I NEARLY choked on my Sunday fry reading the headline: “The UK will not surrender its flag to those who wish to use it as a symbol of violence, fear and division."
Keir Starmer’s words were followed by a eulogy on how the union flag represents "our diverse country" and how he would not allow people to feel "intimidated on our streets because of their background or the colour of their skin".
It nearly brought a tear to my eye. Well, actually, that was the by now hard-to-swallow bit of black pudding causing me to cry, but the statement definitely impacted my morning.
I am all for those who value the union flag bigging up some different, positive version of Britain, but, you know – don’t pretend it hasn’t been synonymous with a whole load of horrific nastiness in the past and in the present. With its two incarnations of 1606 and then 1801, it has been the banner under which much happened and remains unaccounted for.
Union flags flew from the masts of ships carrying millions of slaves from Africa to the Americas, sometimes dumping their “cargo” into the Atlantic Ocean when convenient. The acquiring of slaves, and keeping of them, was pretty “violent”.
Union flags were carried by Redcoats enforcing the penal laws across our land, laws that desecrated our culture, language and the religion of the majority of citizens who lived here. There was little that was “diverse”.
This flag is sewn into the uniforms of the soldiers that killed with impunity on these streets and which shields the killers of civilian men, women and children to this day.
On divided streets of Belfast, the union flag is regularly used to mark territory and instils fear, putting it up to those who will never identify with it to either put up with it, or be, at best, accused of intolerance in our Alice in Wonderland sectarian statelet.
The right wing terribles on the streets of London at the weekend who marched in provocation, and whose numbers included mass-murdering loyalists, deliberately fly the union flag to declare a Britain in their own image. A calling to arms was not far away and might even be encouraged by Elon Musk’s words. Britain is a right-wing country, with its best days behind it and, devoid of a racist empire of its own, ill at ease with itself. So, its most angry citizens take to the streets, flying the flag of slavery, racism and oppression in the hope of returning to a shade of its former self.
Britain’s Prime Minister doesn’t want to admit to this, with his inane talent for cognitive dissonance. While on the one hand refusing to comply with Belfast courts’ directions to hold a public inquiry into the murder of Sean Brown in order to protect the so-called intelligence services that ran agents in the LVF, he welcomed the relatives of those killed in 1998, pledging a new “Hillsborough Law” preventing state cover-ups. And he really looked like he was very serious. Because the British establishment wants to believe its own propaganda.
This Labour government wants to tell us it has a vision of a different Britain to the one that exists. It is terrified of the Farage/Reform movement, because it exposes Britain for what it really is. And it defies the cosy yet false narratives.
