Wrapped up in the Union Jack: Starmer's patriotic turn.
| Author | Goes, Eunice |
After almost a year leading the Labour Party, Keir Starmer has said remarkably little about his agenda; but one thing seems clear: whatever is proposed by the Labour Party at the next election will be neatly wrapped up in a Union Jack. In the relatively few speeches, interviews and public statements he has made since being elected leader, Starmer has made clear that patriotism will play a leading role in his agenda.
Starmer's 'patriotic turn' is informed by his interpretation of the causes of Labour's last four consecutive electoral defeats, and, in particular, by the catastrophic results of the 2019 general election, which reduced the party to its lowest number of MPs since 1935. These are still early days to make a definite assessment of 'Starmerism', but the narrative he has weaved so far suggests his priority is to win the next general election. To that end, the Labour leader has focused his energies in winning back the trust of voters who abandoned the party in the last two decades by tapping into a patriotism which combines conservative iconography with some vague futuristic elements. But this take on patriotism may be problematic, because it offers little to Labour's core voters. By emphasising a conservative interpretation of patriotism, Starmer risks alienating Labour's younger and progressive voters on whose support the party's electoral success also depends.
Labour and patriotism
Keir Starmer is not the first nor will he be the last leader to use a patriotic narrative as a key component of Labour's electoral strategy. Clement Attlee's cross-class patriotism sought to present Labour as a true national party; Harold Wilson's meritocratic and scientific patriotism sought to portray a party in tune with the buzz of the swinging sixties; Tony Blair hoped to win the votes of Middle England by combining traditional patriotic symbols like the bulldog with the ironic and optimistic spirit of Cool Britannia. (1)
More recently, Ed Miliband's One Nation patriotism tried to address the country's anxieties with immigration by extolling the virtues of Britain's ethnic diversity, generosity with strangers and Britain's traditions of progressive and radical patriotism. Starmer's predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, tried to articulate a patriotic narrative combining progressive patriotism with internationalism and universal values. (2)
In short, different Labour leaders, and in particular those Starmer has singled out as inspirations (Attlee, Wilson and Blair), have used patriotism to widen the party's electoral base. At every juncture, the party's different patriotic turns sought to address a structural weakness that has affected not only the Labour Party but other socialist parties. As Adam Przeworski showed in his seminal book Capitalism and Social Democracy, socialist parties could never rely solely on the votes of the working class to win elections. After all, the working class never constituted an electoral majority and not all workers voted for socialist parties. (3)
For most of the twentieth century, socialist parties tried to win the support of the professional middle classes by de-emphasising class conflict. As Sheri Berman reminds us, this was often done by co-opting 'themes and appeals from the right'. This was the case with the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party Per Albin Hansson, who in the 1930s championed a patriotic vision articulated in the idea of Sweden as 'the people's home'. (4)
In Britain, Clement Attlee was equally successful in portraying Labour as the country's true national party. In his famous electoral broadcast in 1945, Attlee was keen to show that Labour represented 'a good cross-section of the nation'. As he put it, 'all the professions are well represented, there are doctors, clergy and lawyers, there are employers as well as workers; there are farmers, practical working farmers as well as farm workers, there are writers and printers, working engineers and managing directors of engineering works, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and men from the merchant navy, scientists and artists, teachers and professors and women of varied experiences'. (5) Similarly, in the 1960s, Harold Wilson claimed that Labour was the true meritocratic party. (6) And in the 1990s, Tony Blair, who faced very different circumstances from Attlee and Wilson, was at pains to describe Labour as a party that went beyond class divides. As he made clear in his 'Young Country' speech, his vision was of a country of 'no more bosses versus workers - [but of] partnership at the workplace'. (7)
Labour's electoral dilemma
In recent decades, the electoral dilemma for parties like Labour has dramatically changed. In a surprising transformation of electoral behaviour, Labour has become the party of the educated, professional middle classes and has lost the support of many working-class voters. As Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley showed, the working-classes started to desert the Labour Party in the early 2000s, but the 2015 general election was the first election since the war when the 'working class voted for Labour at a lower rate than some middle class groups'. (8)
This big change in Labour's electoral coalition has several roots, but it is strongly connected, as Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford argue, to big societal changes brought by deindustrialisation, the acceleration of globalisation, new migration flows, the expansion of higher education, and also by changes in political campaigning. (9) If deindustrialisation and globalisation led to the steep socio-economic decline of Labour's former industrial heartlands in the North of England, the Midlands, Wales and parts of Scotland, the demise of trade unions and the representation of these areas by Labour MPs who knew little and understood even less the places they represented made those voters feel abandoned. This problem was then accentuated by the party's decision to concentrate its campaigning efforts in marginal seats, while neglecting safe seats in Labour's heartlands. (10) Over time, those forgotten and...
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