Old style, pre-war and immediate postwar British socialists may have been patriotic, but I’m not sure that is the case today. Once Communist infiltrators (of the kind Yuri Bezmenov warned us about in the 1980s) got involved, they eventually perverted western leftist groups and turned their members into useful idiots for the Soviet Union. Even though the USSR is long dead, they have never really lost their habit of despising patriotism and damning all its forms as ‘imperialist’ and ‘fascistic’ as their former paymasters wanted them to.
I only suggested that because there was a Guardian CiF editorial (I’ve been banned from giving my opinion) about the Empire and every teenaged, snot-nosed leftist wrote in praising it to the very skies. Oh, the roads we built! Oh, the purdah we destroyed! Oh, the massacre at Amritzar we loved, oh wait...
That may have wrongly colored my judgment.