Once again on Englishness. Useful to understand, not a political programme
In the wake of the European football more has appeared on Englishness. One example is from John Harris in the Guardian, a piece that might be described in some circles as ‘mere impressionism’. That really means, could do with more research.
More pointedly Socialist Worker has criticised a turn to Englishness and progressive patriotism as a turn to the right, an accommodation with ruling class ideas. It argues that there is a similarity to the New Times project that Marxism Today ran in the 1980s. This argued that the working class had changed and the ideas of the left must change with it.
There is nothing wrong with measuring ideas for relevance against material circumstances. The specific issue with the New Times project was that it led to New Labour. Its reasonable to note however that in various ways some of the key architects of the project such as Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbawm did come to recognise this in various ways. Hall for example argued that while the left needed a new approach the mistake was that if failed to develop one but simply tweaked Thatcherism.
Elsewhere History Workshop held several conferences on patriotism, which were more nuanced. They looked at the history of the working class and perhaps particularly the Tory and right-wing currents that did not feature in E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. The point here was not celebrate them and suggest adopting their views. Rather it was to try to understand them and then ponder what the left could do about it.
Here however Thompson had done some of the work in his discussion of the Freeborn Englishman. He (and it was a he) was a contradictory character. Sometimes on the left, sometimes not.
For example Thompson notes that the Freeborn Englishman claimed a right to riot against oppression founded in the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688.
The Freeborn Englishman did not however claim many rights but what he did not like was authority telling him what to do, or restricting his activities. Hence things like freedom from arbitrary arrest, jury trial and equality before the law were very important matters.
The British Government of the early nineteenth century, referred to by William Cobbett as The Thing, liked, as Thompson notes, to flatter the Freeborn Englishman by claiming that it held to these principles, whereas OTHER COUNTRIES did not.
Certainly the Freeborn Englishman was not an internationalist or an enthusiast for what happened in other countries.
Here the left by 1848 had moved on. International solidarity became a key feature of working class politics not least because in the face of British imperialism as Thompson again noted there was ‘so bloody much to oppose’
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