You’ve got to have a slogan if you crave success in politics and over the years there have been some memorable ones. “Britain Isn’t Working”, “It’s Scotland’s Oil”, “Education, Education, Education” and my personal favourite: “I Didn’t Realise It Was a Party, Officer”. But the latest slogan, this time from Labour, is not in the same class at all. It is not very good. It will not do.

The slogan was unveiled by the Labour leader Keir Starmer in his speech to his Scottish party conference in Glasgow. Labour, he said, could win a general election and Scotland could choose to replace the Tories with a Labour government. And then he hit us with it: “A new Britain that Scottish people aren’t just part of, but are proud of.”

Sir Keir used the slogan to close the speech too in a bit where he was talking about a contract he wanted to make with the people of Scotland. “It is my solemn promise,” he said, “that their priorities are again the priorities of the Labour party.” He also sought – in a more subtle way than others have tried – to link war and the dodgy state of the world with the British constitution. We have a common language and inheritance, he said, and face the same threats to our way of life.

All of this kind of stuff is perfectly fine as far as it goes – indeed, we’ve heard it before from Labour leaders who need to turn their heads Linda Blair-style to take in different audiences: Scottish nationalists, English nationalists, Brexiters, Remainers, lefties, righties, and so on. The bit about being part of something bigger also makes sense – it’s why a lot of people support No. However, the part that really bothers me is what he said about pride.

I can see why he was doing it: Sir Keir is proposing a future in which British government and policy would be fairer and more liberal and his hope is that Scots disgusted by the Tories and tempted by independence would therefore be happier to be part of the United Kingdom. They would, in other words, be proud to be part of it instead of embarrassed or angered by it and, framed in this way, it’s designed as a tactic against Scottish nationalism.

But an apparently benign form of British pride as a weapon against an apparently dangerous form of Scottish pride – one form of nationalism against another – is problematic. Firstly, the most committed Scottish nationalists will not be tempted by even a cuddly version of British nationalism – a country we can be part of and proud of. But the concept of national pride itself is also a problem: we shouldn’t be proud of our country or its government, we should be realistic about it.

Politicians should also be careful about sticking a poker into the fire of national pride , even with good intentions like Keir Starmer, because the flames can be hard to control. The constitutional debate in Scotland is often pretty ugly and it’s undoubtedly because people feel that their pride in Scotland has been offended or is threatened. Politicians and leaders, from the best like Starmer to the worst like Putin, can use that sense of pride and sense of hurt with good or bad intentions. But they cannot always control it.

The point is that appealing to a sense of national pride is too close to appealing to nationalism, which is the main reason the UK is in this mess in the first place. In fact, Sir Keir had some much better lines of attack in his speech including the idea that the establishment in the UK is represented not only by the Tories but by the SNP as well. “Decades of power between them,” he said, “and neither the Tories nor the SNP has done enough to secure the jobs and industries of the future.”

He also had some good stuff to say about further devolution – “pushing power away from parliaments and towards people” as he put it – and this seems to me to be a much better strategy. Pride in your country leads to touchiness and aggression and sometimes violence. Much better to be proud of what you’ve actually done yourself.

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