The Prime Minister looks set to endorse plans to raise the profile of the Armed Forces through parades at football grounds, an Armed Forces day, and more school based cadet forces. As somebody who was in a cadet force myself, I can recognise the benefit in terms of instilling self-esteem in young people: what bothers me is that this is another plank of a ‘Britishness’ agenda that increasingly seems to be defining Labour as a party whose main ideological foundation is a kind of nationalism-lite.

In fact, it reminds me of the ruling parties in Communist Eastern Europe from the 1960s onwards: given that the idealism of communism had been destroyed by the brutal military put-downs in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the governments of those countries resorted to narrow nationalism and a diet of debt-funded consumerism to buy, if not the consent, then the quiet acquiescence of their populations. This period is now commonly known to historians as goulash communism.

It is obvious to the most casual observer that there are many social ills that still need tackling in this country, from social exclusion, low-skills, child-poverty or the ballooning problem of credit card and mortgage indebtedness amongst a surprisingly large segment of the population. With that in mind, I would’ve hoped that a Labour Government could find something more stirring to motivate and market itself by than the hollow tub-thumping of credit-fuelled goulash socialism. Waving the flag and sitting idly by as growth is funded by ever more debt should not be an option.