There are distinctive features of Englishness that can inspire hope – let's emphasise them
This article by former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas is part of our Voices series on how to fight hate, from the Autumn 2026 issue of New Humanist. To read the rest of the series, subscribe now.
The 2024 riots in England and Northern Ireland didn’t come out of a blue sky. A substantial minority of people still do not accept that we are all equal citizens. In one 2024 survey, 28 per cent of people agreed that “Muslim people will never be as British as other British people are.” In a poll of Conservative Party members the same year, 58 per cent agreed with the proposition that Islam was a threat to British values.
Right-wing politicians and media encouraged and normalised these views by repeating outlandish accusations, such as the assertion by the then Conservative Party chair Lee Anderson that Islamists had “got control of” Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.
On one level, Keir Starmer’s response to the riots was effective. He saw that the sooner the rioters were brought to justice, the sooner some kind of sanity would prevail. But as his mentor Tony Blair might say, he needed to be tough on the causes of the riots. These included a Tory government that poisoned political debate and normalised Islamophobia, and a mass media where columnists could describe those seeking asylum as “vermin”.
But there was also the left pretending that English nationalism would go away if ignored for long enough. At the same time, Labour have failed to challenge prejudice and racism with sufficient force. So we have a vacuum, and into this crawl some strange creatures trying to take the Conservative Party closer to Reform UK.
It doesn’t have to be like this. Scotland has thugs and racists, like every other country in the world. But Scotland has, in recent years, written itself a new story in which Scottish people are generally welcoming to the outside world and treat migrants as equal citizens. This story reinforces positive attitudes. It encourages people to be their better selves. It gives them confidence that Scotland can both change and be true to itself. The story is itself endorsed by symbolic acts, such as adopting the term “new Scots” in place of “migrants”, and creating a Sikh tartan. Myth-making? Of course – but in the service of a positive idea.
We know by now that the English do not stand apart from the rest of the world. We are not cleverer than others, or morally or physically superior. But, as I set out in my book Another England, there are distinctive features of Englishness that can inspire hope; above all, the distinctly English belief in the value of rules and traditions in preventing exploitation and tyranny.
It is there in the myth of Robin Hood taking from the rich and giving to the poor, and in Elizabeth Gaskell’s support for the artisans and labourers organising to protect wages and working conditions even under the threat of draconian punishments. It is even there in “Rule, Britannia!”, half hidden by the brash expansionism of the chorus, in the rejection of tyranny – and the belief that we all have inalienable rights, and our rulers cannot take away our land, or our liberty, on an arbitrary whim.
We still see ourselves as a country that champions democracy and the rule of law, even when the reality is being eroded. Indeed, we believe so strongly that, for the English, our homes are our castles that we cannot grasp that those walls are being torn down with new state laws and powers and extralegal surveillance. That mythic sturdy independence is also revealed in the endless struggle against those seeking power over others. We need to celebrate the spirit of the Peasants’ Revolt, the Charter of the Forest, the Diggers, the Chartists and the Suffragettes.
But we also need to bring back the more traditional elements of England’s history which were once seen as essential to our sense of self: Magna Carta, the English Civil War, the “Glorious Revolution”, the rise of parliamentary democracy, an independent judiciary and an impartial civil service, the rooting out of corruption and, finally, the acceptance that every adult should have the vote. It is revealing that those who most loudly claim that our history is being trashed are the same who support attacks on these institutions and the dismantling of these hard-won rights.
As the writer Ben Okri puts it, “Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.”
Finding and telling stories that speak to the truth of England’s past and present, and inspire us to imagine and pursue new and better futures, might turn out to be one of the most transformative acts we can undertake.
This is an extract from Caroline Lucas’s book “Another England: How to Reclaim our National Story”.
