Keir Starmer’s plastic patriotism

Ingurland football shirts, pork pies, Ross Kemp. Downing Street’s special St George’s Day reception yesterday really had it all – summing up the cringey, deracinated, centrist-dad vision of patriotism that our flag-bothering prime minister Keir Starmer appears desperate to inflict on a bemused nation.

Having spent the best part of five years bringing his own Union flag to practically every public engagement, desperate to overcome Labour’s Corbyn-minted reputation as a full-blown threat to national security, Starmer was keen to hug the St George’s Cross close yesterday. No10 was decked out in red-and-white bunting. In his short address to assorted well-wishers, Starmer dubbed himself a ‘proud Englishman’.

As the great comic writer Graham Linehan has observed of Starmer, the PM is the master of ‘tell, don’t show’ – the inverse of the scriptwriting rule of ‘show, don’t tell’. His words always speak louder than his actions and his words aren’t all that loud to begin with. Such is Starmer’s desperation to overcome the sense that he is an out-of-touch London lawyer who would sooner die in a ditch for the ECHR than Merrie England, he feels the need to constantly tell us he’s patriotic in a way that only leaves you more suspicious. Like someone shouting ‘I am a good person’, or ‘I am not a sex offender’.

So, what makes Starmer proud to be English, then? You’ll be unsurprised to learn it all starts with Euro 96: the Year Zero for centrist-dad patriotism, only recently supplanted by the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. (Starmer was ‘there at Wembley’, apparently.) What was once derided as 90-minute patriotism is apparently all today’s English metropolitan elites have to draw on.

I’ve no reason to disbelieve Starmer when he says he loves England. But it’s striking how difficult he and today’s centre-left ruling class more broadly find articulating this affection, beyond a laundry list of sporting events, snacks and staycation destinations. More the Lakes and Melton Mowbray than Shakespeare and the Civil War. Although, perhaps this is to be more expected of Starmer, a man with so little cultural hinterland he once flatly told the Guardian he ‘doesn’t have a favourite novel or poem’.

Now, the patriotism of the English today is undoubtedly worn a little more lightly than aloof arch-traditionalists would prefer: rooted in community and national fellow feeling, but articulated more in terms of popular culture than ancient custom. Rather, the public’s suspicion of Starmer and Labour isn’t so much that they dislike England – or have an insufficiently deep appreciation for its lore – but that they dislike the people who live here.

In his address, Starmer talked about the need to ‘reclaim our flag’ from the scumbags who threw bricks at mosques and migrant hotels after Southport. Indeed, centre-left patriotism – whenever it is attempted – seems always to be an exercise in the negative, a kind of damage limitation – begrudgingly flying the flag so as to show the dumb plebs that you can be patriotic and not a racist thug. As if ordinary people don’t already know that, and don’t already reject the poisonous identity politics we saw explode on to our streets last summer.

The discomfort with Englishness among the cultural elites has long been bound up with this fear and loathing of the masses in general. After all, England is where the vast majority of the British live. The English, summoning up caricatures of string-vested skinheads with bluing tattoos, are written off as the bigoted dolts who backed Brexit, who remain highly sceptical of Labour, who are now Reform-curious. Working-class voters who are moving towards centre-right parties, supposedly against their economic interests. By contrast, Scottish ‘nationalism’ could be indulged by the London great and good, particularly during the Tory-Brexit years, because it offered at least part of the country a faux-progressive escape hatch from the idiocy of the majority.

You could say Keir Starmer’s plastic patriotism has already succeeded on a superficial level. According to More in Common, 40 per cent of voters now see the party as patriotic, which is double the proportion of the Corbyn years (admittedly, a low bar). But the problem obviously runs much deeper. The sort of England (and indeed Britain) voters are demanding is one Keir Starmer – a man who proudly says he prefers Davos to Westminster; who fought tooth and nail to overturn the EU referendum result – is constitutionally incapable of delivering. One in which the nation matters and borders matter because voters matter. Who’s afraid of England? More like, who’s afraid of the English?

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater