Flags aren’t the problem, it’s people trying to dictate what they mean

Younger readers may well recall it as one of Prof Sheldon Cooper’s obsessions from the US comedy Big Bang Theory.

Older readers only may remember Maureen Lipman’s ‘Beattie’ adverts for BT, about staying in contact with the older generation (via the the phone, obviously) and, apt for this time of year, sharing her grandson’s exam results with the immortal line “ooooh he’s got an ‘-ology’!”

Well in recent time honoured fashion the telephone’s grandchild, social media, lit up, as it does when there’s a political row in the news, with lots of people professing deep knowledge of ‘an -ology’.

In this case everyone’s suddenly a Vexillologist. Only, with respect to Sheldon Cooper, nobody has really been having ‘fun with flags’.

The accusation that the English flag, and the Union Flag have overtones of racism, suffused with far right ideology, and the ugly face of nationalism is not new nor baseless.  In some people’s hands they have been. I grew up in an era when too many associated those flags with just such sentiments, because the National Front, and it’s spawn the BNP, and even Britain First did wrap themselves up in our symbols, for those reasons.

However many more, both in the Conservative party and outside, felt the answer wasn’t to meekly hand over those symbols – but take them back. Jubilees, Olympics, sporting success, have always been times and places where whoever you were, whatever your background, it was ok to wave our flags, and celebrate our country.

People from other countries were not implicitly excluded from Brits enjoying that, however enough oversensitive organisations tended to opt for the frankly cowardly tactic of excluding Brits from enjoying that. Last night of the Proms anyone?

I still remember as a teenager getting emotional seeing our flag raised at Olympic medal ceremonies, and yet sensing that unhealthy disdain people had for ‘waving our colours’ as if it was somehow vulgar or not quite polite.

I’ve never seen patriotism as an equivalent to nationalism, nor need it be.

The other country to which I am, literally, married, is Norway. Love their flag, do the Norwegians. It flies everywhere. Homes, balconies, flag poles, official buildings. Nobody ever thinks of it as right wing, or left wing, white or non-white. It has no religion or class, it’s just their flag, and they are proud and happy to display it.

That’s how it should be here. It’s how we should encourage it to be.

I even fly a Norwegian one at home here in London, but that’s really just to show any of our Norwegian visitors which front door is ours! In writing this I found 8 versions from small to large, inside our house.

I have only one Union flag. It’s a Lambretta short sleeved shirt and I love it. I bought it to present a local BBC musical festival show, celebrating the golden jubilee. There was even then, a discussion about whether I, as a presenter should wear it. That nagging doubt some had that it might ‘offend some people’ crept in. I wore it any way. Not to upset anybody but because I didn’t believe in surrendering our national flag to any cause and I didn’t think anyone would really be offended.

They weren’t.

Sadly even now displays of patriotism, can get you branded on social media as a ‘flag shagger’, a particular epithet favoured by the ‘#bekind’ folk.

A shame because things had seemed to have moved on. In 2014 then Labour shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry didn’t use any such words when she tweeted a picture of three England, Cross of St George flags flying from a house in Rochester. She had to resign from the front bench as the owner of the house and many more thought it sneering and ‘snobby’.

This week however there has been an outpouring of flag one-upmanship. It’s brought all the tropes and arguments out again, in force. It’s been unedifying to see, as flying your country’s flag shouldn’t be controversial or problematic.

Birmingham Council, and Tower Hamlets Council fell into a trap, rather of their own making, when responding to English flags being hung from lampposts ordered them to be removed by council workers because ‘they caused potential distraction to motorists’. In Birmingham’s case this from a council in the midst of months of a bin strike, but still had resources to bin flags and in the same week they lit up a civic building in the colours of another country.

I wasn’t much fussed about the latter in isolation but the dissonance was jarring.

They would have been better off saying they were removing them because they thought those attaching them were racists, and trying to offend people from other countries and cultures.

Oh yes, there would obviously have been a justifiable outcry – but it would at least have been more honest.

It didn’t help that for months Palestinian flags have hung from lamp posts and nobody, not even those who don’t support the Palestinian cause had touched them. Until this week, where ‘two tierism’ seemed to come into iplay. And so inevitably some started removing them themselves.

It hasn’t helped that Reform had a campaign not to fly any flags from council buildings that weren’t our national flags. I’m all in favour of flying them, as I’ve said, but this performative policy seemed too exclusive to allow say Ukraine flags flown as a signal of support and missed out county flags, and local council flags.

Of course it’s flags that were designed to represent a societal or political message that were really the target.

So there’s a mess of contradictions in dictating what flags can or should be flown, because the fate of a flag is not in the flag itself but all of us, and what any one tries to claim it symbolises to suit them.  We could just decide, and agree that our flags symbolise our country and it’s values, including patriotism. That doesn’t need to be exclusive.

It’s just there’ll always be some on both right and left want them to be for their own differing reasons.

Our flags are no longer battle standards, or holy badges, and yet we still get tied up in knots around the flagpole about them.

Conservatives should beware of having a flag policy. Showing a positive patriotism shouldn’t need a diktat to help it along, but it should be something we can encourage and argue for, that any citizen can be comfortable with.

Left wing Commentator Naurinder Kaur and certainly victim of online racism in her time tweeted this week a photo of some men putting up union flags on a lamp post.

“Going around raising flags in what’s apparently called Operation Raise The Colours. Intentionally, infront of Turkish barbers and Chinese takeway…where they probably got a fresh trim and a Chinese before heading home. Thick AF”

Apart from the fact that brandingpeople you disagree with as thick has a long history of not working to win an argument, there was later evidence one of the men in the picture is the barber in question, and she also got this reply

“Hi, former Chinese takeaway owner, and over 30-year family history in the Chinese food industry here. It’s okay to eat Chinese and love your country”

I’m prepared to bet more people feel like him than her.

Flag rows so often mimic other political rows where those most angry are seemingly so ‘on behalf of others’.

I don’t want our flags to be a weapon for real racists, nor the despised taboo of people who assume they always are.

As some councils remove one form of flag, 12 Reform councils have announced a policy that they won’t remove them, and the daft cycle perpetuates.

Conservatives should beware of having ‘a flag policy’. Showing a positive patriotism shouldn’t need a diktat to help it along, but it can and should be something we encourage and argue for, that any citizen can see as theirs, and representing shared British values. Sell those. The flags will sell themselves. It’s only a negative if we let it be or much worse set out for it to be. I don’t know a patriotic Conservative who actually favours the latter. There are still a few people in Labour, and some who’ve left, who’d be far more comfortable with a red flag than a red white and blue one. I don’t believe most of the Labour party dislike our flag.

The thing is, Britain might be in a doom-loop, the broken bits needing fixing and myriad competing ideas  both good and bad about how you do that, but it is our country and it much to love, and a flag to show that with, I’ve never understood why the anti ‘cultural-appropriation’ crowd are so happy to drape themselves in other people’s flags and not see an irony.

Some will say I’m being niave, that this is all really about immigration, hotels, and ‘whipped up’ protests. For the vast majority it’s really not, but it has played into the idea, that some flags are seen as ok but ours are not. Stopping everyone trying to out flag each other, whilst arguing about the specific symbolisms of each, is only really done by understanding why people feel the way they do. Not taking flags down.

Just a thought I wanted to run up the flagpole.