We can only hope all this stuff is posing and PR aimed at impressing the newspapers because if it isn’t, it’s going to be a long and very stupid few years until 2024. Because...

It’s incredible that it’s necessary to say this, but: when you talk to Britain about patriotism, you are mostly talking about English nationalism and - as has been *repeatedly proven* - English nationalism is a blazing bonfire of insane resentments and idiotic horseshit.

Yes, it’s theoretically possible to have a progressive English patriotism. And as was graphically demonstrated between 2016 and 2019, what you get in practice is clownshoes liberal performance art and totally dedicated, take-no-prisoners screaming insanity from the right.

The right can call on practically the entire press to set half the country on fire with deranged spite and flaming xenophobia, while the centre can raise a million idiots to demand to know why their dogs can’t come to Tuscany on holiday, then intentionally fuck themselves over.

Patriotism to the right is xenophobia, cruelty, viciousness and spite. You can’t play Fancy Dress Farage and win because any attempt to find the Just Nasty Enough Apex on the Racism and Resentment Laffer Curve is going to fail: they will always vote for people who really mean it.

So this is the battlefield and these are the combatants: on one side, heavily armed and grim-faced jihadist retirees who will gladly blow up their own children and torch the country and on the other, blarting, honking middle class fuckheads armed with feather dusters.

(You might ask, how come Scotland can do progressive nationalism? And the answer is that you’d need a hated external foe to define yourselves against, like e.g. the appalling Conservative Party at Westminster or maybe the EU and even then, it is still shite).

(Short version: You wind up still stuck in the UK in a vastly worse position, because the galaxy-brained Scotland-only solution to the Conservative Party that you sold the public is entirely reliant on the continued success of the Tories, who will never allow you to secede).

Anyway, the upshot is that every attempt to harness progressive patriotism is like deploying the 14th Fluffy Bunny Regiment to hop into the Battle of the Somme. It’s a dickhead move by people who never listen or learn, and a few who don’t care because they have no other ideas.

TL:DR - I hope all this is just a PR exercise aimed at impressing the Times but when you look at that Labour front bench, it’s a Who’s Who of Westminster’s most strident, rocket-propelled dullards who have no idea how clueless they are. It’s a second charge of the shite brigade.