There’s a movement afoot this week, flags sprouting like weeds on our streets. Driving into Yate I saw a St George’s Cross tied to an overbridge, flapping over the traffic. Nearby a Union Flag had been hoisted on a lamppost, but that felt different, not as badly tainted. The Union Flag can still pass as a symbol of the country as a whole. The Cross of St George, though, has been dragged into darker company. These flags aren’t going up to celebrate football or a fête. They’re being planted in protest at asylum hotels, as if a bit of bunting could stand in for an immigration policy.
My 25-year-old son, on seeing the one on the overbridge, felt an urge to climb up and pull it down. That’s what happens when a symbol that should unify has been turned into a mark of division – the instinct is revulsion, not pride.
Patriotism, to hear the flag-wavers tell it, is nothing more than draping yourself in polyester and shouting at foreigners. They’ll insist they’re “proud to be British,” as though the rest of us are ashamed. Yet most people show their patriotism quietly – paying taxes, supporting the NHS, looking out for neighbours, keeping the country running. That, apparently, doesn’t count. What counts is a £4.99 flag from Amazon and the conviction that everyone who doesn’t salute it is a traitor.
The irony is that their beloved St George wasn’t even English. He was a Levantine soldier, most likely born in Cappadocia or Palestine, and therefore an immigrant – exactly the sort they’d be screaming to deport if he pitched up at Dover today. Imagine the headlines: “Brown-skinned man with foreign accent seeks asylum.” Straight on the next flight to Kigali. Yet these same people bellow under his cross about defending “our” culture, oblivious to the fact that their mascot comes from somewhere they couldn’t find on a map.
And that’s why I feel revulsion when I see the Cross of St George in their hands: they’ve debased it. Once it meant football tournaments, village fêtes, a sense of community. Now it’s been dragged through the muck of xenophobia and petty nationalism. And it isn’t just England. In America the Stars and Stripes has been hijacked by militias and Capitol rioters, while the Confederate rag became shorthand for white supremacy. In Germany, neo-Nazis wave the old Imperial colours because the swastika is banned. In Japan, the Rising Sun flag still reeks of militarism. Everywhere the far right touches a symbol, it corrodes it – leaving ordinary people disgusted at the very thing they ought to feel pride in.
That disgust isn’t at the cloth itself, but at the meaning smeared across it. If I didn’t care, I’d simply shrug. The sour taste proves the opposite – I do care, which is why their misuse of it offends me.
Real patriotism doesn’t need to be shouted from a flagpole. It doesn’t screech about “loving Britain” while voting against the very things that make Britain decent – fairness, tolerance, public services. It certainly doesn’t rely on bunting as a personality substitute. Their noisy pantomime doesn’t honour the flag, it cheapens it. They haven’t reclaimed St George’s Cross for the people – they’ve debased it, just as their counterparts have debased national symbols the world over. And in doing so, they’ve revealed the emptiness of their cause, leaving only a hollow rattle beneath the fabric.
Perhaps I should buy an EU flag to hang next to the St George's cross.......
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