IN 1381, the English ruling class trembled at the name of one "Jack Straw", leader of the Peasants' Revolt against the iniquitous Poll Tax. In the following century, the standard of revolt was raised again, and "Jack Straw", it was said, haunted the
land. In the early 21st century, another Jack Straw re-appeared to support war on Iraq, against British public opinion, then, in the midst of corruption scandals implicating the entire Westminster elite, urge caution on constitutional change.
The evolution of Jack Straw shows both the triumphs and limits of Britain's radical tradition. In this hefty tome, Edward Vallance uncovers a "secret history" which, he claims, provides a welcome alternative to the "Nazi-obsessed" historiography currently fed to our schoolchildren. We would not be as free as we are today, he argues, without a genealogy that includes Alfred the Great, Magna Carta, the Levellers, the Chartists and the Suffragettes.
What emerges from Vallance's fluent, if not particularly original, narrative is that the battle for a free-er Britain has been long and bloody. The guillotine was rarely used in these isles, but seditious rebels were hanged, drawn and quartered up until the 19th century. Medieval revolts involved the carnivalesque annihilation of prelates and property, whilst ruling class hatred and fear of "rustics" led to repression verging on sociocide. The English civil wars cost proportionally more adult male lives than the Great War, while religious and ethnic hatred provided an even more deadly cocktail in Scotland and Ireland.
Loyalist mobs and a jingoistic press, including a newspaper called The Sun, murdered and harried sympathisers of the French Revolution. In 1819, the Peterloo massacre of unarmed demonstrators, including many women, had a death count comparable with that of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989. Indeed, student protestors in Beijing recited Shelley's 'Mask of Anarchy' as they were mowed down by the People's Army.
Throughout the centuries, conservative chroniclers have striven to show the dangerous consequences of rebellion, and exulted in the 'exemplary' punishment meted out to Jack Straw and his ilk. Paradoxically, such writings helped keep the spectre of radicalism alive, whilst a combination of ruling class self-preservation and pressure from below led to the extension of the franchise and the creation of the Welfare State. That said reform was neither immediate nor coherent: the Great Reform of 1832 could have been adopted in the 1640s; most Chartist males deemed women too inferior to exercise full citizenship.
Overall, Britain's radical tradition places emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities. For these reasons, argues Vallance, New Labour was in fact a return to "very old Labour", pre-Clause 4. Perhaps also for these reasons, the reader can be turned off by the unending righteousness of a tradition deeply marked by Protestant nonconformity. As compensation, Vallance does offer us some indigenous "hopeful monsters": the sexual communism of the Ranters; Muggletonian ale-house prophets, another 17th century creation, the last of whom died with punk rock in 1979; brilliant and dissolute MP John Wilkes, who had a scandalous liaison with a man pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man; without forgetting the Black Dwarf, "a four-foot high shoemaker given to cross-dressing".
But British radicalism frequently drifts into xenophobia. It is little surprise that the BNP, as well as Billy Bragg, salute Wat Tyler and the Levellers as their own. Unfortunately, the belief that Britishness and freedom go together infects Vallance's own narrative. Although the author concedes that Britain and England are not co-extensive, and that the Celtic fringe produced Jacobins such as the United Irishmen and Scotland's Thomas Muir, there is a curious absence of pages devoted to either the campaigns for Home Rule and civil rights, or the struggles against slavery and colonialism.
World wars, European unification and globalisation barely figure in this book. But perhaps a little less insularity would help.
