Reclaiming History for the Left

Caroline Lucas has achieved little as an MP, though not for want of trying, but the news that she is standing down at the next election has triggered fulsome praise for the Green's only parliamentary representative, which is as good an indication as any that she hasn't rocked the political boat nor, to mix my metaphors, set an intellectual cat among the anti-intellectual pigeons of British public discourse. Predictably, her latest book, Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story, has been well-received, not only by soi-disant progressives but by conservatives who find her English particularism resonant (it probably helps that she admits that leavers had the best tunes during the EU referendum). Though some liberal commentators have wheeled out the strawman of progressives being uncomfortable with national identity, this has simply served to allow them to exhibit their own patriotic instincts ahead of a new Labour government that will be swept to power on a sea of Union Jacks and England football kits. I'm not going to review the book, but I think the reception given it is a useful jumping-off point to discuss the idea that the left (however defined) can "reclaim" national history.

According to Sunder Katwala, "She suggests that an emotionally intelligent, progressive politics might focus a little less on factchecking and a bit more on how to compete to shape the myths, memories and stories that shape who we think we are to progressive ends." This is pernicious nonsense, not simply in the contempt it shows for history or the hypocrisy over "sacred facts", but in its twin delusions that progressives can succesfully compete to shape national myths and that such mythmaking can serve progressive ends. The first delusion is obvious when you consider the minimal influence progressives have over the media that construct the myths, preserve the selective memories and select the stories that collectively constitute our narrative history, and that's without noting what little sway it has is limited to "progressives" of a particularly conservative bent. This partly explains why she has recourse to the consolations of novels, but it should also be noted that fiction offers the chance to enact virtues that one might be reluctant to apply in reality. For example, as Katwala perhaps credulously puts it: "Lucas suggests the social consciences of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Nevile Shute could inspire new arguments for universal basic income." Well they didn't at the time of writing.

Tim Stanley points out that what vibrates with him in Lucas's work is its concern with manners: "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. These fashionable doomsters lose sight of what really matters, of what really shapes a tribe. I’ve read countless books about the historical precedence for Brexit and Boris Johnson, but none that convincingly explains why the English obsess about the weather, let their teeth go yellow or make love in the dark with their socks on. I care far less about Magna Carta or the strength of the Royal Navy than I do about our once-solid reputation for good manners – being eroded, alas, by iPhones and the invasion of American familarity." There is an obvious echo of George Orwell in both Lucas's approach (salutary lessons about Englishness drawn from literary classics) and in Stanley's cultural commentary (he fails to appreciate the artifice of his own prejudices - e.g. the "yellow teeth" trope originated as an American critique of NHS dentistry). The point is that Lucas and Stanley, like Orwell before them, are operating in a conservative register.

The British left has long been bedevilled by the conservative tenor of its dreams of a better society, combining a pre-industrial rural nostalgia with the sober respectability of the self-improving working class. This tends to be heightened whenever there is the threat from the radical left, and the reaction invariably emphasises an aesthetic and moral critique over a material analysis, hence the prominence of the literary Fabians in the early decades of the twentieth century, the instrumental revival of Orwell in the 1980s and 90s, and more recently initiatives such as Blue Labour and the commentary of John Cruddas that sought to mount an emotional defence of a working class culture that rejected continental theory (and the EU). A good example from 2017 was Julian Coman's eulogy for Robert Blatchford's Merrie England: "Labour needs to return to 'its roots in a kind of moral and civic critique of the excesses of capitalism'. This was the core thrust of Merrie England, and the original spirit of a Labour party that had its roots in religion, not Marxism. But during the 20th century, the “ethical tradition” faded as the parliamentary party became more pragmatic and managerial, while the left pursued the more confrontational Marxist route of class struggle".

Progressives will struggle to compete in the shaping of national myths not only because of the asymmetry of power in the media but because their own historical ignorance tends to result in them believing that there is a radical kernel within the conservative nut. A good example of that this week was George Monbiot evoking the Norman Yoke, apparently unaware that Hereward the Wake and his ilk were originally popularised as part of a Victorian anti-Catholic campaign and more recently in the service of Euroscepticism. The problem with reclaiming history, like reclaiming symbols such as the flag, is that it concedes the struggle at the outset. You might as well try to reclaim the monarchy or the House of Lords. Where the left has advanced in the war of position is in presenting an alternative history, and we know the left has been successful here simply because of the scale of the reaction against it since its breakthrough in academia in the 1960s. In many ways this has been an over-reaction, ignoring that most history courses at British universities remain conservative and that the comment pages of newspapers are full of rightwing historians complaining about being silenced.

As ever, the right has sought to hijack the left's techniques and language, hence initiatives such as the History Reclaimed group, which seeks to turn back the "woke" tide and thereby resist the demands for a full accounting of colonialism and reparations for slavery. This is arguably a more accurate and therefore honest use of the word "reclaim" than is found among progressives, making it clear that the right once monopolised narrative history and is determined that it should do so again. Is this a fight worth having from the perspective of the left? The second delusion of progressives bothered by the conservative near-monopoly on popular history is that winning the fight will somehow lead to progressive political outcomes, but this runs dangerously close to making history a fetish with magical properties. Just as putting a million people on the streets to demonstrate against the Iraq War did not stop that war, so religiously attending the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival to hear Billy Bragg sing A New England isn't going to result in the abolition of anti-union laws.