What does it mean to be English? Let’s start with the fashionably confessional/genealogical. I am about the most English person I know. As far back as I can go - admittedly, like most ordinary English people, not very far - my forebears were unquestionably English. My mother’s family came from the old market town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, and my father’s from rural Cambridgeshire. I have never traced either branch back beyond my great-grandparents, who were tradesmen and clerks. But, given the relatively fixed family and community patterns of the southern English midlands, with relatively little outward or inward migration until recently, and my family’s decidedly non-exalted social status, I can safely assume that they all came from the solid, steady heart of England. Nothing Celtic, continental or colonial in there, though a bit of TV celebrity-style digging or a DNA test might unearth some surprises.

So, if I’m so bloody English, why do I find myself so generally embarrassed and often downright ashamed of it? Why have I, throughout my adult life, felt drawn to other countries and cultures, and carried inside me an elaborate (almost wholly unrealistic) ‘escape-plan’ for when life here becomes finally unbearable? Why, whenever I find myself amongst the English abroad - the tattooed, bloated, around-the-clock pissed, football shirt-wearing variety, or their complacent, condescending, wine-quaffing, socks-and-sandals superiors - do I insist on marching my family a further half-mile down the beach? Why do I start thinking in O-level French, German or Italian to convince myself I’m not one of them? Why do the English towns and cities where most of us live seem so mean and dull by comparison to the vibrant, civilized places in continental Europe Easyjet and Ryanair are so eager and ready to whisk us away to? Is it only a matter of lousy weather? And why do we persist, in our petty fog of regional rivalries, in thinking that everywhere else in England is even worse? Is there some general tendency in the English towards self-loathing, and if so, what are its specific contemporary triggers?

Blimey; a whole paragraph of questions. I’d better start providing some answers. In this essay, I want to begin thinking a way out of this distinctively English mess. I’m particularly interested in what I might call a ‘democratic left’ Englishness, as opposed to the boorish, braying, occasionally terrifying and essentially terrified Englishness we see all around (and, if we’re honest, inside) us. I plan to use the thinking of the great twentieth century libertarian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (an Italian with a recurring, somewhat puzzled fascination with England), and specifically his concept of the ‘national-popular’, to illuminate elements of our English ‘national identity’. That’s in both its negative connotations, what we have to feel ashamed of; and the more positive, what we might incorporate into a more intelligent, expansive and generous outlook on our own country and the rest of the world.

I’ve spent much of the last few years ruminating on this stuff, often while out walking with my dog in the real, physical English places I live in: the urban pockets, green wildernesses, long beaches and more managed rural landscapes of northern East Anglia, mainly Norfolk and Suffolk. This most English of the English regions, or at least those further parts that remain outside daily commuting reach of London, seems to me to represent the best and the worst of our country. Its largest and most important settlement, the ‘fine city’ of Norwich where I reside, really is closer in ‘feel’ and layout to the vibrant, civilized, manageable and easily walkable places explored on short breaks to Europe than to other comparable English cities. It is also closer, as both the proverbial crow and its contemporary low-cost airline equivalent fly, to Amsterdam than London. At the same time, it was once famously (and accurately still) referred to by the National Front as ‘the last white city in England’.

*Gramsci and the national-popular*

I have no idea whether Antonio Gramsci did much walking as an adult. For the last ten years of his life, during which he produced his extraordinary _Prison Notebooks_, he was only ever able to walk around his cell, prison yard and hospital ward. As a child, however, he spent much of his time roaming the Sardinian hills and fields, and recalls it regularly in his letters from prison as an obvious highlight in a troubled, poverty-stricken childhood. What shines through all his writings, in freedom or incarceration, is a deep appreciation for the feelings, traditions and perspectives of ordinary people, both in his native Sardinia and recently unified, mainland Italy. But his affection was fiercely realistic and wholly unsentimental. He was acutely aware of the contradictory impulses at work among the nascent Italian masses: from women like his mother holding together fractured families and communities, and the self-taught, determined and heroic activists of the 1919/20 Turin factory occupations, to ‘the scum of society’ he remembered hanging around the squares and bars of Cagliari and the ‘monkey people’ who embraced fascism.

Gramsci was always preoccupied with the social, cultural and regional tensions amongst the Italian people, from a ‘Sardist’ schoolboy composition calling for ‘the mainlanders to be thrown into the sea’ to his final essay as a free man, ‘The Southern Question’. This scrutinized the supposedly ‘scientific basis for regional prejudice’ propagated by the Italian Socialist Party among the northern industrial proletariat, as against the ‘backward south’. The Prison Notebooks make repeated reference to the processes whereby the Italian people are brought together and pulled apart. For Gramsci, the national-popular is a key element within the process of hegemony, whereby a particular social group represents its own interests as those of the whole nation. The success of this hegemonic project is measured by the extent to which other subordinate or ‘subaltern’ social groups accept this new ‘settlement’, more or less voluntarily, and are drawn into a ‘historic bloc’ around the dominant elite. We might call this, a little cheekily, ‘a coalition of the willing’, but note that in Gramsci it is a wholly real rather than rhetorical device. Together, these new social allies forge a national-popular identity and purpose, which becomes the new ‘common sense’ of the epoch, a ‘collective will as operative awareness of-historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and effective historical drama’. A further condition of the continued hegemony of the national-popular historic bloc is that it is constantly refreshed with new personnel, energies and insights, especially from subaltern groups’ own elites and intellectuals.

Gramsci sought to understand the attempts made over centuries to awaken this national-popular ‘collective will’, and the struggles to form a distinctive national-popular culture, alongside the mythology and iconography required to construct a national ‘story’. He was always especially sensitive to the question of language within a national-popular project: a common language is one of the primary sites wherein a nation coheres, and literally learns to talk and listen to itself. In our own time, this perhaps explains the extraordinary sensitivity over the uses and abuses of English, especially amongst certain sectors (Radio 4 listeners spring to mind) who rush to its defence at the slightest provocation, especially over suspected Americanisms. (This linguistic protectionism is even more evident in France, which Gramsci felt displayed a more pronounced ‘national-popular culture’ than any other nation, largely because of its thorough-going bourgeois revolution and because its intellectuals ‘tend to guide the population ideologically and keep it linked with the
leading group’.)

Gramsci attributes the relative historic failure of some countries’ attempts to forge a national-popular primarily to limitations within the ‘leading’ class of the society - in particular to an inability or unwillingness to represent its own sectional interests as the interests of the nation. The examples he cites are mostly drawn from Italian history, but he was also intrigued by the similarly untypical and conditional English ‘bourgeois revolution’. He suggests that the English bourgeoisie were never especially interested in forging a national-popular consensus: ‘instead of the bourgeoisie leading the people and winning their support to abolish feudal privileges, the nobility (or a fraction of it) formed the national-popular bloc against the industrial bourgeoisie’. (An elaboration of this idea formed one of the famous ‘Nairn-Anderson theses’ of the early 1960s, which basically issued a vote of no-confidence in the British ruling class.) It seems to me that the ramifications of this analysis for the formation of our society are immense, not least (as Gramsci goes on to note) in explaining the English tradition of popular Toryism, and the predominance of financial over industrial capitalism. Not to mention a divide between north and south, which is hardly less marked in England than it is in Italy.

British Labourism offers an equally resonant case study. When Gramsci says of the Italian Risorgimento ‘an effective Jacobin force was always missing’, he might just as well be indicating the recurrent failures of political leadership within the British labour movement. In particular, the lack of a ‘Modern Prince’ - by which Gramsci meant a coherent, consciously revolutionary party with a wide, deep mass base, such as only his own PCI ever came close to, certainly in Europe - points to the utter historic failure of the ‘militant’ wing of Labourism, the Communist Party of Great Britain. And the ‘British problem’ is not simply one of leadership, but equally to do with those who allow themselves to be led. As labour historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Gareth Stedman Jones have established, the class-consciousness of the oldest and proportionately largest proletariat in the world was formed and expressed primarily through lifestyle, recreational pursuits and appearance, manners and ethos, rather than political action, intellectual formation or deep-seated ideological affiliation. As Stedman Jones puts it: ‘Its dominant cultural institutions were not the school, the evening class, the library, the friendly society, the church or the chapel, but the pub, the sporting paper, the racecourse and the music hall … both impermeable to outsiders and yet predominantly conservative’. What political agencies have emerged from the British working class, in the various forms of the labour and trade union movement, have tended to be shallow and ineffectual, imbued with a quasi-religious mythology and iconography and a narrowly electoral or sectional approach. There has been little sense of a class that seeks to represent itself as the leading actor in a new national story.

Gramsci insists that what is required of a political party is a conscious and systematic programme of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ conducted by ‘intellectuals who are conscious of being organically linked to a national-popular mass’. While this notion of party leadership is not as vanguardist as some notable twentieth-century models, it still seems far enough from populism, in our own deep-dyed ‘anti-elitist’ time and culture, to make me at least feel deeply uncomfortable, and apprehensive at the prospect of such a programme of reform. Geoffrey Nowell Smith and Quintin Hoare, the editors of the _Selections from the Prison Notebooks_ published in 1971, plainly also feel uncomfortable with ‘the national popular’ and add a note of their own on the concept, which they describe as ‘one of the most interesting and also widely criticized ideas in Gramsci’s thought’. They argue that it is important to stress that it is a ‘cultural concept, relating to the position of the masses within the culture of the nation, and radically alien to any form of populism or national socialism’.

Hoare and Nowell Smith’s clear unease with the term betrays their underlying allegiance to the _New Left Review_ end of British Gramscianism, which, amongst other things, was severely critical of PCI leader Togliatti’s application of the Gramscian legacy to post-war Italian politics. But it also serves the useful purpose of demonstrating much of the British left’s traditional discomfort with the ‘nation’ and pretty much any aspect of the ‘national’, especially when applied to the geographical and social entity of England. There are some good reasons for this. We are still haunted by fascism and Nazism, embarrassed by their socialist origins; and during the twentieth century socialism was linked to nationalism in dangerous ways in many countries. Furthermore, the history of the English nation-state is generally one of military aggression, conquest and violent dominion over other peoples. From the Holy Land of the Crusades to Cromwell in Ireland and the clearance of the Scottish Highlands; the colonization of the New World and Australasia; the enslavement, imperial occupation and exploitation of large parts of Africa and Asia; to more recent military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, we English lefties have much to feel deeply uncomfortable about. Even Tony Blair, our furthest outrider, recently felt moved to apologize for some of it. The anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist, ‘internationalist’ and solidaristic currents of the British left run deep and close. And, while many other of our traditional stances have been jettisoned in the last twenty or thirty years, this one has if anything been re-invigorated by its coupling with anti-racism and more recently anti-globalisation.

A contemporary variant on this latter theme - what we might call a social-democratic anti-globalisation - argues that the nation-state is redundant in an era of unchecked global capitalism and that we must shift our attention and efforts to supra-national institutions and their requirements of our population. This could be seen as a generous interpretation of the ‘Third Way’, especially in its Brownite version. But it seems to me to be an approach based on an economism of just the kind Gramsci railed against in early twentieth-century social democracy, and in the ‘orthodox’ positivism of pre first world war marxism. Both are fixated on the economy and the state, with no sense for the separate, ‘relatively autonomous’ arenas of society; not to mention the cultural or ideological or the politically contingent. Yet the national-popular has become, if anything, more important in this latest phase of globalisation, not least as a form of cultural and ideological protectionism for groups who feel threatened and marginalised.

This is surely why the rhetoric and symbolism of national identity has become so evident across the globe - sometimes to murderous effect - as an expression of popular grievance and resentment at the effects of the neo-liberal agenda. Like all subaltern cultural forms, it ultimately serves the purposes of consolation and adjustment to new hegemonic realities, but it is still a major part of daily material reality. Thus, within the still vigorous ideological corpus of Thatcherism, the patriotic heart of Englishness still strongly beats, even as the world status of the English nation-state continues to decline. This is one of the ramifications of the ideology of Thatcherism that the British left has found it difficult to understand, not least because our latest political ‘project’ (New Labour) is turning out to be an embarrassing ‘transformist’ adaptation and deepening of it. Nevertheless, any politics that seeks - as Thatcher and Blair did - to create a hegemonic sense of what a country means to its inhabitants must grapple with this question.

We might argue that it’s all right for Gramsci and the Italians to talk about the ‘national popular’. They don’t have quite so much, by way of imperial conquest and dominion, to feel ashamed of. And what they have had, in North and East Africa, can easily be blamed on Mussolini and the fascists, who were no less rapacious in their treatment of parts of Italy itself. Gramsci himself was amongst the first to identify, in his writing on ‘the Southern Question’ and elsewhere, the colonial relationship between the industrial/ financial capitalism of the Italian north and the peasant, agrarian south. But then hang on a minute. What about the relationship between the wealthy South east of England and large parts of the rest of the country, especially the industrial north of England where I was born? Wasn’t that, and isn’t it still in some ways, oppressive and exploitative? (It is even more so, according to a recent IPPR report, after ten years of New Labour government.) And Italian fascism was not outside Italian culture: it was, and still is, deeply rooted in the oppressed, ‘subaltern’ south, and is still a vigorous current in the rest of its ‘modern advanced democracy’, just as conservatism, xenophobia and racism are deeply rooted in the British proletariat and most of its post-industrial fragments.

So, as Gramsci might ask us, is there something specific and peculiar in the British left’s discomfort and occasional loathing of the national, and in particular the English? And might it go some way towards explaining, or at least illustrating, the almost total disappearance of the communist, socialist or even social-democratic currents from our country’s political system and culture? Perhaps we should start by asking exactly what is ‘our country’?

Follow the links on the right for Part 2...