Skip to main content
Progressive patriotism: the historical detail is important
Socialist historian KEITH FLETT looks at an example from the past given by Rebecca Long Bailey in her advocation of ‘progressive patriotism’
Lancashire mill workers

REBECCA LONG BAILEY is now officially the standard-bearer of the left in the Labour leadership election.

She is not of course some kind of “continuity Corbyn” candidate but a leadership contender with her own perspectives for the 2020s.

She laid some of these out in a recent article in the Guardian.

Donate to the Fighting Fund
Support the Morning Star
You have reached the free limit.
Subscribe to continue reading.
More from this author
Features / 18 April 2025
18 April 2025
From bemoaning London’s ‘cockneys’ invading seaside towns to negotiating holiday rents, the founders of scientific socialism maintained a wry detachment from Victorian Easter customs while using the break for health and politics, writes KEITH FLETT
Karl Marx 1
Features / 14 April 2025
14 April 2025
From bemoaning London’s ‘cockneys’ invading seaside towns to negotiating holiday rents, the founders of scientific socialism maintained a wry detachment from Victorian Easter customs while using the break for health and politics, writes KEITH FLETT
TURNING POINT: The anti-cuts plan put forward by Tony Benn (
Features / 31 March 2025
31 March 2025
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Chancellor of the Excheq
Features / 17 March 2025
17 March 2025
Starmer’s slash-and-burn approach to disability benefits represents a fundamental break with Labour’s founding mission to challenge the idle rich rather than punish the vulnerable poor, argues KEITH FLETT
Similar stories
The arrest of the Cato Street Conspirators
Features / 4 February 2025
4 February 2025
The legacy of an 1820 conspiracy in revenge for Peterloo resonates down the ages, argues KEITH FLETT
SOLIDARITY ACROSS THE POND: This Abraham Lincoln statue in M
Features / 18 January 2025
18 January 2025
PETER LAZENBY reports on how trade unionists in Manchester are to celebrate the role of the city’s cotton industry workers in the fight for the abolition of slavery in the US civil war
Drax Hall plantation in Barbados
Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival 2024 / 20 July 2024
20 July 2024
KEITH FLETT uncovers the links between Dorset landowners, Caribbean plantations, slavery and the prosecution of trade unionists, revealing a darker side to the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ story