Thread by @IanDunt

Covid vaccine passports would be un-British, says Starmer telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/…

Lots of criticism about this. I think it's the right position, expressed in a sensible way for a leader of the opposition.

Covid passports, in this context, means for domestic as well as foreign use. The latter is inevitable. The former isn't - there's no evidence it would help reduce infection and lots of reasons to think it might not help.

I go into those here politics.co.uk/comment/2021/0…

But you're better off listening to the experts on Indie SAGE discuss it here (the video auto starts at the moment they begin taking about it)

On the language, there's a difference between talking this way and the naff, insecure endless plastic-flags approach of the government. People who want to run a country have to about to talk about its character and speak to its sense of how it sees itself.

Responding to that with 'flag shagger' is kind of a surrender to the Tory culture war: you've allowed your opponents to push you into a position where you're against any expression of national pride or articulation of a vision for the country.

I get that the patriotism stuff feels icky at the moment. It feels like the quiet understated British patriotism I used to rather like us breaking down into something more desperate, shallow and demonstrative.

But if a party can speak to a sense of Britishness, and to the better things in it, that can actually be a riposte to flag-cumpulsiveness, a way of highlighting it's superficiality.

I'm not sure Labour will manage that, but it seems worth a shot. Better than the alternative, which is to allow the Conservatives to monopolise and define patriotism.