Andy Beckett points out the risks in Keir Starmer’s talk of “the national interest” (Is Keir Starmer’s professed patriotism a strength or a weakness?, 31 December). He acknowledges that Clement Attlee successfully rode his patriotism to electoral success in 1945. But where Attlee’s patriotism seemed a genuine conviction, there’s been an expediency to Labour leaders draping themselves in the union flag lately. It comes across as a panicky reaction to bad opinion polls rather than a genuine love of country. The British public can sense this disingenuousness and they don’t take kindly to it.
Where the left falls down is that, in its rush to be ostentatiously progressive, it has abandoned the field of patriotism and allowed it to be churned up and rehashed in the shape of a slightly nasty nativism à la Priti Patel. Unless Labour actively makes a different case, though, rather than simply playing dress-up, Starmer can scream until he’s red, white and blue in the face. Nobody will take him seriously so long as the only vision of patriotism is the one presented by the send-them-back brigade of Tory ministers, because they might as well vote for the people who really believe it.
There is hope for Labour yet; Starmer can still seize the initiative. He should stake the progressive left claim to patriotism, pointing out that Britain at its best is so much better than the parochial, them-and-us fortress of Tory hard-right dreams. This is the Britain that millions from different parts of the world have come to call home, the Britain that (even now) has a genuine claim to be a world leader in international aid, the Britain of vaccine pioneers, of community volunteers, of villages opening up their homes to refugees. Labour has so far missed a trick in not associating these things with what the UK can be as a nation. If it does so, Labour can start to redefine patriotism and reconquer the ground it abandoned to the Tories.
Dr Hamid Khan
London
• In a good article, Andy Beckett refers on several occasions to Starmer’s patriotism. However, to which country or state is that patriotism attached? The article has a photograph of Starmer wearing an England football top. In less than 20 years, Labour has fallen from the majority party in Scotland to a single Westminster seat. Labour has never organised in Northern Ireland, where the “patriotic” parties are all unionists, whose preference is the Tories. In Wales, although Labour has most Westminster seats, it is in power in the Senedd due to a deal with Plaid Cymru and increasingly stresses its Welshness.
So, Starmer’s patriotism seems to be an English nationalist patriotism. Increasingly, people in the four countries identify as English, Irish, Scots or Welsh, rather than British. But Labour has for decades been scared of saying what Englishness/Britishness connotes other than the royal family, the imperial history, war and the union flag. As far as the section of the public to whom these things matter are concerned, the Tories and parties further right do these things more convincingly. So, I think Mr Starmer will be “one of Labour’s patriotic failures”.
Alasdair Macdonald
Glasgow
• If Keir Starmer listened to Nesrine Malik (For Labour and the Conservatives, racism is really all about reputation management, 2 January) or, better still, asked her to be his chief adviser, Labour would reap the reward for being a party of principle, integrity and courage – a party I might once again be proud to be a member of.
Alan Wolinski
Otley, West Yorkshire
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