Sat, Oct 25, 2025 page7

• UK’s Labour must look to history as it seeks to tout patriotism

  • By Adrian Wooldridge / Bloomberg Opinion
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  British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has at least learned one important lesson in his lackluster 15 months as a leader: His Labour Party’s only chance of saving the country from a hard-right Nigel Farage government lies in reclaiming the mantle of patriotism. Parties could survive all sorts of economic misfortunes — the Conservatives survived 14 years of stagnant growth and Brexit-inspired turmoil — but Labour cannot survive the suspicion that they would rather wave the European flag than the Union Jack.

  Starmer is doing no better at reclaiming patriotism than he is at improving productivity. The prime minister makes all the right gestures.

  “I always sit in front of the Union Jack,” Starmer said.

  “I have been doing so for years,” he added, before boasting that his family have “a St. George flag in our flat.”

  And his chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is obsessed with reforging Labour’s links with regular people. There is something plastic and insincere about all this flag sitting — as if the prime minister is playing the role of a patriot rather than speaking from the heart.

  This is partly a problem with Starmer’s personality: He is a mechanical speaker with no hinterland other than football and no knowledge, as far as one can tell, of British history or literature. It is partly a problem with Labour members of parliament.

  John Podsnap, a character from author Charles Dickens’ novel Our Mutual Friend, said that “this island is blessed... by Providence, to the direct exclusion of such other countries as there may happen to be.” The Labour Party has become the party of the reverse Podsnaps.

  Above all, it is a problem with Labour’s last big attempt to deal with patriotism. Former British prime minister Tony Blair tried to meld modernization and multiculturalism into a comprehensive answer to the question of “Who are we?” He wanted to make the UK shiny and new — “cool,” in the phrase of the time. He justified mass immigration as a new variation on the ancient theme of the UK’s global reach. Too often modernization reeked of dislike of traditional folkways. And insistence that “diversity is our strength” was mocked by social blights such as the grooming scandal or the spread of ethnic segregation.

  Yet failure is not preordained. Labour has a rich tradition of progressive patriotism to draw upon: a tradition that understands the strength of the common bonds that bind people to the land of their birth or adoption; that celebrates British peculiarities rather than denigrates them; and that recognizes that the UK was, in some respects, the first country to embrace limited monarchy and individual rights.

  This progressive tradition of patriotism runs like a golden thread through British history from rebels such as Robin Hood who resisted the “Norman Yoke” imposed by William the Conqueror to the great figures of the Labour past. The 17th century Puritans who overthrew King Charles I were inspired by a vision of restoring an “English Commonwealth” based on the principles of popular sovereignty, equality before the law and religious tolerance. In the 19th century, the Anti-Corn Law Leaguers who got rid of the protectionist Corn Laws and the Chartists who prepared the way for the extension of the franchise prided themselves on using peaceful methods when so many continentals were turning to violence.

  This progressive tradition produced some of the finest patriotic phrases in the English language. Labour delegates regularly sing poet William Blake’s Jerusalem at their annual conference. Author Percy Bysshe Shelley urged the British to “rise like lions after slumber, in unvanquishable number.” Novelist George Orwell described how red pillar boxes and suet puddings entered our souls. Only fools would neglect this tradition of eloquence in favor of the bland banalities of public relations speak — or allow it to be hijacked by the right, as seems to be happening with Blake and Orwell.

  This tradition also produced some of Labour’s greatest political achievements. Former British prime minister Clement Attlee was inspired, above all, by the belief that “love of country was a noble and unifying thing,” as historian John Bew makes clear in his biography Citizen Clem. The 1945 Labour government created a National Health Service, a National Coal Board and, in enshrining the welfare state in law, a National Insurance Act. The 1964 Labour government, which started off full of promise, drew on the same tradition, with then-British prime minister Harold Wilson making it clear that British socialism “owes very little to continental socialism and has its roots in distinctively British institutions. Its ideas are the modern expression of that great tradition of British radicalism.”

  Starmer needs to put reconnecting with this great tradition of British radicalism at the heart of his next few years in power. This must involve recognizing his own limitations: Surrogates will have to help him sing the song of patriotism that too often turns to cliche on his tongue. It must involve recognizing McSweeney’s limitations, too: The Irishman is a backroom technician who specializes in the politics of prose rather than poetry. He needs people who read historian Richard Henry Tawney’s The Radical Tradition and writer Edward Palmer Thompson’s The Peculiarities of the English for fun.

  It must also involve reinventing the radical tradition for a more multicultural age. Blairism might have dissolved into empty cliches. Progressive patriotism must find a way of celebrating diversity without denying the problems that unprecedented levels of immigration combined with poor assimilation have produced. The UK has unique advantages in absorbing immigrants that are rooted in its peculiar history as a composite country and in its overseas trading links. The first British Indian-origin member of parliament, Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree, was elected for Bethnal Green in 1895. The first British mega-mosque was built in Woking in 1889.

  A difficult task, to be sure, but not an impossible one, given the strength and flexibility of this radical tradition.

  Attlee had said that you cannot love your country without loving the people who inhabit it in all their infuriating variety. Here, the Labour Party has a distinct advantage over Reform. While Reform is defined by its dislike of significant sections of the population, Labour is at least trying to overcome its loathing of “white van man” — a loathing encapsulated by Labour Member of Parliament Emily Thornberry’s 2014 tweet showing a modest house draped in flags and a white van parked in front, which was branded “snobby” in the media and obliged her to resign from the party’s front bench.

  One of the great moments in British parliamentary history came in September 1939, when then-Labour Party deputy leader Arthur Greenwood, standing in for a bedridden Attlee, was interrupted during a hesitant speech about Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

  “Speak for England,” the heckler said. Greenwood finally got the wind in his sails and delivered an oration that doomed then-British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and his fellow appeasers.

  If the Labour Party can overcome its hesitant start and learn to “speak for Britain,” then it could deliver an equally devastating blow to Farage.

  Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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