Flags

The oldest national flag is said to be the Dannebrog of Denmark. Legend has it that the flag fell from the sky when a Danish Christian army was all but defeated by pagans in Estonia. The Christians then won, of course, and the Dannebrog stuck.

The St. George's Cross of England is younger by over a century. Even St. George's place as the patron saint of our nation is relatively new. The Danes, before they sailed east to spread the word of Christ through sword and axe, had a terrible habit of sailing west and enslaving the English. In the ninth century, they killed an Anglo-Saxon king, whose martyrdom earned him the patron saint position. Five-hundred years later, English crusaders brought St. George back from the Holy Lands.

In any case, both the Dannebrog and the St. George's Cross are aesthetically a bit naff. Most flags are. Exceptions include Britain's Union Jack, the Canadian Maple Leaf, the Taegeukgi of South Korea, and (had they gone with it) that gorgeous silver fern on black that New Zealand rejected. Insert your own country's flag, if you like — it's all subjective, anyway — but let's be honest, most flags are rubbish.

I mention this because England is awash with the St. George's Cross right now. Flags seem to be flying everywhere. They're even painted on roundabouts, and a few cats are prowling about with them hanging from collars. It's all rather new — we're not generally a flag kind of people — and it's ignited another farcical culture war debate.

Some months back, a school tasked its students with dressing in their cultural clothing. It was supposed to be a celebration of multiculturalism, but the school appears to have forgotten that English and British are also cultural identities (and quite prevalent on this island). A young girl wore a Union Jack dress, got told it was unacceptable, and was sent home. That decision was rightly condemned by all but a tiny group of anti-British online agitators, and the school apologized. Since then, there has been a movement to take pride in national symbols and publicly display them. All to the good, objectively.

Things have become weird, though. I woke up a while ago to find the St. George's Cross zip-tied to every lamppost in town. This has since become common nationwide and is often done in the dead of night by groups of men wearing balaclavas.

Now, very technically speaking, you do need permission to fly flags from public property like lampposts, so you could argue that the men are doing something subversive and conceal their identities for fear of prosecution. But, the government has said "fly flags anywhere" and local authorities have given their implied approval by not removing any of them. So why has a bright red and white flag turned into something so cloak-and-dagger?

Honestly, I kind of get it. I'm convinced that the every culture war, everywhere on Earth, is stoked by two tiny groups of chronically online bastards who are essentially in cahoots. Members of each group constantly quote-post content from the other to say how stupid and evil they are, which validates their fans' egos, inflames anger from the others, everyone has a jolly good row, and the algorithms love it. At the end, the bastards all say, "Subscribe to my Substack". This works depressingly well, and social media algorithms are very keen to suck people into it.

Depending on your online history and demographic, you'll eventually be targeted in some form. For a white, middle-aged, hetero male, that will probably mean coaxing you toward the nationalist side of things. At any rate, it did for me, and it's powerfully insidious. A few years ago, I started noticing lots of anti-English content creeping into my social media feeds. Facebook, for instance, seemed obsessed with making me feel bad for the Irish Famine (apparently unaware that Irish ancestry is extremely common in England) and its Reels feature kept surfacing gems like "Do the English even have a culture?" and "Should the English be allowed to eat curry?". I deleted my account.

But before I did, I felt a real bunker mentality setting in. An online narrative telling me that being English made me a piece of shit, made me react with a sense of fuck-you pride. Albeit a pride I had to wear quietly, a pride that was somehow not okay. I dread to think what kind of anxiety-ridden, angry mush my brain would have become if I'd suffered years of that toxic content. To be perfectly honest, feeling the need to hide my identity while putting up flags under cover of darkness wouldn't be at all surprising.

Happily, I can state in this article — published under my name and with my face on the website — that I am proud to be English. I'm 100% English… just not in my blood and family history, nor in the mixed-race family I'm now the father of. And this is where the flag issue becomes tricky, it's become conflated with concerns around migration. Those are genuine concerns.

It is far too easy and arrogant to think we can accept everyone who wants to come here. Frankly, we don't have a strong enough economy, sufficient infrastructure, or the resources to build either. (This may dent the national pride I just stated, but we are a debtor nation pretending to be rich). It is also too easy to think we can stop accepting migrants. Our native population is ageing, and for at least the next two or three generations, migrants are the only way to plug our working-age deficit (unless you think Logan's Run is an option). Unhappily struggling to find a balance between those truths is the foreseeable future for us.

And for our children and grandchildren. Sorry.