As he took office as British prime minister in July 2024, Sir Keir Starmer made a commitment to put the ‘country first’, echoing his earlier decision to add the same words to the Labour Party membership card. ‘Politics’, he said in January 2024, ‘shouldn’t be a hobby… for people who enjoy the feeling of power.’ For him, politics was ‘a higher calling’, for those committed to bringing about change while being ‘married to the responsibility of service’. In setting out his vision in the way that he has, Starmer is seeking to build a broad political consensus, to move away from a type of politics he sees as having been a vehicle both for upholding particular sectional interests and for the achievement of power as an end in itself. It is deliberate positioning.

Words matter. Whether or not those words are really believed, the fact that they are used and not others both represents a change in language and creates a mental shift. The discourse itself can also become a vehicle for an adjustment of mentalities, attitudes, and ultimately behaviours. This is not just the case in the corridors of political power, but beyond, in wider discourse. It is why the language used by political actors is in itself so important.

It is also a way of staking a claim to authority; a political actor seeks to derive legitimacy for their decisions and policies from the idea that they are acting in the interests of the country and its people. Sometimes, of course, the words and the policy are dissonant with each other.

Messages about putting the needs of the country first have been regularly voiced in history, often with reference to the ‘common good’. The concept was a cornerstone of Aristotelian ideas – government was not a necessary evil but could instead be a powerful force for good. Unsurprisingly, ownership and definition of what constituted the common good have also regularly been a matter of contention across history, just as they are now and will undoubtedly continue to be during Starmer’s term in office.

The battle for ownership of the concept of the common good and the power that came with it was a very live one in the Middle Ages. In the 13^th and 14^th centuries, ancient ideas about the common good and the role of rulers and governments in preserving it took centre stage in Europe as a result of the re-absorption of Aristotle’s work. In consequence, the notion of the common good was invoked by a variety of political actors at pivotal moments.

Magna Carta, of 1215, started a dialogue between English medieval monarchs and their subjects about how the king should rule: where the Angevin monarchs had bent the law to their will, now their subjects demanded that the king should be beneath the law. In doing so, they cut off, in practice, his ability to extort money from them without due process or consent.

The effects of this played out during Henry III’s reign (1216-72) in relation to war, foreign policy, taxation and the role of Parliament. When Henry, unable to secure the consent of his subjects to taxation for his mostly ill-advised foreign policy, accessed their property in ways that were deemed antithetical to the spirit of Magna Carta, it provoked crisis. In 1258 a group of his barons took control of government and sought to reform it. In so doing, the rebels invoked language about the common good inspired by the Aristotelian ideas that were flowing into England from continental Europe, making the so-called Provisions of Oxford for ‘the common good of the whole kingdom’.

The clear message was that in his period of personal rule Henry had failed to do his duty. The rebels also demanded more representation. Parliament, they said, should be summoned three times a year, and there the ‘common needs of the kingdom’ as well as those of the king should always be considered. Through their words, they were claiming true legitimacy to govern, a legitimacy they argued the king had forfeited, though they did not attempt to unseat him entirely. Simon de Montfort, who shortly afterwards became leader of the rebels, while certainly motivated to a significant degree by personal ambition, seems also to have been heavily influenced by burgeoning ideas about the common good.

While Henry III would ultimately be successful in defeating the opposition, the crisis and the language used by the rebels changed the terms of political discourse.

It seems clear that, from an early point in the crisis of his father’s reign, the future Edward I realised the importance of the common good as a totem for legitimate government, something that perhaps in part explains his initial alliance with De Montfort. In 1259 he wrote that he was ready to die for the community of the realm and the common good. There is no indication that this was political posturing – in a private letter to his Chief Justiciar in Chester where he was lord, he stated that if ‘common justice’ was denied to his people, he risked losing ‘the favour of both God and man’, thereby jeopardising his own authority: ‘our lordship is belittled’.

While the partnership with De Montfort did not last – the heir to the throne soon realised that the earl had designs on the crown itself, not simply reform – Edward’s fundamental views did not change. Informed and reinforced in all likelihood by the work of the political theologians like Thomas Aquinas, who were incorporating Aristotle’s ideas into their guidance (so-called Mirrors) for rulers, to emphasise government as a benevolent force, Edward’s ideas about kingship had the common good at their heart. In fact, as soon as his own reign began in earnest, he issued what was in effect a manifesto based on his commitment to upholding the common good. In the Statute of Westminster I, read out in Parliament in April 1275, he stated his ‘great zeal and desire to redress the State of the Realm in such things as [require] amendment for the common profit of the Holy Church, and of the Realm’. He had invited to Parliament a much bigger group of people than ever before in order to promulgate the message as widely as possible: like Keir Starmer he wanted to signal widely that his government was going to be different from what had gone before.

For much of Edward’s reign, his commitment to upholding the common good was uncontroversial and in line with what the rebels of 1258 had wished for: official corruption and crime were targeted, attention was given to righting problems with aspects of the common law through new legislation, and representation at Parliament was increased; Parliament itself was called more frequently and subjects given greater opportunities to make complaints and seek redress at its sessions.

Tensions re-surfaced, however, over war and its funding. In the late 1290s, after several years of intense military engagement with both the French, the Scots and in Wales, Edward’s leading subjects began to challenge the king over taxation. In the course of this, both sides invoked the common good. Edward argued he was acting to protect it and that without money he could not fight the wars necessary to do so, while his subjects argued that if taxation for war had the effect of impoverishing his subjects (as it was doing), the king would be damaging the common good, something that invoking the common peril of military threats could not justify.

Although ultimately the cessation of war rather than political compromise brought about the resolution of this ‘mini’ crisis, the seeds had been sown for a longer term political reality in which not only did the king have to commit to maintaining the common good and mean it, the definition of what action was in the interests of the common good would be seen by the king’s subjects as a matter for the king and Parliament, not the king alone. Subsequent events demonstrate that where the two were unable to co-operate – when the king acted in his own interests, setting aside those of his subjects (action that came to be seen as tyranny) – discord and crisis ensued, and government was hobbled. On the other hand, when the king had the interests of the realm at heart and was a capable leader, this joint enterprise led to highly effective government that was welcomed and embraced by his subjects. The access the king gained to their wealth through taxation as a consequence of this cooperation was largely unparalleled across Europe, and it is to this that the glittering successes on the battlefield of both Edward III and Henry V can be significantly attributed (Crécy and Agincourt are good examples), alongside their obvious personal ability.

In the course of a century, the re-absorption of Aristotelian ideas in European political thought had made a deep imprint on English political discourse and government. It was a period in which an understanding and belief that government could be a force for the promotion of the common good came to the forefront of political thinking. In this sense, reflecting on Sir Keir Starmer’s motto ‘country first’, the past is not, as was once said, ‘a foreign country’ in which things are done ‘differently’, but one strikingly similar to the present day.