Until recently I’ve basically not really cared one way or another about the British flag. It felt just like a fact - “this is the flag of the country you live in” - with no emotional aspect to it, one way or the other. I’d no desire to fly it. I’d no desire to burn it.
More recently, after Operation Raise the Flag et al., much to my surprise I’ve started to actually feel something about it, something emotional. It turns out I do care about it after all.
I hate that it’s being transformed by some of the strategists on the far right from a representation of our country into a symbol of hatred. The flag should, if anything, unite us. It is explicitly being used to divide us. And I loathe that it is being used to represent hate.
I want to find a way to reclaim it from the unpatriotic right-wing extremists, back into at least something neutral, or even better, something with a positive message.
In a The New World article, James Ball puts into far better words than I could something very close to how Operation Raise the Flag et al have been making me feel - as well as helping us to remember what the current actions of a certain type of vitriol-fueled flag waver do to folk who are substantially less privileged than me.
A conversation with a friend who lives between several small towns that have been covered in flags – with more sprayed on roundabouts, road signs, and more, came as a jolt. My friend is British-Pakistani, and the message those flags send is that she can never relax.
She is sure most of her neighbours barely notice them, or think they’re a nice display of patriotism. But she is also aware that the mass display of flags was part of a concerted effort from far right groups and racists, who don’t intend them as a symbol of unity or a celebration of modern, multicultural Britain. They intend them as a threat to people like her.
The result is oppressive. The butcher’s shop down the road now displays a huge union flag on a newly installed pole, as well as England flags painted on the windows. Do they really want her custom?
Her favourite coffee shop is festooned with union jack bunting. Is it just a bit of twee tearoom symbolism, or are the owners sending a message? What are they saying just after she leaves?
Following a hypocritical campaign of victimhood, it’s hard for most people to criticise those who are abusing our flag.
To criticise the display is to risk being misrepresented by the right wing press and populist politicians as unpatriotic and out of touch.
Or worse:
People who have tried to act on their own and cut down flags have been beaten black and blue.
It seems even those people with the whole power of the state behind them are too scared to do anything about it:
The government, afraid of its own shadow, has done almost nothing to speak out regularly and loudly against people misusing our symbols of state for a campaign of hate.
It was not always this way. As ever, I didn’t realise what we had until we lost it:
Among much else, the phenomenon is a reminder of how easily symbols can change and be co-opted, and how fast that process can happen. Whatever the union jack meant as it flew during the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony has nothing to do with when it’s on the streets today. An England flag raised at a football match has nothing in common with one sprayed on to a Chinese takeaway’s shutters.
Ball goes on to show how this horrible appropriation of what should be a symbol to unite the country being turned by right wing ideologues into a message of hate is now infecting the poppy many of us choose to wear for Remembrance Day.
Poppies started as the most sombre of displays of remembrance. The fields upon which millions of men fought and died in the first world war were decked with poppies. Veterans and their families adopted them as a symbol to remember their friends and relatives who had never come home. This practice became a way to fundraise for veterans and their relatives, a commendably charitable instinct that continues to this day.
But has something changed?
So what it is it we’re actually remembering when we engage in what seem like ever more frenetic and extravagant displays of poppy fervour each year? Is this really, sincerely, something that’s about honouring the UK’s veterans of more recent wars, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere? Is the focus on them?
Certainly for the Royal British Legion it is, but the increasing ostentatiousness of the display – and the policing of who is and who isn’t wearing a poppy – feels less about solemn thanks and more about the same kind of nationalism that has come to infest displays of our national symbols.
There’s something stomach-churningly ironic about trying to weaponise the poppy by those who want to punish anyone they deem “not English” enough.
Increasingly, people who share the ideology of the UK’s enemies during the second world war feel empowered to say so – to deny the Holocaust, to demand the UK close our borders, to insist that narratives of “racial purity” are somehow British, rather than the antithesis of our values.
Britain won its wars, the second world war especially, thanks to troops from across its empire. And yet people who dismiss this fact as somehow “woke”, or to be airily dismissed, feel comfortable embracing the poppy as somehow close to their cause.
It is, upsettingly, a very effective political movement, if that’s the right word.
The results of their nocturnal efforts are surely beyond their belief. They have emboldened racists and their champions, and brought misery to those they hate.>
What should we make of this?
This is a reminder of the power of symbols, and of the need to fight for those symbols. As it stands, the flags are being ceded without a fight, and some bastardisation of the poppy’s meaning is being allowed to feed into it.
So then, what must we do?
Well, as awkward and dangerous as it can be, those of us who can should speak out against it. And if you decided to put yourself in a position of power, well, you didn’t campaign on the basis that you’re a massive coward, right?
Pick your side and make it known, or you will, fairly or not, be assigned a default one. No-one sane will think you “hate the flag” if you simply hate that it’s being converted by the hands of a few ill-intentioned everything-a-phobes into a symbol of hatred.
When politicians or commentators are afraid, they vacillate, they hesitate, they dodge the issue, and where they can help it they say nothing at all. Britain’s political elite has a reflexive reaction to avoid saying anything about flags, poppies, or patriotism that might even slightly upset the Daily Mail or Nigel Farage.
For years, they have decided discretion is the better part of valour. But increasingly, it is unmistakably cowardice – Britain’s minorities are being left to live in fear so that politicians can avoid a little discomfort. Those who oppose the UK’s emboldened far right need to speak out, and risk their own necks.
To do otherwise is either appeasement, or it is complicity.
Our country is better than that. It’s on us, the vast majority of people who do not hold extreme, unpatriotic and dangerous right-wing views, to make sure that it stays that way.