AT THE START OF THE 1960S, EP Thompson published his magnificent and path-breaking The Making of the English Working Class. Writing history would never be the same again. Thompson, then a lowly extra-mural lecturer at Leeds University, had invented "
history from below". This was the collective (and subversive) story of the common people – in marked contrast to the top-down Oxbridge approach concentrating on the institutions and political hypocrisy of the British ruling class.
Thompson summed it up: "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, the 'utopian' artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Soutcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not."
Anyone attempting to follow in EP Thompson's footsteps has a hard job, as does Edward Vallance in his new, self-styled "radical" history of Britain. First off, it is difficult to match Thompson's gorgeous prose, which attains the stature of literature. Vallance, a regular contributor to the BBC History Magazine, tends to be journalistic: short and prosaic. His avowed theme is to trace a radical populist tradition running through British politics, from Magna Carta to the NHS.
Immediately, we hit a definitional problem: are we talking about Britain, or England? EP Thompson was clear on the distinction: "A note of apology to Scottish and Welsh readers. I have neglected these histories, not out of chauvinism, but out of respect. It is because class is a cultural as much as an economic formation that I have been cautious as to generalising beyond English experience …The Scottish record, in particular, is quite as dramatic, and tormented, as our own."
Unlike Thompson, Vallance seems myopic regarding the separate political traditions within the British Isles – or the fact that Britain as a state did not exist before 1707. As a result, he is confused about the true subject of his book – the history of English (rather than British) dissent. The tension between the plebeian mob and its rulers defines the very heart of Englishness itself. It is a "two fingers to you" tradition that is still alive and well in the BBC Question Time audience braying at MPs defending their ludicrous expenses. Or even, in a much bastardised form, in the willingness to vote BNP as a protest.
Where Vallance does make a telling point is in arguing that this (English) radicalism is not the same as being left wing: "The 'state socialism' that formed one strand of the Labour Party's ideological heritage … arguably sat less well with most British radical movements than did the historical Liberal/modern Conservative emphasis on low taxation, individualism and self-reliance." Thus David Davies, who resigned from the Tory front bench to fight a by-election in protest at the government's bid to extend detention without charge to 42 days, is more a traditional English radical than the authoritarian Labour Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith.
There is much that is interesting in Vallance's book. For instance his resurrection of the "Commotion Time", the little-known popular revolt against the enclosure of common lands, led by Robert Kett, which engulfed southern England in 1549. But by missing the elephant in the room – English class identity – Vallance fails to answer the question he sets himself: why has the radical, anti-establishment tradition in English politics endured for so long? Answer: because protest is a permissible safety valve for the system and romanticising it is necessary to keep it under control.
England has always been run by an oligarchy, whatever the democratic veneer. The alienated lower orders rarely queried this "natural" state of affairs. All they could do was riot or protest until the ruling order grudging accepted the modicum of reform necessary to quiet things down. Thus it has been with the Levellers, the Chartists, the Suffragettes and the 1980s poll tax protesters. The common reference point among these English dissenters is an innate sense of personal liberty and fair play, and those are laudable values. But it has always been too easy for the ruling oligarchy to incorporate such dissent by buying it off with piecemeal reforms.
Thus we arrive at the top-down version of British history that EP Thompson challenged – the fantasy of the peaceful evolution of British-English political institutions towards perfection, known as the Whig interpretation of history. In this ideologically-laced history, all political roads lead inevitably to the Mother of Parliaments at Westminster. In reality, the Mother of Parliaments has turned out to be a cesspool of corruption.
Wedded to a narrow, romantic definition of radicalism, Vallance blithely ignores centuries of armed insurrection by the Irish against the British colonial state. Whatever you think of the United Irishmen, the Fenians, the Irish Republican Brotherhood or the IRA, it is bewildering to find them excluded from an essay on popular dissent. Ditto the Scottish Jacobites, the 1820 Rising, the Highland Land League, John Maclean and Red Clydeside, or a century of agitation for Scottish Home Rule – none of which get a mention in Vallance's history. But then, in Ireland and Scotland, dissent is always about (potentially) overthrowing the British state – not reforming it.
Patrick Hannan was the BBC's Welsh political correspondent for 13 years. His book is a more self-conscious attempt to analyse the essence of "Britishness" after a decade of devolution. Hannan's point is that "Britishness" is based on being an outsider – at least for the Welsh, Irish and Scots part of the population. He thinks that a combination of devolution, membership of the EU and mass immigration have contrived to make the English feel outsiders too. As a result, we are all supposedly in the same cultural boat. But that is sophistry.
Hannan makes the same mistake as Vallance, which is odd considering his Welsh perspective. The reason he and Vallance go in search of Britishness and don't find it is because there is no such common identity. Britain is a state – and an increasingly rickety one at that – not a nationality. These two books are the latest contribution to the debate on Britishness and should be taken seriously because of that. But they are far from being the last word on the subject. That will come from the bottom up.
