As I remember it Gregor Maclennan's article on the CP Historians Group was making the point that people's history recuperated patriotism in a popular form, citing Hill's article 'The Norman Yoke' in which he celebrates the strand of radicalism that sees the ruling class as essentially foreign and unpatriotic.
Maclennan was a structuralist, one of those that Thompson effectively demolished in his Poverty of Theory (?). But waspish as Maclennan's criticisms are, he has a point. The long march of labour was a refracted version of the Whig history that saw Britain's past as a progressive march towards democratic political institutions. -- James Heartfield