Flagging Enthusiasm
A few months back, committed racists and xenophobes had the irritating idea to start plastering every square inch of the UK - or at least England - with flags.
This charge was led by Facebook groups, proclaiming their national pride and daring anyone to call them racist simply for flying a Union Jack or a St. George Cross. Which wasn’t why people were calling the campaign racist - it was because it was the brainchild of (and enthusiastically supported by) a bunch of fucking racists. Co-founder Andy Saxon (who, like Tommy Robinson, picked a more English sounding pseudonym than his given name, the hideously Francophone “Andrew Currien”) has links to Britain First and the English Defence League, according to watchgroup Hope Not Hate.
The usual bloviating fuckwits then enthusiastically joined in with the project - the sort of people who “aren’t racist, but” are about to say something objectively racist, and who would complain that “you can’t say anything anymore” after having just said something and not getting the response they wanted. They’re the same people who are “being silenced”, a lot of the time, which you know because they never stop fucking telling you, loudly and across multiple forms of media.
Not content to hang flags from every available lamp post in the name of standing up for British Values (hanging things from a lamp post is actually illegal according to the laws of the country whose culture they so vigorously defend) they also began daubing any available white surface - most often road crossings and roundabouts - with inexpertly painted red lines.
These committed patriots, who “aren’t racist but” simply love the flag, often-as-not hung their Union Jacks upside down (white stripes should be above the red ones on the left hand side, signifying that the Andrew’s Cross of the Scottish flag became a part of the Union before the red Saltire of St. Patrick was added, and also as a subtle reminder that the English disdain the Scots but actively hate the Irish) and were, at least in my area, too stupid to understand that the red bit has to go on the white bit in order to make a St. George Cross.
I hated all of this, of course. I hated it on multiple levels.
First, the obvious intention of intimidation by nationalists - this was a campaign that made non-British people (and often just non-white people) feel threatened, which was part of the point.
I also hated the historical ignorance of it all. The “what’s racist about the flag of Our Country?!” crowd, who always pronounce “Our Country” like it’s capitalised in case you didn’t make the inference that only certain people can rightfully (read: whitefully) claim to be British, are the same people who are entirely oblivious to the crimes of Empire. The sort of people who hate learning in the first place, and who, if they did learn that, say, the British invented concentration camps in Africa and proudly flew the flag over them, or that the Union Jack flew over the Raj as the British blithely starved millions of Indians to death, would probably not find either of these facts problematic. Africans? Indians? Fuck ‘em, they’re not us.
The same nationalists who joyfully supported this bout of flag-flying are the same ones who would have thought it absolutely correct that the British army had standing orders to pull down Irish flags in Northern Ireland, because there’s nothing racist about flying a flag and everyone should be free to celebrate their culture, except for people we’re invading or oppressing, who are celebrating the wrong cultures anyway.
Above the racists and the nationalists are the useful idiots - people who might actually just think it’s a nice, patriotic gesture and not consider any of the baggage that British (or English) flags come loaded with. These are people who could be excused on the grounds that they don’t do a lot of thinking about anything, much - and boy, are those people common! - but I still have no sympathy for them, because ultimately it doesn’t matter if you’re flying a flag without intending to support racists, because racists think you’re supporting racists by flying the flag along with them. We are what we pretend to be, as Kurt Vonnegut warned. Or, as the Germans knew all along in a joke from the thirties: What do you call a guy who’s drinking at a bar with two Nazis?
Three Nazis.
The final thing I hated about it all, however, was born from my own battered and stunted patriotism itself. There’s an almost endless list of things that are wrong with the UK - perhaps none of them are un-fixable, but we certainly don’t seem to make much effort in trying - but there are still things I like about the country of my birth, and one of them is that nobody likes a show-off. There’s something fundamentally un-British about this kind of flag-waving jingoism. Like so many ideas popular on the modern right, this feels like an American import. British people always think Americans are silly for their idolatrous attachment to their national symbol - while the British aversion to emotion or “causing a scene” is often a great weakness, it does also lead to a society where anyone who is too enthusiastic about any particular subject is seen as an embarrassment. Installing a big British flag in your garden is about the least British thing I can think of.
Some of this (like basically everything in the UK) is related to class. The British working classes have historically had an almost genetic suspicion of their rulers. The Andrew formerly known as Prince is a good example of why. But to return to history, there’s a very strong class argument to be made for why everyday British citizens actually shouldn’t be blamed for famines and genocides. It wasn’t the poor people of Britain who were shipping good food overseas at a profit while Irish and Indian people starved to death. It wasn’t the butchers, the bakers or the candlestick makers who were rounding up Kenyans and putting them in camps. It was the ruling elite - the old Etonians and the landed gentry - who were the architects of these crimes. The British Empire, an entity that is essentially the entire reason that the flag can be considered a hateful symbol - was run by the same rich assholes that still run the country today. In a very real sense, it’s their flag - it’s literally the flag of the United KINGDOM, run by an actual fucking KING - and working people flying the flag should be seen as either an act of social climbing (Hyacinth Bouquet would absolutely have had a flagpole) or grovelling. These people are flag-ellating themselves.
The whole sordid enterprised began in August, and it’s early November as I type this. There have been some bright spots - Wales, a nation that still seems to understand the importance of not taking itself too seriously, mounted a beautiful response by flying every available flag of every nation, and I read of at least one enterprising vandal who was going around with a ladder every night, removing all the flags, and then selling them back to the same racists again the next day on eBay. But overall, I’ve found the last few months depressing evidence of how a few people - and it is probably only a few people with a box of flags and a can of spraypaint, each - can make things unpleasant for the rest of us.
Except, as mentioned, it’s now early November. The rains have long since washed the red paint off of white surfaces, and the flags are starting to look forlorn. Strangely, this means that I’m starting to like them.
I still hate the campaign that brought the flags out in the first place, for all of the stated reasons, but in the endless drizzle of late autumn, the meaning has changed.
Ignoring, as the original flag-hangers did, that the guidelines for flying the Union Jack state that it should not be flown if torn or dirty (and should not be flown at night unless illuminated), the now-drooping flags prove a few things.
They prove that this was never about pride. If you’re proud of something, you don’t abandon it to the elements. You look after it. Certainly, if you really care about the flag you’re flying, you don’t leave it ragged and limp, only attached at one point, for someone else to deal with. This was always about nationalism rather than patriotism, accepting George Orwell’s definition that the latter is love of one’s country and the former is just the hatred of everyone else’s.
The sad remaining flags also prove that the people who hung them don’t really give a shit about Their Country. The whole campaign has now essentially devolved into an act of mass littering. The people who have strewn flags from every lamp post expect someone else to clean up for them, because they are petulant children who can’t take responsibility for their own actions.
Finally, the dishevelled flags prove that the racists and nationalists always talk a good game, but lack the focus or committment to ever make good on their grand plans. This is, of course, part of the reason they’re dangerous - they are very good at making a mess far bigger than their numbers would suggest and then abdicating all responsibility when things get difficult. The apotheosis of this was reached by whichever poor bastards had to rebuild Berlin in the fifties. But the limp, dishevelled flags that now flap raggedly beside the roads of the nation are continued proof that every right wing blowhard who tries to hide behind a veneer of patriotism is a liar and a con artist.
A week ago I saw, depressingly, my first “Make Britain Great Again” sticker in a house window. But don’t be fooled. “Make Britain Great Again” ? These fucking idiots can’t even look after a flag. They just make the country an objectively shabbier place. And now there’s proof of it everywhere you look.