Watching Labour politicians talk about the flag is like witnessing someone have a nervous breakdown. A sense of rising panic seeps out of them. Their eyes bulge and start darting around the room. They seem like they’re seconds away from collapse.
“I’m proud of our flag as a patriotic symbol of our nation,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote on X yesterday, speaking the most unimaginable gibberish. “Like lots of people I’ve proudly got one up at home.” Really? Do lots of people actually have a flag up at home? Where? On a mast in the front garden? Framed above the mantlepiece? Draped over the bed so that their future children can be conceived on it?
It got even weirder in a BBC interview. “I’m a supporter of flags,” he said. “I’m very encouraging of flags, I think they’re patriotic and I think they’re a great symbol of our nation.” As he spoke, it was possible to feel yourself leaving the land of reason, standing on the deck as the boat pulled away from the shore.
He’s a supporter of flags? Incredible. Who exactly opposes flags, which group objects to the existence of symbols on fabric? Who has ever questioned whether flags are patriotic, or that they’re a symbol of the nation? What kind of mind-scrambled nonsense was this?
Things somehow got worse when Home Secretary Yvette Cooper was asked whether she had flags at home. “We actually have Union Jack bunting on our garden shed,” she said, a petrified grin stamped on her face. “I’ve got St George’s flags, I’ve got St George’s bunting, I’ve got the Yorkshire rose bunting as well, I’ve got Union Jack flags and tablecloths, we’ve got the lot.”
Cooper, like Starmer, is a deeply intelligent human being. She can grasp the intricacies of an issue with extraordinary speed and comprehend the crucial element. If you were to see her for the first time in this interview, you would conclude that she is a maniac. Flags drive Labour politicians mad.
There is another way of talking about this. Five days ago, the Labour MP Mark Ferguson pulled out a St George’s Cross during a social media video. You could tell that there was something different about him. He seemed calm and composed. He did not appear to be afraid, or paranoid. He simply spoke in normal language about normal things. “Sometimes I hang it out the window, but often it lives in a drawer, folded up, fairly neatly. It’s my flag, it’s our flag, so I try to look after it.”
It was striking that this seemed so ordinary. He took it out for football tournaments and St George’s Day. He did not seem desperate to prove anything. He then went on to say something beautiful and important.
“For me it’s about pride and joy, togetherness – yeah, sometimes it’s about that heartbreak on the pitch, but it belongs to everyone who calls England home. ‘England, your England,’ as Orwell wrote. The England of the city, the town, the river and the rolling hills, whether it’s been your lifelong home or not… We wave this fabric to show that we’re together even though we’re different.”
By mentioning Orwell, Ferguson was positioning himself in a specific progressive heritage. The 1940 essay he referenced urged the British left to accept and embrace patriotism. This was partly because of its tremendous animating power: “One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognises the overwhelming strength of patriotism.”
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But it was also because it was simply impossible to deny the relationship you have with your country. “The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul,” he said. “Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side of the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.”
Progressive patriotism is open, diverse and welcoming. It is grounded in shared experience and shared identity, not blood and soil. But it is also something else, which is rarely articulated. It is bottom-up, rather than top-down. It blossoms from personal experience. It emerges from our individual lives, not from the demands of the press or the judgement of our neighbours.
We don’t express patriotism because people insist on it, or because we feel we should. We express our patriotism however we like, when we like, as we like, or not at all. This is what authentic national sentiment looks like. This is the key to speaking about our country like a normal human being.
Ironically, Starmer and Cooper’s reaction actually makes them look less connected to the country than simply saying nothing at all. But if they look towards their backbenches, they’ll discover a better way of doing things. Ferguson showed a far finer grasp of what patriotism looks like. They’d do well to learn from him.
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