THE rise of authoritarianism and the far right in Britain – and in England more particularly – has for some time had the side effect of highlighting the insane nonsense that we take for granted here in the North.
The clampdown on anti-genocide activism by the Metropolitan Police in London after the Labour government’s outrageous decision to declare Palestine Action a terrorist group saw the PSNI join the party with enthusiasm, deploying a no-nonsense approach to signs, stickers and t-shirts in support of a ceasefire in Gaza. While the targeting of peace activists has caused deep and widespread anger here, it has also put a sharp and unforgiving focus on the PSNI’s utter failure to act against regular examples of public support for banned loyalist paramilitaries, whether that support takes the form of music, words, flags, signs or banners.
Similarly, the current craze in England for painting the red cross of St George on buildings and roundabouts and hanging St George flags and union jacks from lampposts has underlined the complete failure – refusal is perhaps a better word – of officialdom here to act against similar displays across the North. A robust and vigorous debate is under way in England, and businesses, individuals and local authorities have been playing a grotesque game of whack-a-mole in removing the flags from where they’re not wanted and painting over the red crosses where they have been daubed in flagrant acts of criminal damage. Not only is there little or no response official or unofficial to the plague of flags across these six counties, any suggestion that dealing with unwanted and/or illegal displays is immediately shouted down as an attack on unionist/loyalist culture; as the way it’s always been.
The difference in approach is both startling and instructive. What, for instance, is stopping people from taking down flags that have been put up without permission in the way that we see happening in England? If shirtless, lager-swilling louts can put up flags in England, and if those flags can be immediately removed, why can’t the same happen here?
Finaghy crossroads is a perfect case in point. Once a unionist stronghold, the residential area immediately around the flag-strewn crossroads is now mixed, but with a substantial non-unionist majority. And yet every summer the ever bigger flags go up in abundance and are left there untouched as if protected by statute or law. But they are not. And the simple truth is that if one person feels as if they have the right to put flags up where they’re not wanted, then – as we’re seeing in England – people are perfectly entitled to take them down.
It’s a question not so much of competing rights, but of clashing ideologies. The everyday sectarian realities of partition that we and our forebears have taken for granted for over a hundred years are being swept away. The lesson of the English flag furore is that decent people can make their voices heard even as the louts roar.
