Labour is right to talk about patriotism
You don’t have to be a flag-waving nationalist to understand that any party must at least appear to support the country it intends to govern
Photograph by Chatham House on Flickr
‘It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God save the King” than of stealing from a poor box. All through the critical years many left-wingers were chipping away at English morale, trying to spread an outlook that was sometimes squashily pacifist, sometimes violently pro-Russian, but always anti-British’. - George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn
As the Labour Party begins its annual conference, so continues an effort to expunge from its image the worst excesses of the Corbyn years. Chief among them, a perceived deficit in patriotism. Up and down the country, the party lost voters who saw the previous leadership as unwilling and incapable of standing up for the national interest. Keir Starmer is clearly out to change that.
Labour’s new slogan, proudly superimposed upon a Union Flag, is not exactly subtle: ‘A New Leadership’. However, as far as the party is concerned, a year on from a crushing election defeat and six months into a deadly pandemic is not the time for subtlety. As Starmer used his keynote speech to strike a patriotic tone, Lisa Nandy, the shadow foreign fecretary, told the BBC: ‘we stand up for Britain, we stand up for British people, we stand up for British interests and we will always put that first’.
Fair comment for a woman who seeks to represent the British people on the world stage. Some, however, have not taken to it kindly. Clive Lewis, the Norwich South MP and former leadership candidate, accused the party of ‘tackling to the right’. Others suggested that Nandy was appropriating the language of ‘Britain First’, the obscure far-right organisation perhaps best known for ‘invading’ British mosques.
To paint Nandy as some kind of nationalist stooge is obviously absurd. The Wigan MP has been a long-time defender of Palestinian rights and is a passionate internationalist who marched against the Iraq War. Rather than adopting right-wing langauge, her comments were part of a much needed effort to take back patriotic rhetoric from the right. The real problem here is that a not too insignificant portion of the British left appears incapable of realising that left-wing politics can be inherently patriotic in their nature.
For almost it’s entire history, the Labour Party had no issue with patriotism. And why should it have? As the self-proclaimed political home of Britain’s working class, it seeks to represent some of the most patriotic voters in the country. Clement Attlee, the party’s most cherished leader, was a war veteran who took a bullet for his country and later led Britain into NATO. Ernest Bevin, his foreign secretary, famously proclaimed that Britain must not only build the bomb but put a ‘bloody Union Jack on top of it’. Even Michael Foot, a man mocked for wearing a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph, was a fervent critic of appeasement who supported Britain’s role in the Falklands War.
Unfortunately, just over five years ago, the Labour Party elected as its leader a man who not only cared little for patriotism but who’s entire worldview considered Britain’s global influence to be a negative one. With him, he brought his friends from the CND and the Stop the War Coalition, some of whom subsequently got jobs within the leader’s office. For a while, their foreign policy views, be it their support for the IRA, or Hamas, or their cuddling up to dictators received little notice among the electorate.
That all changed in March of 2018 when a pair of Russian military intelligence officers poisoned five British citizens with a deadly nerve agent. One, a Wiltshire resident unrelated to the intended target, later died in hospital. As news of the attack broke, Corbyn and his team appeared to do everything but cast blame upon the likely culprit. The country which they sought to govern had been attacked with a chemical weapon. Yet there was Corbyn, suggesting Britain send a sample of the Novichok to Moscow, just to check if it was theirs. In the months and years that followed, multiple Labour insiders would go on to cite the episode as the start of its post-2017 decline.
Personally, I have little interest in performative patriotism. Anyone who believes any government, or any country, is acting from pure altruism is, as far as I’m concerned, being dreadfully naive. But I am also not running for anything, and it seems rather obvious that any leader, any party, should at least appear to support the country they intend to lead. Especially when the past five years have been categorised by failure to do just that.
