A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries - The Men and Women Who Fought for Our Freedoms [Hardcover]

This is an absorbing if ultimately limited account of the major episodes in British history in which popular movements have ranged themselves against the Government of the day to press for socio-economic and political change. From Magna Carta (which Vallance puts into perspective as something rather less than the mythical foundation-stone of our freedom that it has since become), through more genuinely revolutionary moments like the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, Cade's and Kett's rebellions of the following two centuries (all put down with savage force), the author pauses to dwell at some length on the Civil War, and the challenges posed by the Diggers and Levellers in the 1650s. There's then a curious historical lull until the late 18th/early 19th centuries, when Tom Paine and an upsurge of revolutionary fervour abroad lead us on to Luddism and the hideous state brutality of Peterloo and the Six Acts, and the repression of Tolpuddle. In his in-depth analysis of Chartism and the Suffragettes (on whom he is particularly illuminating), Vallance is at his most interesting, showing how universal suffrage, rather than revolutionary change, became the dominant and enduring theme of protest.

He broadens the insights from this analysis into a general, and (it seems to me) over-comfortable conclusion that gradualism is `the British way' of bringing about political change. There is, sadly, a frustrating absence of reflection on how contemporary protest conforms (or not) to this thesis, with little detail on anything later than the Cable Street riots. Despite this, Vallance ends his book with a solemn warning that, as Parliament has regularly shown itself to be no friend of the people, it is up to the people to be vigilant in ensuring that rights hard won over the centuries are not lost at a stroke of the legislature's pen. A fascinating tour of some of the uncomfortable but necessary way-stations on the route to the state we're presently in - though of course it remains to be seen whether his gradualist thesis will hold...

This is a book on 'radical' history by someone who does not like radicalism, and as such it cannot help but be deeply dishonest. In many cases Vallance explicitly has a go at other radical histories (dubbed disparagingly as 'marxist') for their overly radical tone. While I am not a marxist and find those dogmas within historical writing to be very tiresome, I also do not agree with Edward Vallance's take on 'radicalism', which is in fact nothing more than the 'rights' and liberal values that have already been attained within British politics. These weak voting rights and equally weak protective shields within parliamentary democracy are for him the 'radical' outcome he is pleased with, while any more radical ideas that didn't make it into the mainstream of British politics (or have since been crushed) are kind of brushed aside.

It becomes apparent then that the author has an axe to grind throughout the book: he wishes to debunk more radical accounts of history in favour of a circular logic that says that those movements that resulted in the rights we have now were the true radicalism, while those radical ideas which didn't make it were not to be taken seriously in the first place. There is one deviation from this pattern which is also the most serious dishonesty in the book. The rights of workers, as fought for through many decades and even centuries by the workers themselves, are barely mentioned. The word 'strike' does not appear in the index, nor can I find a mention of the 1926 General Strike that threatened the authority of government (admittedly I started skim-reading towards the end, not wanting to waste too much time on such egregious nonsense so do correct me if it's in there).

In fact the entire history of socialism is bizarrely condensened into a long section about women's suffrage and socialism, with almost all the attention paid to women's suffrage. This is followed by an 'interesting' interpretation of anti-fascist action in Britain (according to him it was affection for parliamentary democracy, not direct action, that defeated fascism - an unprovable assertion but let's not worry about that hey?). I don't even describe myself as a socialist and think that most socialists made grave mistakes in an espousing of authoritarianism which I find highly objectionable, but to write them out of history? This is the dishonesty of propaganda and I would urge you to at least read other sources before blithely taking it seriously as history.

There are some bits that aren't so bad - he joins in a string of recent attempts to rehabilitate Luddites as radicals rather than mere conservative reactionaries. This chapter is probably the best of the book. However it doesn't excuse the general tone of sidelining the radicals he doesn't like (the ones who are *too* radical, in other words).

To give you an example of how strong this author's bias is, he attempts to downplay the radicalism of the Putney Debates (between Levellers and New Model Army leaders during the Civil War) by saying that there was very little talk of universal male suffrage at the Putney Debates. Instead, he says, there was much more focus on the idea that 'every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government'. So keen is he to use this to downplay the radicalism of the Putney Debates that he appears not to notice that this latter idea is far, far more radical than the mere process of voting every few years. If taken to its logical conclusion it undermines the idea of the nation state (whether or not the speakers at the debates intended it that way) and speaks of a radical freedom much greater than that of the freedom to vote. But Vallance is now so caught up in his own intellectual dishonesties that he cannot see that he has incriminated himself from his own mouth. His 'proof' of a less radical interpretation of the Putney Debates actually operates as a proof of his bias.

In conclusion, this is a book of 'radical' history the purpose of which is to defend the status quo. I urge you to read other books instead (or as well, at least) such as Christopher Hill's wonderful The World Turned Upside Down - a book relatively 'unpolluted' by the marxism Vallance hates so much, and much more inclusive and much more fun than this book.

This magnificent work is an astonishingly wide-ranging and erudite history of British Radicalism, covering historical episodes as diverse as Magna Carta, the Levellers, Tom Paine, Luddism and the fight for women's suffrage within its monumental scope. Indeed, the real revelation of this book is that Vallance's sophisticated treatment of these topics, particularly virtuoso when dealing with how subsequent ages understood an episode, actually shows that the connections between them are much more complex than one believed when one picked it up. This does make the book a harder intellectual work-out than it might have been in the hands of a weaker historian, for there is relatively little common structure or simple narrative to link the sections, although there are amusing, surprising, obscene or insightful revelations frequently enough that working through it is never a chore. Moreover, coming to a full understanding that the British radical tradition is not so much a single golden thread as a complex multicoloured tapestry repays the effort that this book demands and deserves, and is a lesson I wholeheartedly recommend to both contemporary radicals and their conservative opponents.