THE PEOPLE’S FLAG IS DEEPEST red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts blood dyed its every fold….

Jim Connell wrote the song, and gave it to the social democrats and labourists of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The British Labourists still sing it; even the Australians still know the words.

Norwegian kids can’t be that different to the young women and men I spent my twenties arguing with. Like A, I’ve been an earnest teenager in a youth wing of a moderate, labourist, reforming Party. For pleasant and unpleasant times, for all their enthusiasm and compromise and cynicism, they’re my people. And to read the news makes me sick to my heart.

It well recalls the triumphs past,
It gives the hope of peace at last;
The banner bright, the symbol plain,
Of human rights and human gain.

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