 The Guardian has published a leaked presentation given to the Labour leadership that has caused quite a stir on social media. Given by the party's head of research, the presentation included analysis on the party's brand by Agency Republic. It fed back on opinions given at focus groups about Kirstama and advised the party on how to rebuild trust with voters in a so-called red wall. Now, some of the focus group feedback in that presentation was pretty uncomfortable for the leadership. So the Guardian explained here what was in that presentation. They say his slides, this is the Labour head of research, his slides featured comments from the focus groups such as, I don't know anything about the Labour Party at the moment, they have been way too quiet and he, Starma, needs to stop sitting on the fence. Voters see this fog as deliberate and cynical. Top officials have been told proving that Starma and his team are not being forthright and honest about where we want to be. One Birmingham voter described Labour as two different parties under one name. An ex-Labor voter from Grimsby quoted, they are the voice of students they have left real people tax payers behind. Lots of food for thought there, lots of slightly awkward comments from the public about Kirstama's fence sitting, but it's this next bit that really caused controversy. The presentation suggests that displays of patriotism are needed to reinforce that the party has changed. One slide says belonging needs to be reinforced through all messengers, while another is headed communicating Labour's respect and commitment for the country can represent a change in the party's body language. Among the top recommendations is the use of the flag, veterans dressing smartly at the war memorial, etc. Give voters a sense of authentic values alignment. Now approach for response a senior Labour official said the language came from the agency's research rather than their own phrasing. That article which is saying they need to use flags, veterans and dress smartly at the war memorial to give voters a sense of authentic values alignment. I love PR speak. In that article they quoted Clive Lewis who expressed concerns about the contents of the presentation saying it's not patriotism, it's fatherlandism. There's a better way to build social cohesion than moving down the track of the nativist right. The Labour MP has also put out an opinion piece in The Guardian this evening titled phony flag waving is not the way for Labour to win back the red wall. Voters will reject fake patriotism. Kirstama should have the courage to embrace the complexity of our national story. I'm joined by Clive Lewis. Now, I suppose my initial reaction to this was a bit different to yours because I thought, look, this is just a presentation based on research from an external company who have said, look, voters don't think you're patriotic enough to maybe stand in front of flags. It was comms advice, but you seem more concerned. Could you lay out your position as to why you think that what was in this article is concerning and it should concern Labour members? Well, I feel a bit like the emperor from the Empire Strikes Back because when he says, all is progressing as I have foretold. But you may remember when I had my brief stint in the leadership election, myself and many others could see where post Brexit, with a blame game going on about who was to blame, was it people calling Brexit voters racist, is this what's to blame for Labour's woes or second referendum? And as we rushed headlong into basically under the first part of the post system, looking at where the new swing voters were and what their perceived issues were, this belief that actually that meant that black people, students, others in those seats where Labour votes are stacked up, we were going to be thrown under a bus because that's what the political system we have does. It means our votes get taken for granted and the votes of those and the perception of those who need to be looked at and assuaged, then take on a disproportionate standing in how we approach things. On top of that, we've also had a very difficult time during the pandemic with the rise of Black Lives Matter and I think what many people would consider to be some of the mood music of the new leadership. I won't even start with elite documents because we can pop that to one side. But I think in terms of the response of Keir to Black Lives Matter, I think the initial response on the statues, which was a kind of out of hand dismissal of the whole issue around those statues, around our history, you saw how all those black historians and others piled into this to discuss and say this is good in so many ways because we're beginning to address the real history of this country rather than the fairytale that we've told ourselves for far too long and this was what that was all about. But that was dismissed out of hand as was the concerns of the black community who suffered racism for decades, for centuries, but who suffered decades at the hands of the police for many years, brutality, beatings, stop and search and whatever we think of defund the police, the angst behind it, the cry of help from that community behind it, who were talking about that. That wasn't unpacked, it was dismissed. And I think when you begin to look at the mood music, when you begin to listen to those who are saying we have to look at what our voters are saying, their justifiable concerns about issues on immigration and other things, it begins to set alarm bells. So in this piece of research, which has been commissioned by the leadership, and then you begin to kind of build up a picture, which I think you can already see playing out long before this kind of brand analysis came back in, you can see this is where we've been heading. Blue Labour now, inside the party, are probably the biggest, I would say, intellectual force inside that is office. I can't prove that, but there are people like Jonathan Rutherford and others in there who are advising. Clare Ainsley's book has talked a lot about the values of these groups. So it's not just come from nowhere. I haven't just suddenly panicked because of this piece of brand work. It's kind of on top of a stack of other things, which I think lots of people in their bones can feel has been on the cards for a long time, has been coming. To give the strategy the benefit of the doubt, let's say, what I imagine is going on. I don't have much faith in the left-wing credentials of Keir Starmer, but it seems to make sense to me a bit in terms of a strategy where you spend the first two years trying really hard to appeal to those people who are the stickiest voters. They're most likely, they're the most difficult to get to come back into the labour fold, because they haven't voted for them for a while and they live in key seats. And then they're going to realise that a couple of years down the line, they're going to have to make some big offers to young people and ethnic minority communities to get turnout up. But they need to start with the really difficult voters and then come up with some good stuff later. Do you think that that could possibly be going on? And if that were the story, would you find that more acceptable? I look as easy for me to kind of be an armchair quarterback and second guess what it is that they're doing. I haven't heard, I'm not privy to the strategy that's being pursued. As I said, we're having many of us including MPs having defeated together, jigsaw together from what we're seeing. And that's one possible analysis of what's going on. But there's a problem with this. And I think in many, I didn't quite hear what was being discussed last time. I heard the word PR mentioned by Aaron. But there are limitations. Look, the reality is for Labour to win in 2024, which I assume everyone on the front bench still believes is not just a possibility, but has to happen. Because otherwise we're looking at 20 years of the Tories. Scotland is not going to come back under the current conditions before 2024. We might make some new inroads in the next couple of years. But I think given the pandemic, given where the SNP are kind of thinking that that's going to change dramatically by 2024 is Cloud Cuckoo Land. So that means that in reality we're looking at a 10.5% uniform swing to Labour to achieve a majority of one. That equates to about 124 seats we have to win to get a majority of one. And that's not even stable government. So it seems to me this kind of pitch to the right to try to emulate the Tories and their kind of two dimensional fairytale image of what are Ireland's extremely complex history, which they bottle it up and tell the story of empire, tell the story of this country and its impact on the world and how it reflects now to this very day. That fairytale isn't a fairytale I want to buy into. And the problem with the flag, the problem with wearing a tie at Remembrance Services is basically it takes the complexity of this country. This Ireland story of which I'm a part of, you're a part of, black people are a part of, white people are a part of, it involves racism, anti-racism, empire, post-colonialism, all of these aspects. It's a complex tapestry and it tries to distill them down into these concepts of patriotism and flags, which quite frankly are shorthand for some good things but also some quite dark chapters in our history. And when you see the rise of the authoritarian right and the nativist right, not just here but across the globe in the US, you have to question a strategy which is about actually using those shorthands without unpacking them and doing the hard work of being able to understand what that complexity is and having an honest conversation about it. I would argue that Black Lives Matter, that issue that was kind of knocked out of hand dismissed away was an opportunity where the country had come together, the majority of this country had come together, had seen the evils of racism firsthand and wanted to unpack and discuss it and we didn't take part in that. And that for me is a problem. So now we find ourselves saying, well let's try and move over here, let's have some flags in the background, let's talk about patriotism but not unpack what patriotism means, the good and the bad of it and let's just use these shorthands to try to convince these complex individuals in these six that we're on their side. I think that's highly patronizing to them and I think it's an insult to all of us. So I don't know where they are in this kind of brand management phase of things but what I do know is you're not going to win the election by aping the symbols of the nativist right, which then they have control of them in many ways and in the past I said let's not let them control them but before you can have your own take on these symbols you have to unpack them and have those difficult conversations. The Labour Party has to come to terms with its own difficult history of racism, whether it's Jim Callaghan's racist immigration act of 1969, whether it's new Labour's attack on migration and immigrants when it was in office or Gordon Brown's dog whistling politics and slogans of British jobs or British workers, we have to have that conversation as a party, as a country and as a nation and I don't see that happening yet, I don't see that opportunity being taken up Black Lives Matter and until we do then that means that they control those symbols and that means that we are in effect saying well we're not going to unpack them, we're just going to go hey look here they are, here you go. It's an insult to them, it's an insult to us, so the last point I will say is this, you know there is a way to win in 2024 and it doesn't mean aping the imagery of the right, it actually means having a grown-up conversation about progressive politics in this country, about the crisis of democracy and being open and honest about the fact we have a political system, as Aaron was talking about, which is broken, PR isn't a panacea for all those things, but it's a link, a linchpin to enable us to have an honest, open conversation with the SNP about the future of the union, whether it's federal or we go our separate ways, an honest conversation with the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, Plyde and all the other political parties in this country to start talking about the future of this country, one where we don't have to listen to the rubbish of the Tory Party and the hard right of this country and we can start talking about what it is to have a 21st century democracy, that's the glue on which we can begin to build an alliance to get over the line, PR is the glue of that, I would also argue the Green New Deal as well, but we can begin to find some common things which will get us over the line so we can make those changes and have an electoral system, which means that a party like the Tories which lost a popular vote in 2019 cannot have ever again an 80 seat majority and that conversation, the honest, open conversation is a far better, far rewarding one in thinking we can win a general election by standing in front of a flag or wearing a tie, I remember it some day. So I suppose just to be super specific, because a lot of this is about symbols and I mean, I basically agree with your critique of Keir Starmer up to this point. I don't think he has been particularly daring or taken any risks or been particularly honest with the country, but from past statements you have said we should reclaim the flag. Are you saying it's fine to stand in front of a union jack if you've done some anti-racist groundwork beforehand? Well, I mean the first thing to say is the union jack might not be around for much longer. The Scottish combiner might be gone, and that's the trajectory that it's on. But look, once you've unpacked, let's take Winston Churchill, there we are, it's a complex one, isn't it? I love finest hour, it sent a shiver through me, but it was one part of a very complex story about that individual's life, where he was one of the key people who helped to stand up against Nazism. That's that bit. It doesn't talk about the comments he made about Indians, the racist comments about the Bengal famine, things that he did with chemical weapons in the Middle East in the 1920s and so on and so forth. It doesn't talk about the fact that after the war, he clearly expressed racist sentiments about the empire and so on and so forth. It doesn't address any of that, but it takes a single part of his life and it's hard not to relate to that individual. Clearly it is. He's a complex individual. We're all complex individuals. And that in many ways, to me, the way we want to tell the story about some parts of our past, but not the other more difficult parts, means that there will always be conflict over these symbols like Winston Churchill, until we have that honest conversation. Once you've had that conversation, once you've unpacked it, once you've had that reconciliation about the complexity of our island nation, then I think people can make a decision about what symbols they want to stand in front of and what symbols they want to be a part of. And it may be that people want the Union Jack and maybe they don't. Maybe they want something else. I think people probably will want the Union Jack. But I think it was Edmund Burke who said, if you want people to be proud of their country, then create a good country to be proud of. And I think ultimately one of the problems that we've got at the moment as a Labour Party is, as the comments were reported from the people in the focus groups, there seems to be very little of substance about what the Labour Party stands for and represents. And I think to try and kind of short-circuit that and start talking about flags and remember in Sunday, it's just not a substitute. You've got, if you want people to buy into the Labour Party, you want people to buy into your vision of what this country could be like, the kind of country we could be, the inclusive country we could be, one where the resources to this country are shared equally or more fairly at the very least, then you need to start articulating that. And I think it's that lack and then this kind of sense that we need to kind of jump over that, jump over the hard yards of unpacking these issues, of creating and expressing a vision of the country want to be, of having an analysis of why we are in the state we are, why we have one of the highest per capita death rates in the world, why we have more black people in this country dying per capita than the many others, why the NHS is on its knees, understanding why we're in the situation we're having analysis of that and it's postulating what we're going to do to overcome that to change it. That to me is what the Labour Party should be talking about, what the Labour Party should be doing. The fact we're not means that in many ways it feels that this is a short kind of a short way of short-circuiting that lack of vision, that lack of clarity. So, you know, look, I think go back to the point about symbols and will people, if we could reclaim these symbols, would it be OK Senate? Yes, it would be. I mean, look, I'm someone who was in the Army, you know, on the left in the Army, I love this country, but I'll choose what parts of this country I love. You know, I put my eye, I was prepared to go over there and get shot or blown up or whatever it was that was happening to thousands of the soldiers around me. That's fair to do that. Not for the Queen, not for some fairytale concept of the Union Jack, not for Winston, but for the country and the people that I love and the bits of that country that I love. And everyone will have different bits. It's all relevant. It's all acceptable. It's all authentic. And it's that complexity, this short-circuited approach, completely forgets, completely pushed out the window. So, you know, yeah, it is disappointing. People are going to be upset with that. But I hope the leadership takes that on board. Doesn't see the criticism as necessarily punching them and beating them for the sake of it. I don't do that. I try genuinely not to do that. I hope it reminds them that actually they need to step up because I want to see a Labour victory in 2024. And I want to start seeing the green shoots of that recovery. And I don't think we're seeing it in the moment. And this isn't the way to do that. I want to get behind the leadership. I want to get behind our party. I think most of the people who want to see a Labour government in 2024 do as well. But I want to see a Labour party that can actually take on those issues, get over the line and make changes to our lives in a way that's going to be lasting and transformational. And this sells us short.