and nature emergencies. As the writer Ben Okri puts it, ‘Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.’4 Finding, and telling, stories that speak to the truth of England’s past and present, and inspire us to imagine and pursue new and better futures, might turn out to be one of the most transformative acts we can undertake.

Introduction: United Kingdom?

They really do want to rewrite our national story, starting with Hereward the Woke. We really are at risk of a kind of know-nothing cancel culture, know-nothing iconoclasm, and so we Conservatives will defend our history and cultural inheritance.

Boris Johnson, Conservative Party Conference (6 October 2021)

The Last Night of the Proms is a strange ritual. The promenades at the Royal Albert Hall could hardly be more outward-looking, broadcast around the world and featuring a stellar cast of international musicians and composers. Yet on the final evening, after weeks of Chinese cellists and Turkish pianists playing works by Danes, Germans and Argentinians, the Union flags come out and we are treated to Elgar and Vaughan Williams, the national anthem and ‘Pomp and Circumstance’, and, of course, a rousing rendition of ‘Rule, Britannia!’. Everyone there, and everyone who ever sees it, will have a different response. It could be nostalgia for a time when Britain really did rule the waves. It might evoke the best of Britain’s maritime tradition, when the Royal Navy

succeeded in suppressing the trade in enslaved people, or the Merchant Navy braved the U-boats to keep the country fed. It could be ironic, playing at jingoism, or a day off from subscribing to the liberal consensus about war and conquest. More troublingly, it might suggest that the spirit of Empire, the urge to dominate and to measure your own success by whether others are beneath your heel, lives on.

We see more of those different views when events such as the Last Night of the Proms become embroiled in cultural conflict. ‘Rule, Britannia!’ is inescapably militaristic, most explicitly in the words of its fifth verse – ‘All thine shall be the subject main, / And every shore it circles thine’ – an extraordinary vision of world domination which reflects Britain’s dark history of warfare, exploitation and slavery. And yet the removal of the song from the Proms has long proven controversial. When the BBC proposed replacing it with an orchestral version in 2020, politicians and pundits queued up to condemn it as a betrayal of a great tradition. In fact, the original Proms tradition was to play Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, which features the theme of ‘Rule, Britannia!’, alongside other nautical tunes such as ‘Jack’s the Lad’ and ‘Spanish Ladies’, but without the lyrics. Only from the 1940s onwards was the Fantasia increasingly extended to include the words. Nor were concerns about the lyrics new: the American conductor Leonard Slatkin, the guest conductor in 2002, had commented that ‘ “Rule Britannia” does seem a little militaristic, and though it’s wonderful to celebrate who you are and have faith in your country, I don’t think we should exclude others.’1

These conflicts reflect a deeper insecurity about England’s place in the world. In 1740, when ‘Rule, Britannia!’ was written as the finale of Thomas Arne’s opera Alfred, English ‘merchants’ and English ports were already dominating the trade in enslaved people from Africa to the new colonies in the Americas, whose unconscionable human cost is hard to comprehend. Over the following century, they would become the power- house of the world’s largest empire – a legacy that has shaped England profoundly and remains a potent force in English society, even though some would prefer not to talk about it.2 Yet today, the hubristic certainties brought by the age of imperial power have vanished. The same prime minister who oversaw the dismantling of much of the Empire, Harold Macmillan, was the one who led the UK ’s first attempt to join what is now the European Union, perhaps in response to a sense that Britain had, in the later words of the former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, ‘lost an Empire and not yet found a role’.3 During forty-three years of membership, the UK had a relatively stable international position, within the EU but with strong links to the ‘Anglosphere’ of former English colonies. Now, Brexit is propelling the UK to redefine itself once more; and perhaps even decide whether it has a future at all.

Above all, however, this national insecurity has been bound up with the fragility of the Union. Since the financial crash of 2008, the UK has existed in a kind of perma-crisis. Austerity, the constitutional vandalism of the Boris Johnson–Dominic Cummings administration,

the self-inflicted financial implosion under Liz Truss, the sheer pointlessness of Rishi Sunak’s occupation of No. 10 which has achieved nothing except greater division and suffering, and, lurking behind it all, Brexit. But of all the political crises of those years, the most fundamental may still turn out to be the referendum on Scottish independence. The fact that the referendum was lost is, in the scale of a nation’s history, secondary to the principle that the Scottish people have asserted their right to decide their own destiny, and that the precedent for a referendum has been accepted in Westminster. Back in 1973, when the UK joined the now EU, Scottish independence was such a fringe issue that it was not even the subject of regular polling. As late as 1999, the proportion of people living in Scotland who supported independence was just 27 per cent. By 2022, this had doubled to 54 per cent.4

On the face of it, the Brexit shambles might have been expected to lead many people in Scotland to wonder whether leaving the United Kingdom was such a good idea. It certainly brought the practicalities of borders, common currencies, customs unions and the rest into sharp focus. But support for independence remains remarkably solid. Despite being a constituent kingdom of the UK , Scotland was not consulted by the Westminster government about how to handle the EU referendum result, which chose for its own reasons to impose the most extreme form of Brexit – so making the case for independence that much stronger. It is difficult to see how the UK government can continue to deny Scotland

an independence referendum, if a majority of the people who live there want it. Referenda are hard to predict, but a ‘Yes’ vote is hardly unthinkable.

The implications were even more serious in Northern Ireland. A majority voted for ‘Remain’. Westminster decided instead not only to leave, but to do so in such a way as to fundamentally undermine the Good Friday Agreement, stoke sectarian tensions, and put the peace process itself at risk. Again, paradoxically, the turmoil that Brexit has brought has made it more likely that the union between Britain and Northern Ireland will come to an end. There is a very substantial minority in favour of Irish reunification; and as in Scotland, the demographic trends make it probable that this will become a majority within a generation. (Some Unionists have begun to engage with the idea of negotiating from a position of comparative strength on what a future united Ireland could look like, rather than relying on an English political class which so often uses Unionism for its own selfish ends.) The Good Friday Agreement provides that a referendum on Irish reunification should be held if there is a realistic prospect of a ‘Yes’ vote.

In Wales, meanwhile, the movement for independence has yet to win the broad support that Scottish independence gained a generation ago. But that support is growing fast, current arrangements are not sustainable, and the Independent Commission on the Constitutional Future of Wales has kicked some radical options into play, including full independence. For all that Brexit was framed as defending the integrity and sovereignty of the

UK , it is not at all certain that the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland will continue for much longer.

The overlapping identities that exist within the islands of Britain and Ireland are nuanced and highly sensitive, linked as they inevitably are to questions of belonging, discrimination and exclusion. Yet within a few years, these issues could be at the heart of our politics and put at risk the fabric of our society, just as Brexit has done. For the most part, we’re not even thinking about it. Of course, the fact that Scottish independence or Irish reunification might happen does not mean it will. But there is a significant chance that, within a generation, either Scotland or Northern Ireland (or both) will have left the United Kingdom. In either case, the UK as we know it will be over.

What happens then? To our currency? The monarchy? The military? How will assets and obligations such as pensions or the national debt be divided? Will England be under pressure to give up its seat on the UN Security Council?5 Will Scotland rejoin the European Union? Will the move towards Welsh independence gain further impetus, so that Nixit and Sexit might be followed by Wexit? These kinds of questions have been debated extensively in Scotland, Northern Ireland and increasingly in Wales, but hardly at all in England.6 The risk is that these momentous changes will creep up on us, and we won’t have considered how to respond. Worse, the institutions by which we make decisions in their widest sense – politics, referenda, the media and the constitution – will fail us

once again. We will end up with bad decisions that spread division and leave us the poorer in every sense. Even the name of our new country would prove a challenge. If Scotland and Northern Ireland leave, then there is no more ‘United Kingdom’, no more ‘Great Britain’. Constitutionally, we are left with the old Kingdom of England. The terms ‘Britain’ and ‘Great Britain’ refer to the island on which England, Wales and Scotland coexist – what the Romans called ‘Britannia’. (It is surely fitting that the British, who have imposed their own names on so many other places and peoples around the world, should have themselves been named by foreigners.) ‘Great Britain’ was first used to distinguish the island from Brittany – so it is ‘Great’ as in larger, not ‘better’.7 The island of Britain or Great Britain was separate from what the Romans called Hibernia and we call Ireland, which makes the geographical term ‘British Isles’ to cover both problematic, to put it mildly. With Scotland and Ireland gone, the Union flag itself becomes an anachronism. It consists of the three crosses of St George (England), St Patrick (Ireland) and St Andrew (Scotland). Remove the latter two and you have the English flag.

What would this new Kingdom of England be like? Some have claimed that England is ‘naturally’ conservative, and that the departure of Scotland in particular, with its more European and social democrat instincts, will shift us further towards a free-market, low-regulation state. Certainly, many on the English left see Scottish independence through this lens, opposing it largely because they

fear Conservative dominance in England far into the future. And there is plenty of reason to be worried. In recent years, extremists have become a dominant force in the Conservative Party and used it to try and refashion Britain on the US Republican model. They have attacked independent voices, whether it is the judiciary, local government, universities or the European Union. They have stoked up the fires of division by seeking to create ‘culture wars’. In part because of the many deficiencies in the British constitution, Scottish independence could undoubtedly aid that process. Depending on how it happens, the break-up of the UK could certainly be followed by the end of the NHS as well as further drift towards authoritarianism and economic and social division.

The stakes could not be higher: the Right have come to revel in chaos, and we can be sure that they will try and shape the process to advance their own agenda. As chancellor, George Osborne seized upon the financial crash as an excuse to slash public services and undermine further the welfare state. In their different ways, both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss wanted to smash the way the UK worked, hoping the pieces would fall more to their liking. Brexit, the greatest source of chaos of all, was intended to create the pain needed to justify cutting laws put in place to protect us all, from employment rights to safe food, and to scrap environmental protection for our rivers and wild places: all to reforge the UK in the image of the US , or perhaps Singapore.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. England exists

within a British state that was created through a mixture of conquest, bribery, cultural imperialism and economic exploitation. The struggles of Ireland, Scotland and Wales to gain more freedom or break free entirely from ‘Britain’ are familiar; the impact of ‘Britain’ on England less so. Yet we can also imagine an England rising from the constraints of the British state, with its outdated exceptionalism and arrogance, its imperial institutions and obsession with class and caste, and finding a new freedom. Perhaps this will be within a reformed United Kingdom, a genuine representative democracy where everyone’s vote counts and everyone has an equal chance, whatever their birth. Or perhaps England will emerge from the UK’s crumbling political construct as part of a mutual project of liberation.8 Either way, when we English do finally settle with our own identity, we might just discover we’re much more progressive than we were ever led to believe.9

The Right increasingly seek to defi ne a version of Englishness for its own advantage – above all, in perpetuating the idea that England is and always will be a hierarchy in which some are intrinsically better or more deserving than others, who owe them deference and who challenge the social order at their peril. Do progressives give them a head start, by ignoring the issues or feeling that talking about ‘England’ as a political force makes us uncomfortable? Or do we join the discussion about how to build a fair and decent England?

These are the questions that have led me to write this book. We live in a time of profound change for our politics and society and this is a chance to shape that change for the better. If we could finally address the legacies of Empire, including our thousand-year efforts to dominate our nearest neighbours, then we might see a new England – more confident at home and abroad, fairer and more democratic, less weighed down by privilege and class, and above all more united.

Not that this will necessarily be easy. England now faces a multitude of challenges. Proper funding for health and education. Responding to the existential threat of the climate and nature emergencies. Rebuilding community cohesion and inclusivity. Redefining our place in the world. Dealing with the economic and social challenges of new technologies. We as a country can rise to these; but it will not be by falling back into an outmoded vision of what England is, handing power back to the Establishment, to landed interests and the products of a handful of public schools and elite universities. We have tried that, and it has been an unmitigated disaster. England’s future must be in the hands of us all, sharing the responsibility and drawing in all our talents and energies.

We also need to recognise the risk that others are committed to protecting a particular conception of England: maintaining their privileges, fighting reform all the way, and where possible rolling back the rights and protections which we have gained at such cost over many decades. Populists like Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson have built political careers on the alienation and exploitation which

were the consequences of the very systems that built them up and gave them their platform. They offered a seductively simple explanation for people’s anxieties, built around imaginary conspiracies and false threats, to which they alone could provide the remedy. The fact that each has been roundly discredited does not mean that this populist approach has died with them.10 Quite the opposite. Parliament and the fringe media are filled with people who are trying to follow their example. There is plenty of money to back them from those who stand to gain most from protecting the status quo. Nor do these wannabe populists need much talent or even show much interest in the business of government. (Imagine how Margaret Thatcher would have responded to the suggestion she include Jacob Rees-Mogg, Suella Braverman or Nadine Dorries in one of her Cabinets.) Even when serving as ministers, these populists concentrate on stoking culture wars and manipulating public opinion, not even serving the interests of their party, let alone their country.

Much of their power comes from their willingness to substitute resentment and xenophobia for rational debate or genuine scrutiny. This has been brilliantly dissected by Fintan O’Toole as a mix of self-pity (that England was no longer a superpower able to dictate to other countries) with bitterness (that those it had rescued or defeated in 1945 were now so much more successful economically).11 Fifty years ago, when Britain entered the predecessor to the EU, memories of the war were still fresh, and the dominant emotion was relief that unity in Europe was making the idea of another conflict

increasingly remote. But by the 1990s, that direct experience had become a cartoon version straight from the pages of War Picture Library , and EU membership became a battleground for rekindling old grievances, this time over curly cucumbers and bananas sold in kilos.

Above all, however, the challenge of thinking about the role of our ‘national story’ in England is trying to nail down a coherent version of what it is. Sometimes it seems to be almost a caricature of itself: a rich stew of myths, half-remembered fragments of history, nostalgia and outright misrepresentation – the 1966 World Cup and Dad’s Army, Rorke’s Drift and Bletchley Park, Maggie’s handbag and ‘Up Yours Delors’, Magna Carta and Vera Lynn, Dunkirk and the Falklands, all played to the theme of The Dam Busters. But questions of consistency or accuracy are irrelevant: the ‘story’ works because there is so much in the individual stories from which it is constructed – the creativity of the Enigma code-breaking, the courage that liberated the Falklands – that is genuinely admirable. What is troubling is the way in which they are co-opted to form that complacent, arrogant and at times malign vision of England’s national story peddled by Boris Johnson and the rest.

In short, the Right know, as they have always known, that English national consciousness is a powerful political force which they can turn to their advantage.12 They present a vision of Englishness that cannot be countered simply by facts, evidence and managerialism. Instead, we need to be equally adept in understanding what is driving people’s anxieties and aspirations, and in finding ways to

tell a compelling story of how progressive politics can address these that is equally clear and relevant. As the UK weakens, and perhaps comes apart entirely, and England re-emerges as a real political entity, this struggle surfaces in so many ways, from Brexit to human rights, immigration to inequality. It is in effect an attempt to use myths, stories, perception and culture to control how we think of ourselves, and to create outsiders who can be considered less ‘English’ than others.

We need to resist these attempts to dictate what it means to be English. It isn’t about swearing allegiance or saluting the flag, knowing the words to ‘God Save the King’ and being prepared to sing them. This is the worst of nationalism, taking our sense of identity and crudely simplifying it. Our layered consciousness – family, place of birth, residence, language, religion, ethnicity and the rest – is reduced to a single level: the nation. The former Conservative Cabinet minister Norman Tebbit popularised this in his infamous cricket test: the idea that, if people came to live in England from abroad, they and their descendants should support the England cricket team, not (by implication) the national team of Pakistan or India. The cricket test is odious on many levels and reeks of double standards: there is no suggestion the same should apply to emigrants who might still feel a loyalty to the England cricket team when living in Australia.

Reflecting on the diversity of the England football team under Gareth Southgate, the journalist Hardeep Matharu – who describes herself as the London-born Sikh Punjabi daughter of immigrants and British – wrote: