he love that a certain type of immigrant feels for their adopted country can seem contradictory. Dealing with the immigration machinery of the British state has driven people like me to the edge of mental and financial ruin. My type of immigrant learns more about how Britain’s bureaucracy works than most of its citizens ever will. We become intimately acquainted with systems that are designed to sift people into different tiers according to value, and then dispatch those who don’t make the grade as cheaply and as quickly as possible. Whether you are in need of benefits, official papers or just a hearing from someone who controls your fate, you quickly learn that you will survive in this country in spite of the people who are supposed to help you, not because of them. But while you’re enduring this crash course in bureaucracy, a different feeling can often develop. If you’re lucky, the process of settling in the UK and fighting to belong here is eased by another cast of characters, which includes charities, judges and civil servants, who behave in such upright and generous ways that you feel bound to this country forever. It is still possible to love this country, despite being fully aware of all the ways it is broken – and despite it nearly breaking you several times. This is the patriotism issue that Labour is now failing to crack. When the party’s job in opposition is to point out all the ways in which Britain is currently failing, can it present a positive vision for the country it wants to run? Finding a sense of national endeavour that binds voters together is an important exercise. At a time when Labour is struggling to clearly outline what it stands for, its very identity depends upon this. And the Tories have the benefit of already being in office, and a decade into building their own narrow version of patriotism that promises to restore Britain’s supremacy in the world. Labour won’t be able to define its own progressive form of patriotism by parroting the Tories’ jingoism or slavishly following focus groups. According to a Labour strategy presentation leaked last week, researchers have recommended “the use of the flag [and] veterans dressing smartly at the war memorial” to “give voters a sense of authentic values alignment”. Oxymorons such as “authentic values alignment” should provide a big clue as to why this exercise isn’t going to work. Authenticity is prized because it cannot be manufactured – which is exactly what this “values alignment” strategy is seeking to do. And authenticity is missing here because Labour’s approach to the patriotism question is a negative, defensive one. The leadership is worried that not enough distance has been put between itself and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, and that both the Tories and the press will keep hammering the party for not loving the country enough. But so long as the rightwing press plays a decisive role in driving Britain’s political agenda, Keir Starmer will never be patriotic enough or different enough from Corbyn to satisfy some. The version of patriotism that researchers have urged Labour to embrace involves a set of ideas about Britain’s military, its supremacy in the world and the compliance of its politicians and civil servants that are hallmarks of the Conservative party. The leadership has already adopted elements of this script, promising to make the party more appealing to veterans and the armed forces and launching a new Friends of the Forces programme last year. By taking this approach, Labour will never be able to outflank the Tories or fortify itself against their attacks. All the party achieves by following this playbook is strengthening the Conservatives’ ideological scaffolding. The right’s patriotism is not just about how Britain is good, it’s about how it is better. It is a celebration of all the ways in which others are excluded, which should be the opposite of Labour’s purpose. Labour doesn’t need to look far for an answer to the question of what it should stand for. Its natural allies include the many people who have taken against a decade of austerity and the “hostile environment”, a civil service that is struggling to maintain impartiality under a bullying government, and the teaching unions whose members are suffering under the government’s erratic lockdown policies. For a party that has made much of its leader’s legal career, Labour should be standing up for an embattled judiciary that is challenging the government’s unlawful parliamentary suspensions, and the “activist lawyers” who were smeared by Priti Patel for upholding British human rights. What really connects people across the country isn’t hollow allusions to Britain’s imperial past, but the institutions that strive for fairness and dignity, and the many thousands of NHS staff, key workers, teachers and volunteers who keep them going. These are the positive emblems of national pride that tether me to this country. It is possible to stand up for these institutions and the values they represent, while criticising how decades of political neglect and austerity have left them under-resourced and overstretched. For Labour, this is a more difficult path to take. It will involve a direct confrontation with the rightwing press, and open the party up to charges of “wokeness”, and accusations that it is working against British interests. It will mean acknowledging that the path back to power is not through nailing the optics of patriotism or mimicking the Tories’ talking points, but through an open battle with the right. There are no quick fixes or shortcuts to authenticity. The work of making the case for a progressive and non-exclusive British patriotism needed to start 20 years ago, from a position of moral conviction rather than tactical calculation. With every day that passes in which the party chooses not to start that work, something is lost for ever. So many of the institutions that continue to work, whether it’s the NHS battling the pandemic or civil service wrestling with Brexit, are only just surviving, living on borrowed time, and depend on the efforts of flagging individuals. Labour has no use for an uncritical nationalism. Instead, it needs its own patriotism that stands up for all that is good about the country and nurtures a vision for its future.