Politicians reach for the union jack when they are out of ideas – Labour is no different

An internal party review has recommended that Labour needs to reestablish its patriotic credentials, which shows how far the party is from the better answer it urgently needs to find

Leader of the Opposition Keir Starmer at PMQs this week (Reuters TV)

For most of the last half decade, the small patches of green space outside Westminster were the scene of a near constant battle of flag waving.

Brexiteers waved the union jack. Remainers waved the EU flag. Whenever each side was having its day in the sun, in the form of an organised march or protest or demonstration, small pockets from the other side would appear, waving their flag of choice, principally to wind up and antagonise their opponents.

It was one of a very large number of category errors by the Remain campaign. Willingly ceding control of your own national flag to your opponents is staggeringly naive. When a million Remainers marched through London in 2017, they did so with what they believed to be the very best interests of their country at heart. But almost none of them waved their own country’s flag as they did so.

To put up almost no opposition while the other side claim that they and they alone are the voice of patriotism is a strategic misjudgement from which it will take a long time to recover.

There is a reason both mainstream US political parties campaign in red, white and blue. Turn on the TV to an American political rally and it will still, even now, take you a good few seconds to work out which side it’s for. Neither will ever cede that precious brand value to the other.

It is partly to seek to correct this error that we learn that an internal party review has recommended that Labour – and Keir Starmer – needs to reestablish its patriotic credentials if it is to stand any chance of regaining what it lost at the 2019 general election.

It’s a very messy business indeed. The Labour Party has only ever succeeded when it has found itself able to speak with the authentic voice of the nation. In the 1940s, when it effectively set up the independent nuclear deterrent, and was instrumental in establishing Nato, it had the wrong side of an emergent Cold War to define itself against. “We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs,” said Ernest Bevin of the atomic bomb. “We’ve got to have the bloody union jack on top of it.”

In 1997, despite being a party grown from the industrial trade union movement, it was quite easily able to be a kind of vanguard for a burgeoning modern, metropolitan identity (which really does still exist today, despite determined attempts to pretend it doesn’t).

But the challenges facing a Labour Party in 2021, that thinks it must try and speak for, or represent, any kind of defining national mood or character, are almost too overwhelming to consider.

Covid-19 has, to a certain extent, masked the deep divisions between Leave and Remain, that absolutely have not gone away, and will not go away. Brexit, people seem to want to forget, only happened a month ago. Its consequences are only now becoming real.

Keir Starmer leads a party that still, overwhelmingly, thinks Brexit was a terrible idea, but must win back the minority of its voters that did not, without losing the rest. It will be up to Mr Starmer, as leader of the opposition, to consistently point out where Brexit is failing. In a truly through-the-looking-glass world, it will be Mr Starmer’s job to point out that, for example, Devon-based fisheries, or Scottish cheese companies are going bust because of Brexit. But standing up for British business, for ordinary British workers, will actively harm his patriotic cause.

His route to government is very close to impossible without winning back support in Scotland, where a clear majority of people seem not to even want to be British anymore. Scotland is allergic to Conservatives, but the rash appears on Labour.

Blair and Attlee, of course, the latter more than the former, had big ideas that underpinned their authentic power to speak for the nation.

This, surely, is where Mr Starmer’s real challenge lies. Labour can’t speak for Britain without speaking for both boomer and millennial, without having something to offer both those to whom everything has been given, and for whom the simple aspirations of life have been made almost impossible. Find a way around this very tough challenge and the rest will follow.

For now, the lazy reaching for the union jack shows only how far the party is from the better answer it urgently needs to find.