The subheadline tells the tale that’s been unfolding for far too long in the United Kingdom, the cradle, but no longer a home, of individual liberty and consensual government,.
For some it [the national flag of the United Kingdom] is a symbol restoring patriotic traditions. Others see it as vehicle for intimidation.
The British flag, and its sibling, the red cross on a white field that is the Cross of St George flag, are symbols of British culture and history, and especially of British national identity.
Yet there is a growing movement (only lately starting to be answered) that openly disparages those national symbols, risibly calling them bigoted, exclusionary, and divisive.
They’re sort of right on one, but the other two—the bigotry and divisiveness—are centered on and emanate from only those folks, mostly “immigrants” and their apologists, who do not want to assimilate into British culture, to become British citizens, or merely to accept British culture in their status as non-citizen legal residents.
The flags are exclusionary, though, in the sense that they’re symbols of nationhood for patriotic British citizens and subjects, folks who are proud of their national history and culture, warts and all, while working to improve a grand but humanly imperfect nation.
Different flags in the UK have different connotations. The Union Jack, or, more formally, the Union Flag, is meant to represent England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. It can be controversial among Scottish, Welsh, or Irish nationalists, but is often seen as a mild expression of patriotism in much of England. But the English flag—the Cross of St George—is sometimes associated with soccer hooligans and far-right protests, and has xenophobic connotations for some.
This is just foolish. There’s nothing controversial about the Union Flag—it symbolizes the union of the nation. Those who don’t want to be part of the union need to recognize that their view has lost repeated independence referenda and get over themselves. The only ones seeing the flag as in any way xenophobic are those immigrants who refuse to assimilate and the timid virtue-signalers who side with them to curry favor.
That some hooligans have chosen to wrap themselves in the English flag is in no way a reflection of what that flag represents—it only reflects the misbehaviors of the hooligans. Those who associate it with hooliganism need to leave off their Newspeak Dictionary-twisted definitions and return to British English dictionaries.
[A] local lawmaker called to remove the flags, whether British or English, saying they were being used by some “to rally those who suppress the rights of others and perpetrate acts of hate.” The local city council estimated it would cost £250,000 to take them down and has removed only a few.
This is disingenuous at best. Here, too, the lawmaker’s beef is with those who misuse—abuse—the flags, not with the flags themselves. It’s only the ones who rally those to hate who should be getting the lawmaker’s opprobrium. The position he’s taken, though, is akin to him actively supporting the unpatriotic over British patriots.
Don’t get too smug over the falling—and fallen—Brits, though. We have too many neighborhoods and news writers waxing hysterical about how divisive our own national flag is.
The same contempt for bigots and cowards in the UK applies to these so-called Americans, too. We have a chance, still, to decisively defeat those naysaying unpatriotic ones, and hopefully one good thing about our own Left’s murder of Charlie Kirk will wake us up and get us going.