Labour’s plastic patriotism is fooling no one

The ‘news’ that Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper not only cherish and respect the England and Union flags, but also lavishly decorate their own living spaces with them, carries the unmistakable aroma of a co-ordinated communications strategy.

‘I’m very encouraging of flags. I think they’re patriotic and a great symbol of our nation’, the UK prime minister told the BBC on Monday, adding that he hangs the England flag in his flat and ‘always sits in front of a Union Jack’. Then, on Times Radio, the home secretary urged her fellow Britons to wave their flags with pride and ‘put ‘em up everywhere’.

So it turns out Starmer and Cooper do not, as some have suspected, recoil hissing from British flags like a demon confronted with Holy Water. They actively love the red, white and blue. So much so that barely a surface of their houses is apparently undraped by it.

Supposedly, even Cooper’s shed – a jarring enough concept in itself for this quintessential urban operator – resembles a VE Day parade in full swing. She has, so she said this week, not merely flags, but also bunting in there – a dismal form of gaiety more associated with school fêtes and car sales forecourts than common or garden patriots. How long before she has a wavy-armed inflatable St George convulsing in the driveway to greet arrivals at Cooper’s Castle? Or has poor hubby Ed Balls dolled up like Chaucer’s Knight as he delivers the afternoon tea?

The campaign known as ‘Raise the Colours’ has badly wrong-footed the Labour government. Union flags and crosses of St George have appeared across the country in recent weeks, either like a viral rash or the long-awaited return of colour to the cheeks of the nation, depending on your persuasion. And they have had the tang of authenticity that Starmer and Co find so elusive. They proclaim a sentiment as fierce, implacable and resolute as Labour’s rhetoric is windy, peevish and damp, which leaves ministers looking like the globalist stooges their most swivel-eyed detractors have always claimed they were.

The flags emphasise Scrutonian oikophilia (even if that wouldn’t necessarily be the predominant term employed in the Epping Wetherspoons). But the modern Labour Party, being a party of managerialism, international law and treaty obligations, regards simple patriotism in much the same way that Barack Obama regarded the ‘God and guns’ of his own white working class.

Ironically, it was the arch left-wing radical, Saul Alinsky, who most famously clarified the power of the kinds of protests we are currently witnessing across England. The clearest meaning of your action, he observed, is revealed in your enemy’s reactions. It draws them out into the open.

Thus, the most powerful effect of Jews putting up images of the hostages taken by Hamas on 7 October 2023 came from seeing Palestinian partisans furiously tearing them down. Equally, it was precisely in the haste with which local-council operatives were dispatched to remove British flags that the protest’s power lay. The mask was off. Nothing could delineate more clearly the two-tier attitudes many had long been warning against. Where Palestinian flags have not only been tolerated but also actively protected, expressions of national pride have been repressed. Union Jacks are treated as somewhere between swastikas and Dutch elm disease.

So, in a moment of crisis, Starmer and Cooper naturally consulted their comms experts to agree on what a hypothetical, plausible human being might think and say about all this. And the strategy was to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the colour-hoisters, before gently beginning to wheel left.

Thus, the new line – that we all love the British flag but it is important not to let it be ‘hijacked’ by those who seek to ‘divide’ – makes perfect sense for Labour. Even if it is, in truth, as hard to swallow as an unbuttered yard of red and white linen.

Starmer and Cooper may not have a decisive, disqualifying moment in their past quite as vivid as the notorious tweet sent by Emily Thornberry over 10 years ago. But Starmer’s infamous confession to Emily Maitlis – that he would instinctively choose Davos over Westminster – came close. We know that, however sincerely he might want the best for Britain, he does not see that as coming about through any mindset that would have been recognisable to his father’s generation.

He and Cooper are emblematic of the Great Realignment that overtook Labour under Tony Blair, which has seen it more at home in technocratic and cosmopolitan talking shops than its old crucibles like the shop floor or the Methodist hall. Starmer, a former human-rights lawyer, and Cooper, with her technocratic, policy-wonk reputation, have never felt comfortable with public expressions of patriotism. At best, they regard them as quaint indulgences.

They might not feel as visceral a hostility towards our national flag as that expressed by academic Kehinde Andrews, to whom the English flag is a hate symbol basically on a par with the Jolly Roger and the hoods of the KKK. Nor have they historically cheered on the Crown’s avowed enemies quite as loudly as, say, Jeremy Corbyn has in the past. But their public stances have long leaned toward ‘inclusivity’, multiculturalism and internationalism – values that don’t naturally align with flag-waving patriotism. Their north London milieu – urban, cosmopolitan and progressive – hardly screams ‘flag-flying heartland’. They are more likely to avow the values of Paddington Bear than of the dragon-slaying saint.

Nor do their warnings that the flag should unite us rather than divide us, hold much water. No one, other than Starmer, is remotely confused as to which flags are being used to divide us. It is not the Union Jack that is demanding our sectarian loyalty to the cause of a ‘Free Palestine’ or our obedience to trans dogma.

There was a time when Labour had John Prescott for the traditionally left-wing patriotism that Starmer and Cooper have publicly struggled with in recent days. Whether my new neighbour in Hove, Angela Rayner, can follow in Prezza’s footsteps remains to be seen… If she still is my neighbour, or even the deputy PM, by the time you read this.

But Starmer the flag-shagger? The plastic patriot act is fooling no one.

Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.