Starmer, St George’s Day and awkward English identity

Happy St George’s Day! Barring some ecclesiastical argument between denominations, 23 April is the Feast day of St George, the patron saint of England. It is also the date attributed to both the birth and death of the national poet, William Shakespeare.

Celebrated in mediaeval times on a par with Christmas, marking the day has dropped out of fashion for the past three hundred years – thanks to a union with Scotland and the rise of the British Empire. 

For those who notice it at all, St George’s Day is more often a time for awkwardness, a cue for controversy and identity self-doubt. What does it mean to be English? Or British? Should we display the red-on-white flag of the Cross of St George? Should special interests be allowed to adulterate it with other colours, as the English FA has just been attacked for doing?

This year, Sir Keir Starmer and two well-connected Labour apparatchiks have chosen to be leading stirrers of the pot of Englishness. 

The leader of the opposition took to the hostile territory of The Telegraph to lay out his “great pride and gratitude to be English”. In a punchy and partisan op-ed, he promises: “We will celebrate St George’s Day with enthusiasm, an enthusiasm shared by each patron saints’ day on our isles.”

Meanwhile, two stalwarts of Labour’s Ed Miliband years have just published England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country – and How to Set Them Straight in time for the big day. Marc Stears used to write speeches for the party leader and now heads the “Policy Lab” at University College, London. Tom Baldwin left The Times to spin for Ed. Baldwin’s application and work rate are tremendous. Only a few weeks ago he brought out another weighty tome, the supportive Keir Starmer: The Biography, which is likely to become the standard work on the great man’s life up until now. 

Starmer, Stears and Baldwin all earnestly desire a Labour victory. They concur with  Starmer’s bashing of the Conservatives: “You’ve trashed the economy, hammered mortgage holders, weakened the union, neglected our forces, repeatedly broken laws you expected others to follow…”. But cracks in their common front are exposed when it comes to Starmer’s English patriotism.

Starmer’s pride in being English includes: “finally reaching the peak of Scafell Pike, with my severely ill mother, to gaze down on the breathtaking beauty of the Lakes below”. The mythbusters have “friends who refuse to go walking in the English countryside because they cannot stomach its pastoral connotations: “all those fields and thatched cottages’”. 

Starmer says he has no time for those who flinch at displaying “our flag”. The authors’ same friends “consciously avoid places where they put ‘those little flags up’ during events like a royal jubilee or a coronation”. This is perilously close to shadow cabinet member Emily Thornberry’s mishap, when she had to apologize during a byelection for cocking a smartphone camera, and what was widely taken as a snook, at a Thames estuarine home draped in St George’s flags.

No-one is responsible for the opinions of their friends but they do give a hint of their “elective affinities”. As Baldwin and Stears tramp around seven English provincial locations, commenting on the price of a pint of beer, they do not hide their own comfortable metropolitan Oxbridge origins. Starmer opens his appeal to Telegraph readers explaining that he was “the first person in my working-class family to go to university”. Leeds followed by Oxford, as it happens.

Starmer can take the likes of Baldwin and Stears for granted but to secure victory he needs to reach out to the centrist voters. That will mean being on the wavelengths of people in the parts of the country visited by the mythbusters including suburban Berkshire and Oxfordshire, Plymouth, Hull, Wolverhampton, Blackpool, and London’s outer ring. 

Labour will lose their support if it treats them as alien specimens. The myths of English exceptionalism which the authors want to set straight are the tattered stuff of 1950s Ladybird Books, worth knowing but only, and decreasingly, dusted off for pageants. They want to debunk England’s seminal roles in the “invention of liberty”, as a naval power, as a positive moral force, in the abolition of slavery or the emancipation of working-class leisure. This could not be further from the positive message the Labour leader wants to send out to the centre ground, as he name checks NATO, the NHS, and his time spent “defending people facing the death penalty” and “belting out Three Lions” at Wembley.

Starmer insists that “Labour is at its best when it has celebrated, defended and served the values of our country and its people.” This hardly chimes with England’s downbeat conclusion: “for all the half truths and outright lies, the real source of energy and renewal in England is found in its subtle imperfection. Other cultures celebrate imperfection.”

The mythbusters are highly intelligent and they faithfully diagnose the faults in their perspective. They seek out Robert Ford, Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester, to explain that England cannot be divided into people from somewhere and people from nowhere: “the truth is messier”. The overwhelming majority may have voted to leave the EU, “but to suggest that the Leave vote was dominated by working-class Labour supporters is untrue”, Ford assures them. 

All the same, it is difficult not to see the book as an unspoken but extended Remainers lament at the state of the nation. Putting it that way is a lot politer than the headline above the Sunday Times’ review: “Centrist erotica for Starmer fans”. 

Sir Keir Starmer has no time for nostalgia. His broad appeal depends on moving forward and treating Brexit as a done deal. Building on his working-class Englishness is vital to the image the would-be prime minister wants to project. He knows that when Labour wins general elections, it also wins a majority of MPs in England. The so-called Celtic Fringe in Wales and Scotland is more unreliable for Labour than it was last century. The last time Labour had a narrow lead in England was Blair’s third victory in 2005. 

Attack dogs in Conservative headquarters may soon be hunting through England for ammunition as diligently as they have combed through Lord Ashcroft’s Angela Rayner biography. Coincidentally, but not irrelevantly, Ashcroft has made his own contribution to St George’s Day with one of his opinion polls. It turns out “One in eight voters think the English flag is racist and divisive”. That is a small proportion but worth a Daily Mail headline when only one in a hundred Conservative voters think the same. 

As for me, I identify as British, English and a Londoner. I’m proudest of the English language, literature and culture. I will follow Sir Keir and celebrate this St George’s Day – although, typically English, I have no idea how you are supposed to do that. As Lord Finkelstein is prone to say, I will probably celebrate quietly at home.

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