This stirring anthem of the Italian Left was also once popular with Labour Party activists, as Mark Crail recalls.

Bandiera Rossa
(Music, traditional; lyrics, Carlo Tuzzi, 1908)

Bandiera Rossa may share its title with The Red Flag, but there the similarities end. There is no room here for dungeons dark or gallows grim, let alone any martyred dead. The Italian labour movement’s anthem is, rather, an upbeat and unrelenting celebration of popular redemption and the triumph of communism/socialism (according to taste): Avanti Popolo (forward the people) indeed – the song’s opening words and alternative title. Written in 1908 by Carlo Tuzzi and with a melody taken from Lombard folk music, Bandiera Rossa was adapted in adversity after the rise of Mussolini by the addition of a final defiant ‘Evviva il comunismo/socialismo e la libertà’. I first came across it at the Red Review a regular event on the fringe of Labour Party conferences in the early 1980s, when delegates, visitors and hangers-on would crowd into a suitable venue on the final night to watch shadow ministers and senior union officials put on comedy sketches and perform in other unlikely ways. Speeded up from the traditional version and played at volume by a scratch band of musicians of varying levels of skill, it offered a suitably upbeat climax to the evening for everyone to shout along to before we headed back to our constituencies and another decade or more of Tory government. For a slightly surreal experience, YouTube also has a version sung by nuns and monks.

Mark Crail is web editor for the Society for the Study of Labour History