How Can Labour Win Over the Flag Protesters? We Asked Them

“We’ve got sandwiches, we’ve got tea, we’ve got biscuits.” For the seven friends who’d travelled the hour and a half from Blackpool to Liverpool, it was a fun outing on a sunny September day. For the MPs and delegates walking past them into the Labour party conference last Tuesday, it was a far-right picket.

The men weren’t part of the much larger protest that had gathered outside the conference a couple of days prior – but they easily could have been. Wearing a mixture of fusilier berets, “Free Tommy Robinson” T-shirts and Union Jacks, a visual emblem of the far right-led “operation raise the colours”, the men were the visual antithesis of the slick suits and well-coiffed women slinking into the conference centre. All told me they’d be voting either Reform or Advance UK (Ben Habib’s splinter party) in the next election.

These were the “enemies of national renewal” Keir Starmer would revile in his conference speech later that day, motivated by “the politics of grievance”, and whom Labour would “fight with everything we have”. Paradoxically, they’re also the people Labour is trying hardest to win over. So we asked them how it might.

Last weekend, Starmer described Reform’s plan to axe indefinite leave to remain as “racist” and “immoral”. Yet just a couple of days later, his home secretary was outlining her own plans to restrict indefinite leave to remain. In January, Starmer attacked the right for “spreading lies and misinformation” on grooming gangs and accused Tory leader Kemi Badenoch of “jumping on the bandwagon of the far right” for demanding an inquiry into them. Five months later, he was announcing one himself. The PM delivers speeches sharing his fears of Britain becoming an “island of strangers”, then condemns people acting on that same fear as a “tiny, mindless minority” and a “gang of thugs”; implies that Union Jacks are being used to foment racism, then plasters his events with them. For flag protesters around the country, it must be extremely difficult to work out what the government thinks of you. Labour doesn’t seem to know itself.

According to polling expert Sir John Curtice, Labour has lost roughly the same portion of its vote to Reform as it has to the Lib Dems and Greens – but it is Reform voters Labour appears most concerned with pleasing, tacking further to the right in both policy and rhetoric. The charm offensive isn’t working: polls suggest Reform voters are absolutely besotted with Nigel Farage, but even prefer Jeremy Corbyn to Starmer. Speaking to the men from Blackpool, it appears this is in part because they see Starmer as talking out of both sides of his mouth – and as someone who has reneged on almost every promise he’s made to the public.

“He just comes out with things that he thinks suits him, that’s gonna make him seem good in the limelight, but anything he says is just double-backed every single time,” Alan, who gave only his first name, told Novara Media. “He doesn’t care about no one. All he cares about is what suits himself at the time of saying it in front of the world.”

What do they want Starmer to say? Predictably, the men’s most immediate concern were immigrants. One, who asked to be referred to only as Tommy, said that roughly six weeks ago, he began protesting outside of the seafront Metropole hotel in Blackpool, which houses asylum seekers, because he was “fed up with people going around, harming our women and children” (there is no evidence of this, although in July the Home Office announced it was investigating a Syrian man and woman for making adult videos in the hotel).

Another member of the group, Paul Bagger, told me he was a retired army fusilier of 25 years’ service (hence the hat). He said he resented that his fellow veterans were “on the streets freezing, and they’re putting these people in hotels on our expense” (local authorities spent £2.8bn on temporary accommodation for homeless people in the year to March, and £2.1bn on asylum hotels in the same period).

As is common on the right, the men described a feeling of an immigration influx. One, Lee Smith, described their local high street, Central Drive, as “full of Muslims … Romanians, you name it”. Smith added that children were being taken to the back of shops on the high street, where immigrants would “do horrible things to them” (he didn’t provide any evidence for his claim, nor could I find any).

Labour’s efforts to address the far right – whether by tackling or courting it – are failing miserably. The Blackpool protesters told Novara Media that they felt Labour – which runs Blackpool town council – had done little to improve their lives (the council declined to comment for this article).

Smith said the local MP, Labour’s Chris Webb, “doesn’t do nothing for us … he doesn’t take people’s knowledge in, he doesn’t even acknowledge it, he just walks on.” Smith said he hadn’t met Webb, but that he’s “walked past” him and he looked “stuck up his own arse”. Webb did not comment on this to Novara Media, though his office shared evidence of his work for the community, including the more than 9,000 constituents’ cases he’s dealt with since being elected last summer, as well as the tens of millions of pounds’ worth of investment he’s helped bring into the area, most recently £21.5m of central government funding for improving its high streets and housing estates. Webb was also one of 129 Labour MPs who earlier this year rebelled over Labour’s planned cuts to disability benefits, though he withdrew his opposition following amendments to the welfare bill.

Yet somehow, this small group of Webb’s constituents haven’t felt the benefits of his leadership, the 34 years they’ve had a Labour council, nor the 23 years they’ve had a Labour MP. Though they did cite some positive developments in the town, such as the planned £65m “multiversity”, named for its broad disciplinary remit, they weren’t sure how such developments would improve their lives. “Who are they going to put in that uni?” Smith asked.

The men felt they had, however, personally benefited from the work of local Reform activist Mark Butcher. A former street preacher and local businessman, Butcher unsuccessfully challenged Webb in the Blackpool South by-election last year. In 2010, Butcher set up a soup kitchen – Amazing Graze – in Blackpool, from which in 2022 he spun off a homeless shelter housed on a disused double-decker bus (last year, the charity was investigated by the Charity Commission for allegedly having Reform UK materials at its premises). The men said Butcher had helped them to complete paperwork, pay bills, find jobs and – yes – put up flags. On a walkabout through the town centre, Guardian reporter Ben Quinn noted that Butcher was “frequently stopped by homeless people singing his praises”.

This kind of community engagement is strikingly similar to what John McDonnell says he pursued to beat back the far right in the 1970s and 80s. Corbyn’s former shadow chancellor and the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington in Greater London for 48 years recalled to Novara Media how the economic decline overseen by Margaret Thatcher created an opening for the National Front – and Labour had to offer an alternative. “As people experienced the problems of another crisis of capitalism, you had to be there to help with those problems. That gave you permission to talk about why we were in this mess,” he said.

“It was real community work,” McDonnell added, citing the funding of law centres, women’s refuges and print workshops, where locals could produce magazines and leaflets. Labour should be doing the same now, said McDonnell – but at the moment, Starmer’s project is all “rhetorical flourish” with little substance.

Starmer’s conference speech, roundly hailed by Labour colleagues and lobby journalists as his best to date, contained just a single policy announcement: replacing Blair’s target of sending half of England’s young people to university – itself symbolic and unmoored from any actual enforcement – with a target of sending two-thirds of them into uni or an apprenticeship. The rest of the speech was given over to talking about “national renewal”, a term Starmer mentioned 12 times and defined only as “government and working people, working together to drag us out of decline, building a new Britain.”

“From the speeches [at Labour conference] this week, it’s clear that … they [the Labour leadership] want to raise living standards for everybody. … But it doesn’t translate into sufficient scale of actions,” McDonnell said. Though he defended his Labour colleague Webb, whom he described as “quite intensively involved in the community [in Blackpool]”, McDonnell admitted that “I haven’t seen Labour engaging those communities” that were vulnerable to the far right in a concerted way.

“I’m trying to see those people who [have] been on the [Tommy Robinson demonstrations] … [and] say, ‘Look, what are the issues? Let’s talk it through.’ … It’s almost like recruiting people into resolving the problem, rather than just marching up and down,” McDonnell said.

Rebecca Long-Bailey, the leftwing Labour MP and former shadow minister whom Starmer fired in 2020, told Novara Media that her party needs to look beyond immigration to understand Reform supporters. “If you start having a conversation with people about immigration, they’re angry that they can’t get appointments to see their GP. They’re angry that their children can’t get on the housing ladder. They’re angry that they see people sleeping rough on the streets when there should be enough homes for everyone,” she said. “We should be explaining in detail why those things are happening and what we’re doing to address them now.”

My conversations with the men would appear to support Long-Bailey’s theory. When I asked them what Labour should do to fix society between now and the next general election, migration didn’t explicitly figure. Labour should turn “everything back around,” said Alan. “They need to be for the children, they need to be for the women, they need to be for the veterans. They need to speak for the elderly, the vulnerable and the homeless.” Tommy chimed in: “And the NHS. They’ve knackered the NHS up.”

Others think that there is a danger of seeing the protesters purely through the lens of class. Speaking to Novara Media, Black feminist author and podcaster Shanice McBean said there was a danger of “economic and class reductionism” when it came to analysing far-right protesters: while many “understand they’re being screwed over by an economic elite, they’re more concerned about migrants in their town centre”, and Labour needs to tackle that “head-on”. Still, she acknowledged that those attracted to racist rhetoric and conspiracy theories could be mourning a loss of status: whether the petty bourgeois who supported Brexit and voted in Trump the following year, who felt their lives weren’t as comfortable as they once were; or the more working-class voters now flocking to Farage and Robinson and who voted in Trump last year, hoping to find a way out of the country’s and their own personal struggles.

The men from Blackpool appeared to fit this latter profile. Aged from their 30s to their 60s, none were in work. Four had experiences of homelessness, some relatively recently, and two of them told me they had chronic illnesses. When I asked what the men did for work, they replied bashfully. Tommy said he was starting a training course in groundwork the following week; Martin told me he’d been laid off from the Hilton Blackpool after 16 years when it closed in 2018. The men’s responses seemed to corroborate McBean’s instinct that the “carnivals of reaction” represented by the flag protests was in part a way of “coming together collectively to reclaim status and dignity in society”.

Clive Lewis, another leftwing Labour MP who aligns himself with the new Mainstream group that’s trying to reverse the party’s rightward course, told Novara Media that Labour no longer felt answerable to ordinary people. Instead, Lewis said, Starmer and his allies were embracing “techno-managerialism”. “They crave deference,” Lewis said. “‘We’re doing this for your good, dammit, and you should be grateful.’ Whether it’s Gaza or state authoritarianism, if you question it, you’re told to sit down, shut up, this is going to win us the election.”

“Political parties thrive on debate and discussion,” Lewis added, but in Starmer’s Labour, this was no longer tolerated; McDonnell noted to Novara Media that he broke the whip under Blair and Brown over 400 times and was never suspended, but received a year-long suspension after voting against the government on the two-child benefit cap.

“It’s hard for a political party where Morgan McSweeney and Peter Mandelson are presented as a constitutional necessity, while MPs are treated with contempt, to make the argument that it will treat the British public any differently,” said Lewis.

There seem at present to be two main schools of thought about what Labour should do about those being drawn in by the far right. Some argue that winning over men like those gathered outside Labour’s conference centre is a losing game, and that between now and 2029 Labour should focus on cultivating its progressive base. Those with the ear of Labour ministers seem to be saying the government should “listen” to them – though in reality this has largely meant adopting a watered-down form of their racism, without really inquiring as to what might have produced it.

There is a third way, it seems – one based on the acknowledgement that the men’s anti-migrant views weren’t as strongly-held as they might appear. One, Martin, told me he used to vote Labour in around 2015, “because I thought that was the party that was going to sort the country out, but obviously it’s fallen apart”. He said he’d never been “overconfident” in Corbyn, “but it seemed to be the party that was for the people”. This sense that Labour was once for the people could guide the party in winning back people like Martin. As Lewis put it: “Push power down, give people power over their lives.” In a climate where people already distrust mainstream politicians, moves such as the instantly-disastrous digital ID appear to do precisely the opposite, centralising power within an opaque bureaucracy.

While some of these men do seem to want a government that cracks down on immigration, most also express a more basic hope that politicians will improve their lot – and having met a Reform activist who has done just that, even in a small way, they know it’s possible. Though they hate Starmer’s Labour, they also seem desperate to be acknowledged by it – and not just as a “mindless minority” that cares only about immigration, or as racist thugs that can’t be reasoned with, but as people who, like most of us, have messy, contradictory politics, and want a sense of agency over their lives.

One protester, who didn’t give his name, told Novara Media: “They should … actually [be] giving you the time of day and coming and having a conversation … going, ‘Look … this is what we’re doing. This is what our party is about. Is there any way we can change things? What could we do better? What would you think would benefit the country? What do you think would benefit the NHS, schools, businesses and things like that?’”

“Just kind of coming up and asking us ideas of what we think as a person, as a human, and as a British person.”

The Labour party did not respond to Novara Media’s request for comment.