Can Liberal Patriotism Save Britain From the National Populists?

Under pressure from the national populists and a restless party, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has come out fighting. His landmark speech to the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool last week gave his premiership more definition than ever before, firmly in the mold of the modern liberal patriot.

It is political definition that has never been more needed. On the eve of its annual conference, Labour had been rattled by authoritative constituency-level polling showing that its landslide victory just a year ago would be wiped out by right-wing challenger party Reform UK, taking two-thirds of Labour’s MPs with it. 267 Labour MPs, many newly elected, would lose their seats. The British Conservatives would win just 45 constituencies. Reform UK would eat up former Labour and Tory support with 306 gains, putting leader Nigel Farage on course to be the next Prime Minister.

Of course there is no general election imminent, with the next national vote expected in four years, but together with internal rumblings about Starmer’s leadership, it set the backdrop for a bumpy few days at the Labour annual conference after a bumpier first year since Labour returned to power after fourteen years in opposition.

More worrying than hypothetical election polls has been the emergence of a street-level antagonism. Over the summer, protests at the housing of asylum seekers in hotels took place at specific locations, peaking in Epping, where an asylum seeker was jailed for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and a woman. Then across the country’s streets, the English flag and Union Jack were raised on lampposts and scaffolding. Unlike in the U.S., Brits do not typically hoist their flag with as much frequency or ease as the Stars and Stripes, save for national celebrations. The organizers of the flag displays have said they are a “rallying cry” for people who felt “failed” by successive governments and the overall political system and have been careful not to overtly link the flags to the asylum seeker protests. But reports of racist incidents such as the graffitiing of a Chinese restaurant have heightened tensions.

Then on Yom Kippur last Friday, the country was horrified by the deaths of two Jewish men in an antisemitic attack on a Manchester synagogue by an assailant believed to have been influenced by extremist Islamic ideology. Members of the Jewish community have long been warning of the increase in antisemitism, particularly since the 7th October 2023 Hamas attack, and in the grief, there is also palpable anger that more has not been done to protect the Jewish community.

The politics of all this are as complex in the UK as they are anywhere else. Mainstream politicians tend to tread lightly, for fear of inflaming tensions or getting the politics wrong. This time has been different. Keir Starmer dedicated his conference speech to launching a wholesale attack on the politics of Reform UK, in so doing defining himself as a modern liberal patriot. It was a rallying cry of its own to the people skeptical of his leadership or unaligned to his party, but to whom the prospect of increased racial tensions and social division promised by the populists’ politics is anathema.

“In the end, we really are all in it together,” Starmer told the conference and the country beyond, who were really the audience he was addressing. “You will never hear that from the politicians of grievance. The attraction of unity, that’s something they will never understand. They will never hold out their hand, as I do now, to people who may see the world differently but put the progress of our country first. So if you are a patriot, whether you vote Labour or not, if you want to stand against grievance and renew Britain, then this is your fight too.”

In forging a dividing line between the politics of Reform UK, who have recently come out for “mass deportations” of migrants, and everyone else, Keir Starmer is hoping that the decent majority will prevail. It puts his Labour Party on the other side of Reform, with the once-dominant Conservatives banished to spectators. It was a big strategic call in a politics not known for its decisive moments. It has rallied the party around its leader and quieted the critics, at least for now. But it comes with risks that have to be successfully navigated if it is to succeed.

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As long as Keir Starmer has been leader of the Labour Party, his detractors, and even some of his supporters, have questioned what his real political purpose is. In the early days, when I served as his director of policy, the purpose was clear: to put the Labour Party back in the service of working people, whom the party had drifted away from. Just months before, the party had suffered its fourth consecutive general election defeat, its worst result since 1935, and the new leader set it on the road to recovery through the working-class communities it had lost.

Contrary to some of the external commentary, which suggests Keir Starmer’s instincts pull towards the urban liberal wing of the party, Keir was convinced that it was working-class voters that the party had to reconnect with, the ordinary working Britons who felt Labour had stopped representing their interests in favor of the professional middle classes. Today’s Democratic Party finds itself in similar terrain, without the advantage of the UK party system whereby we elect our opposition leader immediately, instead of having to wait for clarity on direction following the presidential candidate primaries.

Keir set about targeting the party’s efforts on winning back the trust of the working Brits who had voted for Boris Johnson’s Conservatives in 2019, and, in July 2024, he was rewarded with a landslide parliamentary majority aided by the collapse in confidence in the Conservatives after fourteen years. The victory was delivered by the very towns and suburbs those ordinary working Brits resided in, and Labour reversed the historic decline in working-class support. But since the election, those same voters have expressed their dissatisfaction with Labour’s lackluster start to office with a shift to Reform or away from politics in general.

In choosing to define his leadership at this conference speech against Reform, Starmer has defined himself more clearly to the voters. It was the clearest exposition I have heard from him on where he wants to take the country during his premiership, fused with the working-class aspiration that has powered his own life. His choice to make the headline announcement from the speech the abolition of the 50 percent target of getting young people to university in favor of two-thirds of young people opting for college or a high-quality apprenticeship shows it is still those ordinary working Brits that he has in his mind. He avoided the temptation to settle the discontent of his party with a nod to the soft left on child poverty or climate change and deliberately chose to tell them that he is still putting the reconnection with working-class voters at the center of his political strategy.

Some might say that in making the battle for working-class support the centerpiece for the next election, it raises the salience of the same tensions that have been bubbling under the surface. But that is precisely why the Labour leadership believes it is the right thing to do. Their working assumption is that they can galvanize a majority behind a unified version of the country that promotes social cohesion over the politics of grievance.

There were hard edges to Keir Starmer’s liberal patriotism. The words were matched with actions, particularly on controlling borders, which makes the party uneasy but are a necessary precondition for re-election and now need to be given space to enact. The vision of social cohesion has been given real backing, with funding to local areas being rolled out in a new ‘Pride in Place’ program, which, if done well, has the power to deliver visible results in tandem with local communities.

There are two important risks they will have to navigate successfully. The first is that in making immigration control a priority early on, they will need to demonstrate progress to the voters before the next election, chiefly on the visible symbols of boat crossings and hotel accommodation. To do so means potentially simultaneous fights over both our international obligations and providing safe legal routes for asylum seekers. Whilst Reform’s ugly policies of mass deportations can fuel racial division, Labour will be keen to steer clear of inadvertently giving the impression they view all those who support Reform’s policies as racist, which has already presented a challenge. The new Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, has responded with compassion to the antisemitic attack in Manchester and will likely make challenging extremism, fostering social cohesion, and the protection of the Jewish community a high political priority.

The second area is one we heard much less about at the conference but will become clearer after November’s budget. The politics of grievance cannot be overcome only by unifying rhetoric or even by controlling immigration, but by economic optimism. That is some way from where British consumers and businesses are right now. Despite cuts to interest rates and recent tech firm investments signalling growing business confidence, persistent inflation and sluggish growth continue to blight the UK economy. Labour strategists know that voters don’t vote purely on a party’s record, but they do know that without a demonstrable improvement in everyday standards of living, it will be hard to convince people to give Labour a second term, let alone defeat the politics of grievance for good.

In the hall, the crowd grasped the small flags on sticks that are waved by the crowd at national events, the Scottish Saltire and the Welsh Red Dragon, reminders that the Prime Minister’s vision of a united nation of nations faces a huge test at the May 2026 local and devolved nations’ elections. In defining his opponent, Keir Starmer has more clearly defined his Labour Party. And it is only by providing a clear and popular alternative to the national populists that he can hope to succeed in May and in facing the next election when it comes.

Claire Ainsley is Director of the Center-Left Renewal Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, and was Director of Policy for Keir Starmer from 2020 to 2022.