Dear Andrea Leadsom, shrinking the state is the opposite of patriotism | Polly Toynbee

Patriotic? Who? Not the Tory Brexiteers who have brought this country so alarmingly low. While EU politics are rebooted with new Franco-German confidence, our government is only saved by the Democratic Unionist party. Ignominy doesn’t get much more mortifying than that.

Britain has not sunk so far in international esteem since the humiliation of Suez, that fantastical last gasp for colonialism. Indeed, the buccaneering dreams of Liam Fox and Boris Johnson to make Britain great again by trading with our bemused ex-colonies smacks of that same imperial delusion.

Those who told harsh truths about Anthony Eden’s blundering expedition to seize back the Suez canal were castigated as unpatriotic. In the same way now, as Brexit flounders, those who ask hard questions that risk revealing cake-and-eat-it is not on the menu are again damned for lack of patriotism.

The menace from the leader of the Commons to the BBC went straight to the heart of the Brexiteers’ state of mind. “It would be helpful if broadcasters were willing to be a bit patriotic, because the country took a decision and the government is determined to deliver on that decision,” said Andrea Leadsom, as an unmistakable threat to our national broadcaster. Newsnight’s Emily Maitlis stood her ground with admirable aplomb. Leadsom is a comical figure, but as the going gets tougher expect more sinister pressures.

Patriotism-failure is a challenge Theresa May threw down in her party conference speech last year, addressing “ordinary working people” with the claim that “politicians and commentators”, the fabled metropolitan elite, “find your patriotism distasteful”. That was a prod at Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to sing the national anthem, and Emily Thornberry’s tweet of a house bedecked with flags of St George.

Nor need May quote George Orwell’s complaint that “intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality”. What the Brexiteers knew at the referendum was that those who own patriotism usually win at the ballot box. Brexit patriotism was a bogus product, a sham union flag draped on the coffin of Britain’s real interests, yet their campaign sang the better song. Remainers lost because they had no song either about Britishness or our common European identity, only unprovable warnings on penury. The Brexit result did show a yearning for something more than everyday electoral bribery, a seeking of patriotic identity.

But in the year since, the tide has turned: patriotism, a mercurial shape-shifter, is slipping from the government’s grasp, ripe for the taking by Labour. Love of one’s country is universal – a sense of home and a shared history, culture and institutions, best reflected in the NHS and, yes, the BBC. That’s why Leadsom is wildly out of step: she doesn’t understand patriotism.

Seven years of state-shrinking austerity have rekindled a desire for things only the state can provide, things people see stripped away all around them. The NHS is stretched beyond bearing; parents see schools shedding teachers; while bin collections, potholes, a lack of police, sardine-packed commuter trains and scores of everyday public-service failings press in on the public. The Grenfell Tower disaster is widely seen as a symbolic failure by the state to provide the most basic protection.

Patriotism – pride in the country – is undermined by every failure in the public realm. Since 2010, this government and its coalition predecessor have followed an ideology of cuts, intent on reducing the state to a pitiful 36% of GDP, far below any equivalent EU country. Leadsom, hear this: shrinking the state is the opposite of patriotism – a betrayal of country and people. Sajid Javid, improbably in charge of the communities and local government department, chooses Ayn Rand as his cultural icon. What guidance has Rand about the great failure of social housing exposed by mass decanting from dangerous towers?

Patriotism is not the puny, mean-minded Daily Mail mentality that only finds its own identity in hating foreigners. Waving union flags only has meaning when it celebrates the pride in all the public things the nation creates together – parks, science hubs, museums, hospitals, Olympic stadiums, monuments, swimming pools, galleries, libraries, schools and colleges to glory in. Patriotism is made of collective endeavour, joint identity, memory and common values that still bind, despite fractious divisions of class and region.

Patriotism should belong to the left’s ideals for the public realm: it doesn’t belong to the Thatcher, Cameron, Osborne, May and Hammond politics of cut, scrimp, outsource and privatise. Consider the extraordinary sale of all our national utilities: trains, buses, water and energy are now mainly owned by foreign states. George Osborne sold the Hinkley Point contract to the Chinese and French governments at far greater cost than borrowing the money to build it ourselves. With the ink hardly dry, already the National Audit Office has condemned it.

Contracting out to Capita, Virgin, Bupa or Sodexo fragments and undermines the idea of public service. Some services may indeed be better outsourced, but the right has been dogmatic in shedding and shredding services, regardless of profits draining out of the country and losses to public ownership. Patriotism? It has verged on treason.

Old Conservatism once understood the value of the public: in Joseph Chamberlain’s civic pride, Harold Macmillan’s huge council house building, or Michael Heseltine’s grand regenerations. But the anti-public service dogma that has gripped that party since 1979, still there in Philip Hammond’s budget, has lost any claim to patriotic pride.

Let Labour seize the flag and wave it cheerfully and, yes, sing our ludicrous old national anthem too, mixing pride with laughter at all one’s country’s foibles. There is nothing dangerous about a celebratory patriotism.

Nationalism is the war-starting ideology, the fascist-tinged foreigner-hating passion that thinks your own country superior to all others. May trod perilously close with her speech despising “citizens of the world” as “citizens of nowhere”: purging Jews, Stalin talked of “rootless cosmopolitans”. If her patriotism excludes closeness to other countries, if Leadsom goes unrebuked for branding the BBC “unpatriotic”, we should fear May’s approach to Brexit negotiations.