It’s been an unedifying year for Birmingham. Alongside our interminable bin strike, we’ve now got something else littering our streets. ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ has seen cheap flags popping up on lampposts across the city, and we’re credited by some of kicking this whole thing off. Lovely.
Subtle (and not so subtle) racist motivations aside in the current campaign, what is painful about the ‘patriotism’ of flag waving is that it’s so distinctly… un-English.
Now for those of you who see Britain and England as the axiom of all that is evil and toxic, feel free to get off at this stop. As someone with ¾ quarters of my genetic material from the Emerald Isle next door, I can understand why people dislike this nation – fair enough. But I am also English, and I am proud to be so. So for those of you who share a fondness of these pleasant pastures, indulge me as a tell you why waving a flag is a silly way to show it.
The problem I have with even the base premise of draping the flag around yourself or your city (in the manner it has been in the last few weeks) is that it reveals your patriotism to be vapid, somewhat lazy, and superficial at the very least – downright ignorant of history and actual English values at its worst.
Plastering a flag everywhere to demonstrate your patriotism is an incredibly obvious choice. Route 1. Long ball.
So even if I could be convinced (read: I am not) that this current fad isn’t racist in undertone (if not overtly), I cannot forgive the horrendous cliche of it all.
A key element of being English is not having to assert or show that you are. Waving a flag around is just that, it’s gauche. To paraphrase even my most loathed political figure, “Being English is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.”
We are the beneficiaries of an almost 1000-year-old continuous national identity – you shouldn’t need a flag to show off a culture like that. We have architecture, art, literature, and history in abundance that shows off for us. Show, not tell.
The English at our best are understated, ironic, unspoken, gentile. Much of what is difficult and frequently infuriating about being English is what is not said explicitly, of what is euphemistically or ironically hinted at. Englishness is Blackadder, it’s the irony of ‘It’s Coming Home’. It’s having an objectively terrible day and responding with a ‘could be worse’ or ‘not bad’ when someone asks how you are. It’s about apologising when you’re bumped into. There are whole essays for non-native speakers about how to dissect English:
Euphemism is so ingrained in British speech that foreigners, even those who speak fluent English, may miss the signals contained in such bland remarks as “incidentally” (which means, “I am now telling you the purpose of this discussion”); and “with the greatest respect” (“You are mistaken and silly”). This sort of code allows the speaker to express anger, contempt or outright disagreement without making the emotional investment needed to do so directly. Some find that cowardly.
And yes, there is a laundry list of problems that emerge because of this: we’re emotionally repressed, it can feed systemic bigotry of every shade, the class system feeds off unspoken rules, and we certainly have a severe case of tall poppy syndrome. But waving the flag in this way is the exact opposite of the quintessential English quality of subtlety.
And yes, there is a side to Englishness that is boorish and triumphal, that is thuggish, obvious and racist, but that side is quite rightly reviled by most of us. We allow ourselves to purge these tribal instincts out of our system once every couple of years when we do either 1) frustratingly poorly in men’s football or 2) bloody fantastically in a women’s. But otherwise, most of us generally leave English nationalism in its box, tucked away with the St George’s and forgotten about.
And there’s historic motivation for this. When you’re the big kid on the block that is the British and Irish Isles, particularly with our history, it’s undignified in saying so out loud. You must suffer the indignity of everyone hating you a little bit (read: a lot) in the same way a good big brother will allow his younger to tease him. It’s good for the English to be taken down a peg or two, to be reminded of their colonial past, and as a result, it’s a good thing that English generally revert to the less emotive and tribalising Union flag.
We also didn’t have to go through the same overt nation building process that some of our continental neighbours did to become modern nations that mean they embrace their flags in ways and places we don’t. Italy and Germany both had to be unified from a patchwork of states. The fact they might wave the flag a little more than us (although, see that period between 1930 – 1945 to see where it got them) is because they had an explicit political project to create their nations – you don’t when your nation has had, for good and ill, a settled identity for centuries.
Englishness is also about being mercenary, it is about evolving. We all know the hidden implication of this campaign is anti-immigrant, and so that in itself, is also anti-English. One of the great things about Englishness is that it isn’t static, that it will evolve out of recognition, yet retain some quintessential quality. Orwell puts it best:
The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianised or Germanised will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
If you want to be patriotic, then just be English. Get angry when someone doesn’t queue properly. Drink just mildly too much on a weekday. Obsess about the weather. Put the flags away until next year when we’ll get depressingly close to winning a shiny trophy that we really want. There is certainly a place for flags, patriotism and pageantry. Plastering tacky, poorly made flags to lampposts isn’t it.
Do you have issues with the immigration and refugee system? Fine – let’s have that discussion, just don’t drag the flag into it. And if you don’t know how to be patriotic without spray painting roundabouts, then maybe you’re part of the problem of why (you think) national identity is being watered down.
Gin Lane 