BOOKBUSTER REVIEW: Another England
By Caroline Lucas
Published by Hutchinson Heinemann, £22
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
Ex-Green MP Caroline Lucas sets out, in her new book, to suggest ‘how to reclaim our national story’. Reclaim it from what? Well, from ‘exceptionalism and imperial nostalgia’, which, however you cut it, has predictably led to the rise of dark forces claiming a rather toxic form of ‘patriotism’. She quotes Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, who says that ‘nations and peoples are largely the stories that feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies.’ Lucas sets herself the task of suggesting a new narrative, a ‘coherent story’ to help us ‘thrive and prosper’.
Her focus is on England, and she sees a real possibility of Wales and Scotland gaining independence in the future, though by no means inevitably. She voices some serious questions about what a break-up of the Union might mean for us, whilst still seeking to place us squarely in the context of a ‘united’ kingdom, because both contexts are possible and ‘Englishness’ needs a more open culture than the current narratives offer. At a minimum, she suggests we push for an English Parliament, and offer a federated Britain as a solution to the centrifugal tendencies that risk tearing GB apart.
HEALING THESE DIVISIONS
Years of populist genuflection under increasingly philistine government have resulted in what Henry Sussman pithily calls a ‘cultural demolition derby’. I have not seen our country so riven by division and misdirected ire since the late 1970s, the 80s miners’ strikes, and poll tax riots. The rise of a disinvesting neoliberal elite that sell our country’s assets down the river whilst gaslighting the public about how damaging actual solutions such as a wealth tax or a universal basic income may be, mean the ‘right-wing’ have no ‘solutions’ to offer that won’t make things worse. A dwindling number of ‘one-nation’ uniting conservatives has led to an elitist and sociopathic government somewhat to the right, on many issues, even of Margaret Thatcher, though a few voices still exist, once deemed enemies but now, without having softened, sounding comparatively like the ‘voice of reason’.
Which just goes to show how far to the right the ‘Overton window’ has shifted. This concept was designed to ‘define the spectrum of acceptability of governmental policies’, but in fact constrains the spectrum to a tightly controlled range that disables most of the policies we most require.
It is our job to break the Overton window’s frame, and get a more cohesive and inclusive narrative to the fore. ‘The stakes could not be higher: the Right have come to revel in chaos.’ At a minimum, Lucas says, ‘if we are ever to have a chance of healing these divisions, the progressives have got to work together’.
WE ARE NOT ‘ONE ENGLAND’
The book begins with an overview of the country’s history, under the rubric ‘stories of England’. Since the second world war, at least, we have, as our empire crumbled, embraced a myth of Gloriana, and of a halcyon vision of Britain that sees us all living in a Powell & Pressburger ministry of (dis)information that grants us a utopian past wherein all us ordinary folk lived out our days happily in nice cottages with roses round the doors. We hark back to a non-existent time when every Englishman’s home was his castle. This is what Jello Biafra of The Dead Kennedys called ‘nostalgia for an age that never existed’.
There are real divisions within our country, causing anger and alienation. At present, the Right are dominating the story fed to the people, but their ‘solutions’ require more social breakdown. It is, of course, not accidental that they pursue a more divided Britain. A united community, inevitably running along class lines to some extent, is a danger to those weaponising intra-class hate to preserve their wealth at the expense of the masses. Misdirection of our energies, and a narrative that tars empathy and compassion as a ‘politics of envy’ (though only when they operate to rein in the Right) only serves to worsen conditions for millions of us. A socially and economically democratic political culture is heralded loudly as ‘communist’ and/or ‘woke’. Yet that is the only path that can save us. We are not ‘one England’ and we do not own our own country – Lucas declares that ‘the most powerful way to rebalance the interests of private owners and the common good is by shifting the focus towards taxes on wealth’, something the current ‘Labour’ government are too scared by the tabloid media to contemplate.
‘OUR SHARED HUMANITY’
Naturally, as a Green socialist, Lucas also discusses ‘the climate and nature emergencies’, which cannot be addressed without ‘another England’. She compares a reparative project to the ‘post-war settlement’, saying that ‘we need an equivalent collective story that equips us to respond to the climate emergency’. Yet she understands that the horse must come before the cart, and fixing our broken country with a more inclusive narrative to create a stable platform from which to launch a compassionate response to crises the world faces is a necessity. She book-ends her story with ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Jerusalem’. It is a Jerusalem for All that we need. A new ‘national story’, a peoples’ England, that challenges our elites without fear, and to positive ends, must emerge. The ‘right-wing’ offerings from the likes of ReformUK seek an exclusive and toxic anti-establishment story, only a leftist such story can offer actual solutions. The alternative is a narrative that scapegoats and ‘others’ powerless minorities, and we all know where that leads.
Lucas rounds off her concluding chapter with a discussion of John Donne’s 17th Meditation; you know, the one that begins ‘No man is an island, entire of itself; everyman is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’. His expression of ‘our shared humanity’ is as relevant today as the day that, 400 years ago, it was penned. It is this England, and that of the Chartists, the Suffragettes, the Diggers, and of the Charter of the Forest, that we must channel if we are to thrive.
Another England is available from Bookbuster, 39 Queens Road, Hastings TN34 1RE
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