Hillingdon in West London, close to Heathrow airport, is a multiracial suburb. People rub along. It’s now become yet another go-to place for angry Englanders. St George’s flags have been put up all over the place; migrant hotels have been targeted. Some masked men tried to break in through the back door. Two police officers suffered minor injuries. Imagine the fear of the folk inside. One is a young cancer survivor who was tortured before he fled. A number of local people are sympathetic, others just want the inmates gone because they want to keep their children safe. According to Nazir Afzal, the former CPS prosecutor, 84% of sex offenders are white men. The dark stranger, the dark peril.
A church in Lincoln had a crude St George flag spraypainted on it. Shocked and upset, the Church’s upright Reverend Rachel Heskins warns the ‘[The flag] is being used to intimidate; it’s not just about being proud about being English…It’s gone up on the wall, I think, with a much more excluding and angrier message behind it. Zebra crossings, roadside flower planters, fly tipped rubbish are all getting the St George’s makeover, giving notice to those who are not of of English heritage.
They start with new incomers. It ends with all Britons of colour, biracial couples and mixed race families. An English-Jamaican family I know in the Midlands have had six St George’s flags stuck into their plant pots. It looks harmless, even ‘inclusive’, but it doesn’t feel that way to them. Racist slogans and threats- particularly against Muslims- are showing up in Bishop Aukland, Essex, leafy areas and inner cities. They call it free speech. It’s actually a xenophobic free-for-all.
Social media is aflame with the virulent new English patriotism. Ant Middleton, TV’s tough guy and wannabe London mayor tweets he will fly St George’s flags across the capital which has been ‘captured by foreign interests!’. @SimonFoxWriter ‘respectfully’ asks those of us who are offended by the flags to ‘go live elsewhere because This is OUR country’ That’s us told.
It’s a no win game. If black and Asian Brits fly the English flag, we are ‘appropriators’; if we don’t, we are traitors.
Flags are never nice, simple symbols of national pride. They can be used to create a hierarchy of citizenship and embolden the most entitled to claim primacy over the rest. Apartheid South Africa’s flag design included the British Union Jack. Autocrats and ethnic supremacists love flags. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un comes top of the current lot. Narendra Modi exploits the Indian flag to build up his Hindu fundamentalist base.
I have recoiled from flags all my life. Perhaps because I was made to wave the Union Jack – as it was known then- and sing the national anthem everyday in school by our colonial masters. I started questioning this and was given detention for being disrespectful. By the age of 11, I became an anti-nationalist rebel. That’s never changed.
Today’s USA is giving us live demonstrations of how flags create dangerous illusions and fissures. Millions migrated over, decade after decade, century after century, to make a rainbow nation. They were expected to fly the US flag outside their homes. They did that. My friends did that. The descendants of slaves living in dreadful poverty did that. I saw this myself in McKeesport near Pittsburgh. This white nationalist administration is not only fanatically against diversity and equality measures, it wants to rid the country of Hispanics, Muslims and other ‘undesirables’. The flag won’t save them.
As with Brexit and the rise and rise of Reform, some political analysists offer alibis for the St George ‘warriors’. The Sunday Times’s Matthew Syed is one of them. With a mix of intellectual populism and messianic self belief, he opines: ‘ Millions of people are fed up with stagnant living standards; of working harder while feeling ever more squeezed, of being ignored by successive governments’. Yes, yes, yes, to all that. How is flag-flying patriotism going to lift them from that no-hope life?
Patriotism is, as Samuel Johnson famously said in 1775, ‘ is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ His friend and biographer Boswell explained that Johnson was not against genuine love of country, but ‘false patriotism’ used by some politicians to manufacture discontent. False patriotism is all around us. And scoundrels are getting bolder. I hope the millions who love the Britain we have collectively made, will fight back hard.
Published in The I paper September 20025