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Keir Starmer has written to Labour’s general election candidates urging them to celebrate St George’s Day “with enthusiasm” in a bid to “outmanoeuvre” the Tories on patriotism and national identity.

It is part of an attempt to “reassure swing voters that the party has changed under his leadership” and moved on from the days of Jeremy Corbyn. Starmer’s predecessor as Labour leader “often appeared uncomfortable with British institutions and symbols and argued for a ‘progressive patriotism'”, said The Guardian.

Writing in The Telegraph, Starmer said that Labour was now the “true party of English patriotism”, adding that he had “no time” for those who “flinch” at displaying the St George’s flag. He warned against surrendering the flag to the far right, writing: “We cannot allow it to become the preserve of the tiny minority who want to drive hatred in our communities.”

In an attack on the Conservatives, he said that they had “lost any right” to call themselves patriotic, and accused them of having “denigrated some of our proudest national institutions” and stoking divisions that “weaken our nation” so long as it “strengthens their grip on power”.

Starmer has already been facing “discontent” from some Labour MPs over the prominent use of the union flag in election campaign materials, amid concern it could “alienate ethnic minority voters and others”, said The Guardian. But Labour insiders have pointed to 2019 polling from More in Common, which found that 75% of respondents felt that seeing the British flag flying made them feel “good”.

Starmer’s attempt to persuade voters that “despite the impression they may have formed during the Corbyn years, Labour actually quite likes the country it seeks to govern”, is a “mistake”, said Michael Deacon in The Telegraph. Starmer’s claim is “untrue”, said Deacon, who cited a recent poll suggesting that one in eight Labour supporters believe the St George’s flag is “racist”.

In any case, such a push towards patriotism is “irrelevant” with the outcome of the next election all but a foregone conclusion, said Deacon. It is also “terribly short-termist”, he said. “Declaring that your party is ‘patriotic’ may please a few voters today,” he said. “But it’s also a surefire way to put off the next generation”. Many members of Gen Z believe that British patriotism “is not just uncool, but actively shameful”.

Starmer’s words could be seen as the “latest cynical spiel” from a man who knows he’s about to become this country’s prime minister, said Colin Robertson in The Sun, but he is right that we should be “proud to be English” and to “fly the flag”.

“Sometimes the incessant howl of outrage about what we have supposedly done wrong as a nation is so deafening it is impossible to think about all that we have unequivocally done right,” said Robertson. St George’s Day should be used to “take stock of all that is good about England, how far we have come together as a peaceful, hard-working, welcoming and diverse country”.

Some 70,000 people had signed a petition arguing that St George’s Day should be celebrated as a national holiday, said Femi Oluwole in The Independent. Scotland and Northern Ireland have bank holidays to mark their patron saints’ days. But a national holiday “won’t restore the pride of people struggling to stay warm and fed” as the country struggles under a cost of living crisis. 

There is little appetite for empty nationalistic gestures: “Remember the Festival of Brexit – the £120m celebration that was supposed to mark the amazing triumph of national pride that is Brexit?”

What next?

The truth is that most people in England “probably won’t pay much notice” to St George’s Day, said Tom Baldwin in The Guardian. It is “a celebration of a long-dead Roman soldier whose connection to England has as much basis in fact as the dragon he was said to have slain”, and a day which is “sometimes marred with troublemaking by the far right”. 

But the past decade has shown that “an obsession with English mythology” isn’t confined only to the fringes of politics. In recent years “overly engorged ideas about this country have taken hold in an increasingly stark and polarised debate about its future”, said Baldwin, the former Labour spin doctor and author of the recent biography of Starmer.

The “stories we tell ourselves” about national identity matter at any time, “but never more so than in election years when such oversized myths have been pitted against the more everyday thoughts about the country held by the people who live here”. 

For too long the UK has “clung to myths of grandeur and exceptionalism” as part of its national identity. Perhaps what is needed is “a less puffed-up set of ideas rooted in real lives”.