Kmflett's Blog

Keir Starmer’s condemnation of far right thuggery on the ‘Unite for England’ rally in central London on 13^th September, a rejection of the politics of division and claim that the flag whether St George or the Union Jack is not the property of the far right, is a small step perhaps in the right direction. It is also a perspective that has been noted many times before without it must be said any sign that the far right is giving up its claim to the flag. A section on the march did prefer the Israeli flag but one suspect Starmer’s views on that are best left unsaid in this context.

Below is an extract from an interview the late Marxist theorist Stuart Hall gave to the New Statesman in 2012 where he touches on some of the issues with progressive patriotism, which is broadly what Starmer is on about, as he saw it.

What Thompson called the “peculiarities of the English” (and especially the peculiarities of English socialism) have been on Hall’s mind a good deal lately. He has been talking about the New Left and Englishness with, among others, Jonathan Rutherford, his colleague on the editorial board of the journal Soundings and a prime mover in “Blue Labour”, and Jon Cruddas, entrusted by Ed Miliband with responsibility for the Labour Party’s policy review.

Hall says he understands the impulse behind Rutherford’s and Cruddas’s attempt to find intellectual resources for a new politics of “common life” in ancient English radical traditions. Yet he insists that such traditions cannot be revived “at will”. “I talked to Cruddas about this,” he tells me. “I think I understand his preoccupations rather more than Maurice Glasman’s. In a constituency like Cruddas’s, where you’re fighting the far right, you have to think about those things [English identity, immigration]. But you have to be careful about how you recruit them. He came to talk to me about the New Left, which, of course, was interested in the popular language of the nation. But I had the feeling he was raiding the past, out of context, in a way.”