This week’s New Statesman is a special issue on Englishness in which we look at a nation in the grip of an identity crisis. Inside, Dominic Sandbrook provides a history of English radicalism, Mehdi Hasan disputes the claim that multiculturalism has failed, and Jon Cruddas argues that Labour must rediscover a politics of English virtue.
Elsewhere, Jonathan Derbyshire profiles the “Blue Labour” thinker Maurice Glasman, Samira Shackle asks if she is wrong to think of herself as equally English and Pakistani, and Helen Lewis-Hasteley talks to Antonia Fraser, who bemoans our obsession with class.
Also this week, Mehdi talks to Ed Balls, who admits that the last Labour government ran a structural deficit, David Blanchflower says there are unsettling parallels between Portugal and Britain, and Lana Asfour reports on a regime losing its grip on Syria.
All this, plus Kevin Maguire’s Westminster diary, Laurie Penny on abortion rights and Will Self on the resistible rise of William Hague.
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