The real mystery is why it is controversial for a political party to want to be seen as patriotic. That a row has erupted in Labour over a leaked internal presentation suggesting Keir Starmer should “use the [union] flag, veterans and dressing smartly” to try to regain the trust of voters shows just how far the Party still is from power.
The strategy is aimed at winning back what Labour is now calling “foundation seats”: the “red wall” constituencies that fell to the Conservatives in 2019. But its relevance goes wider than that, since voters from Workington to Walthamstow need reassuring about the Party’s motives and loyalties. Already Starmer is following the advice. Earlier this week, he presented a party political broadcast beside the red, white and blue flag.
But left-wingers have condemned the approach as dangerous and inflammatory. Clive Lewis, the MP for Norwich South, accused Starmer of “absorbing the language and symbols of the Tory party” as if the Conservatives were somehow the only people able to celebrate Britain. “It’s not patriotism; it’s Fatherland-ism,” he said. Actually it’s uglier than that, it is itself dog whistle politics of the worst kind, somehow equating the Union Jack with the far-right.
It is also political suicide. Unless Labour starts to act as if it loves the country it wants to lead, it will never get elected. A YouGov poll yesterday found that 61 per cent of voters see themselves as patriotic, compared to 32 per cent who don’t. Only 35 per cent of people, however, think the Labour Party is patriotic, while 41 per cent think it is not patriotic and 24 per cent don’t know. By contrast, 55 per cent consider the Tories to be patriotic, compared with 24 per cent who think they are not.
Anthony Wells, YouGov’s director of political research, says patriotism is “almost a given” for political parties—or at least it should be. “It is a basic assumption that a party will like the country they come from and want the best for it. For Labour, it is only an issue because it feeds into the break between the different parts of their voting coalition—between traditional working-class supporters who see nothing wrong with overt patriotism and more middle-class, liberal graduates with an internationalist outlook who often find it questionable.”
It is abundantly clear which side the voters are on. The Labour leaders who have won power—Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair—have all been proud to wave the union flag. Peter Mandelson even made a British bulldog called Fitz the star of Labour’s 1997 party election broadcast, describing the bulldog as “an animal with a strong sense of history and tradition.” Blair himself drove home the message, defining Labour as the “Party of patriotism” and denouncing the “bogus patriotism” on the right. “We’ll stand up for British interests but I do not believe that being pro-British is being xenophobic,” he declared.
One of the things that voters most mistrusted about Jeremy Corbyn was his lack of patriotism. On the doorstep in 2019, Labour candidates were confronted repeatedly by anger about their leader’s worldview and suspicion about his loyalties. The response to the Salisbury poisoning, when Corbyn initially failed to condemn Russia for the Novichok attack, was catastrophic for the Party’s reputation.
In her book Beyond the Red Wall, the former Labour strategist Deborah Mattinson identifies “pride, place and patriotism” as core values that Labour needs to rediscover if it is to win back the voters lost in 2019. She quotes Julie, a part-time cleaner from Darlington, who said of Corbyn: “he cares more for Britain’s enemies than he does for Britain.” By contrast, focus groups were convinced that Boris Johnson loved his country. A comment from one voter called Mick was typical. He was no fan of the Tory leader, he said, but: “whatever you think of him, country comes first with him.” As Mattinson told me, Labour needs to understand that “if you don’t love your country the red wall will never love you.”
Shortly after the 2019 general election, Pat McFadden, the MP for Wolverhampton South East, wrote an article that began like this. “Patriotism. It is a test Jeremy Corbyn failed to meet. It is a test his successor must pass. Corbyn’s anti-western worldview, shared by his most senior advisers and cheerleaders, goes to the core of his political identity. It separates him from every postwar Labour leader and, as we saw in the election, from millions of Labour voters.” McFadden, one of the few “red wall” MPs who retained their seats, is now a member of Starmer’s frontbench Treasury team and he stands by every word he wrote in December 2019. “It is a basic prerequisite of political leaderships that voters believe that you think the country you are trying to lead is a force for good in the world,” he told me. He is completely right, and it shows the scale of the challenge Starmer faces that so many in his Party disagree.
