Do you, as Keir Starmer once averred, “keep a flag at home?” For many Brits, the thought of garbing oneself in national symbols, other than during football tournaments or royal jubilees, feels like overdoing it.
Patriotism for many of us is a twist in the complex cocktail of identity, not the main measure of it. We will need to get used to stronger brews however, as Reform’s whopping poll lead produces a Labour fightback on the grounds of who really represents the nation’s best interests and Starmer seeks a language to reconnect his government to many dissatisfied voters.
“Reclaiming the flag,” and how that will work in an unsettled and reactive national mood, is the subject which would once have felt peripheral – but has swung into the heart of Labour politics.
As its conference begins in Liverpool, Starmer finds himself locked in a brawl for his own future, tacitly acknowledging that the weapons he has brought to the fight so far have been blunt or downright ineffectual. A part of the remedy is seen as the need to define himself against Reform’s patriotism-based surge – and also combat more alarming manifestations in the form of Tommy Robinson’s ugly ethno-nationalism.
Hence the launch of a new narrative seeking to position Labour in a national discourse which sees the proliferation of the St George’s flag across the country and mass rallies around white English identity.
This is not only an anti-Reform message. It is, according to one of a quartet of senior ministers Starmer has specifically asked how to combat right-wing ideas on Britishness, a moment when the PM can get “off the defensive and into a fight about the future of the country”.
That sense of joining a battle that matters beyond party politics and allows Starmer to look more like a statesman than a harried leader at bay from his own side and many more detractors beyond, is reflected in his eve of conference interviews and pledge to join “the fight of our lives” to beat Reform.
Starmer-speak can be woolly. This time, there was no mistaking the cutting edge of his attack on Nigel Farage’s party as “racist” and “immoral” and its risk of “tearing this country apart”. It’s easy to say why this is hard yards for a centrist leader whose avowal of keeping flags at home landed oddly with his recent past as an urbane professional Londoner with an earnest interest in international human rights laws.
It was also ambiguous: the flag he wants to “reclaim” is the English flag and the dominant emblems daubed across the country in a splurge of red crosses on white backgrounds. That gets more complicated, because of what it excludes as well as includes – it is hardly a rallying cry for Labour in Scotland or Wales – but also because, outside the safe space of football, it is often associated with a more romantically conservative view of nationalism. And moving further rightwards and in more aggressive settings, the flag can feel unwelcoming to people who have settled in the UK or who have a background as an immigrant.
This segue of patriotism into something more threatening is a dividing line Starmer has identified and thinks might play to his advantage. For one thing, the patriotism channelled by Farage also has its own challengers among the more raucous flag-wavers attracted to Tommy Robinson. Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London a few weeks ago showcased a mix of noisy resentments on immigration, working class alienation from politics, “Britain First” tributes to outright anti-globalisation Maga philosophy and what-have-you-got grievance.
But this mood of leveraging anger makes many voters queasy. Reform’s leadership is being dragged rightwards, leaning heavily into a more draconian message this week, with its pledge to include people granted indefinite leave to remain in the sweep of possible deportations.
The opportunity here for Labour is that many of its voters in 2024, now attracted to Reform on the grounds that they want a tougher immigration and asylum system, are not necessarily hostile to incomers getting settled status if they are law abiding and contribute to society. Polling still shows a clear majority of people more sympathetic to this idea than the notion of testing incomers every five years for their suitability to live here.
For a start, it would require enforcement that would bring the UK a lot closer to the hard edges of the ICE removals of migrants at the behest of Donald Trump. There is not yet much evidence that this is attractive outside a hardline ideological core, which is why Starmer has taken the risk of calling this a “racist” approach.
Taken together, this explains a policy shift in the Government towards measures like the proposed “Brit-card” digital IDs, which as well as the promised boons in terms of a one-stop access to all state services, would act as a pretty clear sign of who passed this threshold or did not. Today, Shabana Mahmood also suggested another rise in deportation targets and a tightening of interpretations of human rights law.
None of this will be smooth and a lot of it will discomfit many of the people who were attracted to Labour in an era of greater focus on the benefits of inward migration. But it does have the benefit of Labour taking the fight to opponents, rather than the other way round.
What Starmer – echoed by Rachel Reeves – is now saying is that those days are gone, and that parties which do not accept a more intense voter focus on national preoccupations will end up outside power. To make this recipe work, Labour will seek to become more draconian on enforcing policy on asylum and immigration and be seen to be so, while condemning the harsher undertones of the new forces on the Right.
It also means that reclaiming the flag is really about reclaiming the initiative – and defining a patriotism which stops short of becoming a country fixated on defining who does not fit into it. A lot rides for Starmer and the rest of us on whether he is right.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and co-host of Politics at Sam and Anne’s podcast
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