Progressive 'lefties' make a profound historical error. They think that the working class and the poor hated their nation and wanted to destroy it. They're dead wrong. The working class wanted not to destroy but to be included in the nation, to take their rightful place within it

The profound injustice to them was that the vast majority who work for, who fight for, and who love their nation were seen by much of the elite as somehow 'alien', not even part of the country they loved so much. Their poverty was a sign of their exclusion from the nation

This is why wars have always been so important to the advance of the working class. If you send thousands of working class people off to fight and die for the country, it's pretty difficult to turn around to them once the war is won and say 'you don't count'.

After WWI, many Tories still wanted to treat the Labour movement and unions and working class people as if they were subversive to and 'not really part of' the nation, smearing them as unpatriotic Bolshies. But most - even some Tories - could see it wouldn't wash

The whole historical sweep of 1914-1951 saw the working classes, led by great Labour patriots like Attlee & Bevin, finally being given their weight in the counsels of Britain, being accepted as fully part of this great nation: patriotism & the working class advancing hand in hand

Having painstakingly achieved this and taught the Tories that WE are just as much a part of this country as you, that our loves and needs are part of the social compact, that WE are human beings and Englishmen and women like you are - most of the Left now want to throw it away

The 21st Century Progressive Left wants to give up our great inheritance, our welding together of the solidaristic traditions of the Labour movement and a patriotic love of this country, and exchange it for weak-as-water Mrs Jellyby cosmopolitanism. Over my dead body