LONDON, Sept 26, 2025 (BSS/AFP) - UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer will on Friday tell a global conference of centre-left leaders that patriotism can help defeat "grievance" politics often associated with hard-right politicians.

The meeting in London is expected to include world leaders including Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Canadian premier Mark Carney and Mette Frederiksen of Denmark.

Starmer is also set to say that left-wing lawmakers must tackle uncontrolled immigration, according to extracts of his speech released by his ruling Labour party.

"This is the defining political choice of our times: a politics of predatory grievance, preying on the problems of working people," or "the politics of patriotic renewal," Starmer was due to say.

Labour has fallen behind the anti-immigrant Reform UK party in national polls since Starmer secured a landslide general election victory in July last year.

The British leader's speech will see him try to lay out a more optimistic view of the future than the one put forward by Reform, headed by anti-European Union firebrand Nigel Farage.

The address comes at the end of a week in which US President Donald Trump told the United Nations General Assembly that irregular migration was turning European countries into "hell".

Farage, a supporter of Trump, regularly claims that Britain is "broken" and Starmer has started to accuse him of being unpatriotic as he tries to claw back support.

Starmer was to say that "patriotic renewal" would be "rooted in communities, building a better country. Brick by brick, from the bottom-up -- including everyone in the national story".

"Difference under the same flag," he was to add, in reference to a recent trend of flying English and British flags -- a show of patriotism that has unsettled some ethnic groups.

Starmer was due to reference the recent "Unite the Kingdom" protest organised by far-right activist Tommy Robinson in which US tech billionaire Elon Musk told the 150,000 crowd that "violence is coming".

"Now, you don't need to be a historian to know where that kind of poison can lead. You can just feel it. A language that is naked in its attempt to intimidate," Starmer was due to tell the Global Progressive Action Conference.

Starmer was expected to announce that his government would introduce digital ID cards to tackle undocumented migration.

"It is not compassionate left-wing politics to rely on labour that exploits foreign workers and undercuts fair wages," he was to say, adding that "every nation needs to have control over its borders".

On Friday, his government announced it would invest œ5 billion ($6.7 billion) to regenerate town centres as it tries to stop Reform making inroads in deprived areas of England.