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| Patriot games: how toxic is the England flag today? | Patriot games: how toxic is the England flag today? |
| (about 5 hours later) | |
| Just above the Spider-Man doll with its four limbs suckered to the bay window is what I’ve been looking for. A St George’s flag. In the champagne-quaffing, wild boar carpaccio-munching, Tuscany-holidaying, Ocado-shopping, unacceptably leafy, patriotism-eschewing people’s republic of Islington. Imagine! | |
| To be fair, it didn’t take me long. Yes, Islington South and Finsbury MP Emily Thornberry, in her justification of last week’s career-ruining tweet, may have found a house draped in England flags “remarkable” when she was campaigning for Labour in last week’s Rochester and Strood byelection, but in the north of the Islington where I live, such sights are not unusual. Yes, there are no drives on which white-van man can park his motor of choice in piquant juxtaposition with his patriotic flags, but the terraced streets are dotted with white vans and not a few of the houses are homes to lairy, bald white blokes – one of them me. And England flags? There they are, glimpsed between the inflatable Santas that are now going up in the borough. | To be fair, it didn’t take me long. Yes, Islington South and Finsbury MP Emily Thornberry, in her justification of last week’s career-ruining tweet, may have found a house draped in England flags “remarkable” when she was campaigning for Labour in last week’s Rochester and Strood byelection, but in the north of the Islington where I live, such sights are not unusual. Yes, there are no drives on which white-van man can park his motor of choice in piquant juxtaposition with his patriotic flags, but the terraced streets are dotted with white vans and not a few of the houses are homes to lairy, bald white blokes – one of them me. And England flags? There they are, glimpsed between the inflatable Santas that are now going up in the borough. |
| I knock on the door. There is an England flag draped from one upstairs window and two union jacks hanging from another. Let’s not pretend I am unhappy that nobody’s home. “Hello, I’m from the Guardian. I’m writing a think piece to test the suggestion that the St George flag is a semantically rich signifier, its display betokening scarcely sublimated racism on the part of a beleaguered white working-class population in the face of mass immigration. Any thoughts?” Me and my crown jewels being chased through N4 by a Guardian-hating pitbull would be good footage for You’ve Been Framed, but not much else. | |
| Now that the dust has died down a little on what the ex-shadow attorney general did last week, perhaps we can think more clearly about what the English flag means. Perhaps communities secretary Eric Pickles is right. “We should have pride in flying the cross of St George flag,” he counter-tweeted Thornberry, “don’t knock the flag of England.” Is this what it is to be English in 2014? To bend the knee to a symbolically freighted piece of cloth, in a dictatorship of politicised sentiment? What is England now? The United States? | |
| In 2006, in response to Gordon Brown’s misbegotten call for a Britain Day, David Cameron argued that was not how Britons rolled: “This coyness, this reserve, is, I always think, an intrinsic part of being British,” he said. “We are understated. We don’t do flags on the front lawn.” But now? Flags from the windows, flags flying from cars, bunting from the guttering. If Pickles’s tweet is representative of a new patriotic mood, that Faragist farrago, soon those obligatory stars-and-stripes lapel badges that US politicians wear to cement their allegiance to American hubris will have their transatlantic parallel. Oh man, say it ain’t so. | In 2006, in response to Gordon Brown’s misbegotten call for a Britain Day, David Cameron argued that was not how Britons rolled: “This coyness, this reserve, is, I always think, an intrinsic part of being British,” he said. “We are understated. We don’t do flags on the front lawn.” But now? Flags from the windows, flags flying from cars, bunting from the guttering. If Pickles’s tweet is representative of a new patriotic mood, that Faragist farrago, soon those obligatory stars-and-stripes lapel badges that US politicians wear to cement their allegiance to American hubris will have their transatlantic parallel. Oh man, say it ain’t so. |
| Even Labour leader Ed Miliband was induced by this dictatorship of sentiment, by his witless pursuit of every other muppet’s news agenda, to say that he felt “respect” whenever he saw a white van or a house draped in St George’s flags in an attempt to defuse allegations that his party “sneers” at working-class voters. Really? How much better it would have been if he had said this flag waving makes him sick, especially when those flags bear the imprimatur of the Murdoch press. How thrilling it would have been too had he exploded the myth of white-van man as somehow the unerring symbol of working-class Britain, arguing rather that it was a Sun-sponsored, politically reactionary invention. | |
| How much better too, if Miliband had dared point out that what George Orwell said about patriotism is a lie. “By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people,” wrote Orwell. “Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.” Orwellian patriotism is always innocent, often lovable and, unlike nationalism (think Nazism), doesn’t involve delusions of ethnic superiority. | How much better too, if Miliband had dared point out that what George Orwell said about patriotism is a lie. “By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people,” wrote Orwell. “Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.” Orwellian patriotism is always innocent, often lovable and, unlike nationalism (think Nazism), doesn’t involve delusions of ethnic superiority. |
| Yeah, right, Miliband could have replied, patriotism is far more slippery than Orwell allowed. Flag waving is a veil, hiding precisely nationalism’s desire for power and the flag waver’s desire to exclude and subjugate the other. Had Ed Miliband said any of that, I would have voted for him next year. | |
| “To a sizeable proportion of the population, flaunting the flag sometimes seems territorial and exclusive, perhaps even intimidating,” wrote Owen Jones in this newspaper at the weekend. That sizeable proportion was quantified in a survey a couple of years ago when the thinktank British Future found that 24% of English people think the St George’s flag is a racist symbol. The report, This Sceptred Isle, showed that only 61% of the English said they associated the St George’s cross with pride and patriotism, compared with 84% of Scots and 86% of Welsh when asked about, respectively, the St Andrew’s cross and the Red Dragon. | “To a sizeable proportion of the population, flaunting the flag sometimes seems territorial and exclusive, perhaps even intimidating,” wrote Owen Jones in this newspaper at the weekend. That sizeable proportion was quantified in a survey a couple of years ago when the thinktank British Future found that 24% of English people think the St George’s flag is a racist symbol. The report, This Sceptred Isle, showed that only 61% of the English said they associated the St George’s cross with pride and patriotism, compared with 84% of Scots and 86% of Welsh when asked about, respectively, the St Andrew’s cross and the Red Dragon. |
| Why? British Future blamed the “extreme street hooligans of the English Defence League” for “toxifying” the St George’s cross. But this toxification is a recent phenomenon. Once, the English flag was the safe alternative for those who wanted to express enthusiasm for the land in which they lived, without thereby exonerating the British empire. That was the problem with the union jack – its tacit endorsement of white British feet on black and brown throats. | Why? British Future blamed the “extreme street hooligans of the English Defence League” for “toxifying” the St George’s cross. But this toxification is a recent phenomenon. Once, the English flag was the safe alternative for those who wanted to express enthusiasm for the land in which they lived, without thereby exonerating the British empire. That was the problem with the union jack – its tacit endorsement of white British feet on black and brown throats. |
| By the late 1970s, that flag had been co-opted by the racist National Front, and what it signified to white racists was expressed in songs and football chants, namely: “There ain’t no black in the union jack, send the bastards back.” Why, if you were of Pakistani ancestry living in Bradford, or the child of Caribbean immigrants living in Handsworth, would you put up a union flag in your window showing solidarity with such sentiments? | By the late 1970s, that flag had been co-opted by the racist National Front, and what it signified to white racists was expressed in songs and football chants, namely: “There ain’t no black in the union jack, send the bastards back.” Why, if you were of Pakistani ancestry living in Bradford, or the child of Caribbean immigrants living in Handsworth, would you put up a union flag in your window showing solidarity with such sentiments? |
| Then something happened. It was called Euro 96 and, flag-wise, it was a game changer. Ed Miliband, in a speech about Englishness two years ago, suggested: “Since Euro 96, English football fans have helped to reclaim the flag of St George from the BNP.” Is that really what happened? Not through the massed anti-racist solidarity of England football fans, to be sure. But Euro 96 was undeniably pivotal: in 1966 at Wembley, fans watching England waved union flags; in the same ground 30 years later it was overwhelmingly crosses of St George that were waved as Gazza lobbed the ball over a despairing Colin Hendry and smashed the volley into the Scottish goal. The English football team made patriotism seem appealing and the team song, Three Lions, captured a hopeful, hurt, hubristic and recognisably English sentimentality. | |
| And, perhaps as a result of this new patriotic mood, some felt that the St George flag could express a new, post-imperial, national identity. Scotland had its Saltire, England its St George cross - and the national mash-up that was the union jack? It only got its mojo back with the people in 2012 with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, featuring Team GB. | And, perhaps as a result of this new patriotic mood, some felt that the St George flag could express a new, post-imperial, national identity. Scotland had its Saltire, England its St George cross - and the national mash-up that was the union jack? It only got its mojo back with the people in 2012 with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, featuring Team GB. |
| In the intervening period, the England flag also became one that some immigrants and their descendants felt comfortable waving. Not all, by any means, but some. In their essay Flying the Flag for England? Citizenship, Religion and Cultural Identity among British Pakistani Muslims, sociologists Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain note something improbable that happened in Bradford during the World Cup in 2002 – St George’s flags waved from the windows, shops and taxis of the city’s British Pakistani population. Why? “The St George’s flag was felt to represent a multi-ethnic Britain, whereas the union jack is associated with colonialism and white racism,” they write. Well, perhaps not multi-ethnic Britain – Pakistanis in Glasgow or Cardiff, I’ll bet, weren’t putting out St George’s flags. Bagguley and Hussain add: “The obvious irony, of course, is the St George’s flag’s older historical symbolism of the crusades, of an earlier conflict between Christian Europe and Islam. Yet British Muslims readily took it up as a symbolic component of their identity, as a symbol of their belonging within and support for England.” | |
| But nowadays? Not so much. With the St George’s cross appropriated by the English Defence League in a similarly exclusive, racist and alienating way to the manner in which National Front bigots deployed the union flag in the 1970s, it risks becoming for white English people only, expressing their rejection of multi-ethnic society. That, of course, is not the whole story: to see, say, a black Briton such as Daniel Sturridge or Danny Wellbeck scoring for England while wearing the cross of St George on their chests undermines such reductive narratives. | |
| Around the back of Pentonville Prison in Islington, where revolutionaries against the British empire such as the Irishman Roger Casement or the Indian Udham Singh were hanged, I see more English flags hanging from windows. I ask one woman why, and she shuts the door in my face. At another house, Jim, 51 – like me, a white, bald father of one – is more forthcoming. He says the St George’s flag I can see is hanging from his son’s bedroom window. “I’d half forgotten it was there, to be honest. It’s for football, really, but I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with it. Why shouldn’t he put a flag up?” He denies that it is an expression of white pride. “My boy is just as pleased when Danny Welbeck scores as Wayne Rooney, even though one’s black and the other’s white.” | Around the back of Pentonville Prison in Islington, where revolutionaries against the British empire such as the Irishman Roger Casement or the Indian Udham Singh were hanged, I see more English flags hanging from windows. I ask one woman why, and she shuts the door in my face. At another house, Jim, 51 – like me, a white, bald father of one – is more forthcoming. He says the St George’s flag I can see is hanging from his son’s bedroom window. “I’d half forgotten it was there, to be honest. It’s for football, really, but I don’t see that there’s anything wrong with it. Why shouldn’t he put a flag up?” He denies that it is an expression of white pride. “My boy is just as pleased when Danny Welbeck scores as Wayne Rooney, even though one’s black and the other’s white.” |
| What does the flag mean to you? “Like I said, it’s for football. But I suppose it’s about England. This is still England and I am proud to be English. Why not? If people look down on it, then they can get lost. People get too touchy about that kind of thing. | What does the flag mean to you? “Like I said, it’s for football. But I suppose it’s about England. This is still England and I am proud to be English. Why not? If people look down on it, then they can get lost. People get too touchy about that kind of thing. |
| “Islington’s not all posh houses. Most of it’s not like that. Look around here. But people do talk crap about things they don’t know about, don’t they?” Quite so. | “Islington’s not all posh houses. Most of it’s not like that. Look around here. But people do talk crap about things they don’t know about, don’t they?” Quite so. |
| How, then, should we understand what national flags mean in Britain in 2014, when they are cut across by race, class and national divisions? I ask Paul Gilroy, the black British professor who took the base metal of skinhead chanting and turned it into the golden analysis of race in Britain with his 1987 book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. “Of course ideological and political racists wave the flag of St George and the union flag, but that doesn’t make all its brandishers/users into white supremacists or neofascists,” Gilroy replies. “We need to pay more attention to what that fascism looks and sounds like. | How, then, should we understand what national flags mean in Britain in 2014, when they are cut across by race, class and national divisions? I ask Paul Gilroy, the black British professor who took the base metal of skinhead chanting and turned it into the golden analysis of race in Britain with his 1987 book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. “Of course ideological and political racists wave the flag of St George and the union flag, but that doesn’t make all its brandishers/users into white supremacists or neofascists,” Gilroy replies. “We need to pay more attention to what that fascism looks and sounds like. |
| “These days, racism seems both too big and too small to encompass the clutch of feelings that lead people to drape national emblems on their houses. Too big, because the political geography of these desperate gestures requires attention to a number of identifiable microclimates. Too small, because, these feelings are linked to anxieties over identity, culture and nationality as much as hierarchies of race and colour. | |
| “Didn’t our ex-shadow attorney general point out that the Rochester flags covered the windows of Mr Ware’s dwelling [Ware is the man of whose Strood house Thornberry tweeted an image]? Perhaps they aren’t flags at all, but screens, veils or filters to block out the ghastliness of the public world beyond the home that isn’t a castle any more?” | “Didn’t our ex-shadow attorney general point out that the Rochester flags covered the windows of Mr Ware’s dwelling [Ware is the man of whose Strood house Thornberry tweeted an image]? Perhaps they aren’t flags at all, but screens, veils or filters to block out the ghastliness of the public world beyond the home that isn’t a castle any more?” |
| I love this idea: English flag as post-colonial white-van man’s burqa, except with this twist: it’s not so much to conceal what’s inside as to hide the intolerableness of the outside. | I love this idea: English flag as post-colonial white-van man’s burqa, except with this twist: it’s not so much to conceal what’s inside as to hide the intolerableness of the outside. |
| But of course flag waving is more than white-van man’s burden: it’s as nuanced as Gilroy suggests. Had someone opened the door at the Spider-Man house up the street from me, they might – just possibly – have told me to sling my proverbial hook in idiomatic Urdu or Swahili. Which would have been their right as freedom-loving Englishmen or women. And when white children and their parents put up England flags to support that beautiful and disappointing thing, a mixed-race and underachieving national football team, deriding them seems snobbish, killjoy and counterproductive. Flags? More complicated means of expression than you’d think. | But of course flag waving is more than white-van man’s burden: it’s as nuanced as Gilroy suggests. Had someone opened the door at the Spider-Man house up the street from me, they might – just possibly – have told me to sling my proverbial hook in idiomatic Urdu or Swahili. Which would have been their right as freedom-loving Englishmen or women. And when white children and their parents put up England flags to support that beautiful and disappointing thing, a mixed-race and underachieving national football team, deriding them seems snobbish, killjoy and counterproductive. Flags? More complicated means of expression than you’d think. |
| Today, of course, even the union flag can’t simply be read as an emblem of racist hubris. Its co-opting into the Blairite notion of Cool Britannia might make one sick to one’s stomach, but it was not evidently racist or colonially triumphalist. What’s more, if Mary Berry, Paul Hollywood, Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc are, thanks to their Great British Bake Off bunting, expressing white is right ideology, then I’ll eat more than a victorian sponge. | Today, of course, even the union flag can’t simply be read as an emblem of racist hubris. Its co-opting into the Blairite notion of Cool Britannia might make one sick to one’s stomach, but it was not evidently racist or colonially triumphalist. What’s more, if Mary Berry, Paul Hollywood, Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc are, thanks to their Great British Bake Off bunting, expressing white is right ideology, then I’ll eat more than a victorian sponge. |
| A few years ago, marketing executive Nigel Turner tried to rebrand the union jack by putting a few touches of black in it – in order to better reflect multi-ethnic Britain. But that hasn’t proven necessary for some black Britons who are happy to drape themselves in the red, white and blue of the union flag. Think West Bromwich-born black British heptathlete Denise Lewis or Somali-born British hero Mo Farah. The flag belongs to them as much as, if not more, to the white racists. | |
| But here’s the worry: in waving flags we are becoming more like Americans. Friends in New York still wince over the post- 9/11 culture in their city in which, they felt, the expression of national grief and solidarity with the murdered curdled into something uglier: an exclusive expression of American identity not big enough to include American Muslims. In 2008, a survey concluded that seeing the stars and stripes doesn’t make Americans feel more patriotic, but, instead, more nationalistic and more superior to non-Americans. This mode of thinking, according to US social psychology professor Markus Kemmelmeier, makes people “feel more entitled to express prejudice”. | But here’s the worry: in waving flags we are becoming more like Americans. Friends in New York still wince over the post- 9/11 culture in their city in which, they felt, the expression of national grief and solidarity with the murdered curdled into something uglier: an exclusive expression of American identity not big enough to include American Muslims. In 2008, a survey concluded that seeing the stars and stripes doesn’t make Americans feel more patriotic, but, instead, more nationalistic and more superior to non-Americans. This mode of thinking, according to US social psychology professor Markus Kemmelmeier, makes people “feel more entitled to express prejudice”. |
| What happened in the US risks happening in Britain, but with one caveat. Samuel Johnson called patriotism the last refuge of the scoundrel. It may be that flying the flag is the last refuge of the powerless, the futile assertion of powerfulness by association with a gimcrack notion of nation at the very moment of the flag wavers’ greatest impotence. | What happened in the US risks happening in Britain, but with one caveat. Samuel Johnson called patriotism the last refuge of the scoundrel. It may be that flying the flag is the last refuge of the powerless, the futile assertion of powerfulness by association with a gimcrack notion of nation at the very moment of the flag wavers’ greatest impotence. |
| Mary Wakefield in the Spectator argues otherwise. “If we don’t feel a quiet patriotism, fellow feeling for fellow Brits – if we find it tricky to trust each other – then society begins to crumble.” But the problem with this is that expressions of patriotism, displaying flags in particular, aren’t always expressions of fellow feeling, but signify superiority in skin colour, race or ethnicity. Flags can help express the inward-looking, foreigner-distrusting, borderline racist patriotic ethos in which Ukip thrives. That sort of patriotism can make society crumble rather than hold it together. | Mary Wakefield in the Spectator argues otherwise. “If we don’t feel a quiet patriotism, fellow feeling for fellow Brits – if we find it tricky to trust each other – then society begins to crumble.” But the problem with this is that expressions of patriotism, displaying flags in particular, aren’t always expressions of fellow feeling, but signify superiority in skin colour, race or ethnicity. Flags can help express the inward-looking, foreigner-distrusting, borderline racist patriotic ethos in which Ukip thrives. That sort of patriotism can make society crumble rather than hold it together. |
| Ironically, what gets lost in all this patriotic flag waving is what being English, at best, might mean. It’s akin to what Cameron said in 2006 about how understated Britons don’t do flags on the lawn. It involves suspicion of displays of national sentiment, bottomless irony about any grand patriotic narrative and a healthy sense of shame about what our country did. For all the flags flying round here, then, England can feel like a foreign country – one that professes pride but succeeds sometimes in expressing only fear and loathing. | Ironically, what gets lost in all this patriotic flag waving is what being English, at best, might mean. It’s akin to what Cameron said in 2006 about how understated Britons don’t do flags on the lawn. It involves suspicion of displays of national sentiment, bottomless irony about any grand patriotic narrative and a healthy sense of shame about what our country did. For all the flags flying round here, then, England can feel like a foreign country – one that professes pride but succeeds sometimes in expressing only fear and loathing. |
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