Flags

I don’t claim to be an expert on this subject: I doubt that anyone is, although the sound and the fury makes it seem that an awful lot claim to be.

This is a slightly augmented version of something I posted on Threads a couple of weeks ago and it seemed to strike a chord with some people:-

A few weeks ago, a flag was cable tied to our village flag pole overnight. The Parish Council took it down citing the fact that it was their property, belonged to the whole village& that they raised flags at appropriate times determined by them (ie us).

This is how it’s always been in this Conservative leaning village: quiet patriotism that’s never in your face. I’ve always appreciated that- it’s felt very ‘British’ ; proud, yet understated.

Those who cable tied the flag didn’t know that, didn’t bother to find out & seemed to ride over it roughshod, using the cover of darkness; to be honest, it all felt a bit juvenile & cowardly.

I don’t know how to articulate the wider issue, but I do know how I felt about this & it’s more than the stock British response of feeling ‘a tad peeved’.

The end.

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I’ve a few memories of flags:-

-Happily raising the Union Flag as a tweenager/teenager at the start of Boy’s Brigade meetings….growing up in Leicester, watching the National Front using the English flag as a weapon and wondering why they hated my friends so much… suddenly and unpredictably- to me at least- losing it at Newcastle polytechnic when the Conservative society displayed the Union flag with the word ‘Conservative’ written across the middle of it and saying, in words that I’m not proud of even now, that the Union flag was above politics…..moving to Wales and realising that people who were Welsh had a different way of being British- and sometimes had a first language that wasn’t English- and where the Union flag wasn’t often displayed.

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• The verse from the Good Book that we are ‘to seek first the welfare of the city’ means a lot to me: to give ourselves to the place where we are planted and to look outside of ourselves and our immediate family. I know I’m English and I like my culture, but the Good Book teaches me that at the same time I’m a ‘stranger and a refugee’ and I ultimately have a different allegiance. That’s my bias: I’m part of the long standing non conformist republican segment of the population.

So I don’t really know what to think right now, but a line from C.J Sansom’s historical novel ‘Dissolution’, struck me. A character in that book says ‘In worshipping their nationhood men worship themselves and scorn others, and that is no healthy thing’ (p253). I love my country, but I don’t worship it and part of this whole flags issue has led to a whole lot of scorniong others who don’t match our notions of ‘Britishness’

I like my village flagpole, I like the idea that at significant times flags are displayed to bring people together but it is never forced : mass cable tying of flags to public spaces feels like a version of nation is being forced on those who dissent- it seems like so much more than simple ‘pride in my country’.

I wish it would stop.

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