"Our diverse literary heritage reveals that we do not need a single national story"
I bought and read this book after seeing Caroline Lucas speaking with Zack Polanski during a live session of Bold Politics. It's a book that tries to reclaim "Englishness" from the weaponising that the Far Right have been using it for.
Overall, it's an interesting read, lots of history, both good and bad, lots of literature and how stories and poetry has been used over the centuries to act as a force for political change for good.
Solidarity and standing up for what's right is the theme the ran through for me.
From a technical perspective, I didn't enjoy that nearly every single page also came with a long paragraph of footnotes - which normally I skip (because it goes off to the end of the book and back, but these were inline on the same page), and completely broke the flow of what I was reading. I wish that these had simply been part of the written content rather than regular sidebars.
Then as I read, I felt like perhaps I wasn't quite the audience to fully appreciate the book. There's certainly a good chunk that is accessible, but it often felt like if I worked in politics this content would make more sense.
I did come away with 23 highlights and wanted to highlight more, partly to remember what I had read, partly as a "wow, I did not know".
I think if you enjoy your history and commentary and literature, then you'll enjoy this book. I struggle to read non-fiction in any reasonable amount of time, so I often find by the time I get to the end of a book, I forget the important things from the start!
23 Highlights
the result came at 4.39 a.m. on 24 June 2016: 'We're out'
Many people describe themselves as British rather than English, because the British state was supposed to be more than England
In the ten years of his reign, 1189 to 1199, he spent around six months in England. Put simply, Richard ruled over England but there was little sense that he shared an English identity with his subjects.
And no doubt in the years to come, the Robin Hood myth will be reinterpreted once more. Perhaps we will want more than ever a character who is opposed to greed and power, and who combines resistance to the powerful with compassion and decency for those in need.
barely a century ago several million UK citizens chose to leave and set up a country of their own: the one we now know as the Republic of Ireland.
Such literary traditions demonstrate how powerful the national – and political – identities of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland remain. But strikingly, there is no equivalent literature in England, at least not to the same extent.
Office for National Statistics. In 2023, the top 10 per cent of people earned about £5,900 a month, while the bottom 10 per cent earned around £750
Their book The Spirit Level also explored the sociological processes behind these connections, centring on trust and anxiety – how we, as social animals, thrive when we have a secure place in society and a reasonable status.
The National Insurance system had been built on the principle of contributions made by those in work. When work dried up during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and contributions with it, the government reneged on its promises. A little like an insurance company saying that – because there have been more fires or floods than it expected – it would stop honouring its pledges,
Yet almost another century on, we are at risk of forgetting the lessons learned by Shute and his generation. The dismantling of the welfare state – starting with unemployment benefit, then moving on to other support including for disabled people and now the NHS itself – has been a catastrophe for England.
job which is merely serving a business intent on making money, with no real benefits for others or for society as a whole, where there is no possibility of 'getting on', no team spirit among your colleagues, no feeling of helping others, can create the same physical and mental malaise as unemployment
Many people have jobs they love which they would do for nothing if they could, so long as they had a reasonable standard of life and so long as others weren't getting rich at their expense.
the Charter wasn't formally repealed until 1971 (by a Tory government, in case you were wondering), over its 754 years its principles had come under relentless attack
My note: The forest charter
In the age of enclosure, all this changed. Between 1760 and 1870, more than four thousand Acts of Parliament confiscated 7 million acres of commons, in what has rightly been called an act of organised theft.
we have 'lost' – or, less euphemistically, destroyed – 80 per cent of our heathland, 85 per cent of our salt marshes and 97 per cent of our wild-flower meadows
As he says: 'We cannot protect something we do not love, we cannot love what we do not know, and we cannot know what we do not see. Or hear. Or sense.'
Lewes District Council has become the first council in the country to recognise the 'right of rivers', following a groundbreaking motion brought by the Green Party in February 2023, which will recognise that the River Ouse in East Sussex has intrinsic rights such as the right to flow and the right to be free from pollution.
(We could start by recalling that, in the strict sense, we haven't had an ethnically English king or queen since 1066.)
twelve jurors in Bristol had no trouble seeing the difference between criminal damage and the celebration of a notorious slave owner in the centre of a modern English city. We can as a nation rethink our history and free ourselves from the self-serving myth-making of the past.
humans fully understand the consequences of their untrammelled pursuit of science and technology, and do they ultimately have the moral capacity to accept responsibility for what they have unleashed?
My note: As with AI
Whereas hope 'means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it'.
Today, we are learning the painful truth about English exceptionalism: that it is a deeply dangerous creed, leading us treacherously into stagnation, isolation and chaotic decision-making
Our diverse literary heritage reveals that we do not need a single national story,