JAMES Francis's article on the Chartists (8 February) oversimplifies some important issues. There was a wonderfully revolutionary impulse to Chartism. But it existed side by side with backwardness and chauvinism.
A feature of the monster demonstration in 1848, for example, was a fist fight occasioned by some of the English marchers taking exception to a speaker being French. And in Scotland large sections of the Chartist movement were organised on religious lines, with Sunday prayer meetings, Bible quotes, and specially appointed preachers.
In any case, many backward ideas were inherited by the British working class from its pre-history. The colonies, the Navy, the merchant marine all contributed. Indeed, there were large-scale anti-Welsh riots in London in the 1480s, and there's a good case for pushing the origins of English/British chauvinism in the masses back to the Scottish and Welsh wars of the 13th and 14th centuries — hundreds of years before imperialism.
I don't think we will make much progress in tackling the political backwardness amongst British workers unless we realise just how all-embracing and deepseated it is.
As a subsidiary point, there is a case for saying that the left theoreticians in Britain must take some blame for the persistence and growth of political backwardness, because there have rarely been attempts to communicate theory. The private language of, say, New Left Review or Radical Philosophy guarantees the continuation of backwardness just as much as concentration on 'bread and butter' issues.
As well as a less one-sided approach to labour history, could I urge your series to look at some of the attempts to communicate political theory and internationalism, particularly in recent times.
MARTIN O'LEARY (Glasgow)