Keir Starmer sat before a Union Jack yesterday, telling the nation: ‘I am a supporter of flags.’
Try not to laugh and let that register in your brain. He is not a far-right protester or the local oddball you see in your town centre on a Wednesday afternoon.
He is the Prime Minister. Yet here he is, earnestly proclaiming devotion to bunting.
It is, in objective terms, a lunatic thing to be saying.
At a time when children are being killed in Gaza, at a moment when millions of Brits depend on foodbanks to get by, and when fascists urge for an uprising, all he can do is talk about bunting.
In the meantime, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper is just keeping her head. ‘We actually have Union Jack bunting on our garden shed!’ she says with great enthusiasm. I’ve never seen her so smiley. Union Jacks, St George’s Cross, Yorkshire Rose flags, even tablecloths.
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You can almost hear her praying this will distract us from their lack of action and the far-right marching on our streets.
Taken together, these cringeworthy moments have the most Thick of It-esque atmosphere ever, with politicians so tone-deaf and desperate that they think house flag collecting is a winning strategy.
It’s pathetic. Imagine your boomer uncle trying to explain why he loves Fontaines DC and you’ll pinpoint the same energy here. He’s well-meaning, slightly desperate, and entirely out of touch.
And while Sir Keir lives in his flag-festooned tower, there are thousands of asylum seekers in hotels fleeing war or persecution with far-right mobs knocking at their door on a daily basis.
The flags in Starmer’s flat and Cooper’s tablecloth collection do absolutely nothing to address the problem, just fuel the disconnect.
Not a single person who cares enough to protest outside an asylum hotel will think, ‘Oh, Starmer’s Union Jack collection proves he’s trustworthy now – I really trust him to stop the boats.’
Those who put up flags have already decided he’s secretly plotting to turn the country into a trans or convert kids to Islam through some mysterious Labour scheme. No bunting in the shed is going to convince them otherwise.
The rest of us? The sensible centrists that actually love our country? We see an elderly man on his 63rd birthday bragging about his flag collection!
This has to be bus-stop territory. The kind of display that makes you quietly back away while pretending to check your phone because you don’t want the local weirdo talking you into a patriotic shrine.
The sheer surrealism of it all is off the charts, too. These are adults, leading the country, who think flag support will win over the voters. It would be a tragedy-comedy if it didn’t carry a serious connotation of division.
Labour simply doesn’t understand the appeal of Reform or the far-right’s messaging. People aren’t waving flags because they’re patriotic in a nice, aesthetic sense.
They’re using our national symbols as blunt weapons to bash local communities and asylum seekers with. Starmer’s flags-in-the-flat approach can’t comprehend that.
He’s dressing-up while they are mobilising around fear, grievance, and resentment. I don’t think Labour realise patriotism is not a prop and leadership is not a tablecloth – and that tells you everything.
It shows a government that, after only one year in power, already looks tired and end-of-term. Desperate to deliver victories, resorting to gesture politics over substance.
Closing asylum hotels is difficult; ending the need for protests is difficult; politics is difficult. Flags in your sitting room? Easy. But not even effective.
To really fix the never-ending problem of ‘Broken Britain’, the Government needs to get the NHS back on its feet, fix the immigration problems with policy not soundbite, and, most importantly, make people feel financially better.
In the end, Starmer’s embarrassment-inducing flag-faffing will amount to nothing. It won’t convert fanatics. It won’t reassure fence-sitters. It won’t stop demonstrations or make asylum hotels safe.
It will, however, present a class episode on a Thick of It relaunch that I hope to see at one point.
If Labour is to lead, then they need to put an end to the fantasy that symbolic patriotism is enough to solve big problems.
You don’t defeat the far-right by dusting off your bunting, and if Starmer thinks he does, he might as well wave another flag, a white one, and hand in his resignation today.
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