The St George's Flag

What does it mean to be proud of your country?

The English flag — St George’s — has received a vast uptick in attention over the last few months. It’s normally rarely seen aside from the Six Nations and Lioness matches, but over the past summer, it’s been hoisted from lampposts, painted onto roundabouts and over potholes.  Most significantly, though, it's been raised at a series of far-right anti-immigration riots across London.

This issue means a lot to me. This summer, I was caught up in one of said riots on a day out with a friend of mine while trying to get out of a tube station. In a second, we were surrounded. Shouts, cries, the mass of a crowd and all of their anger. All of it in red and white. One woman had even painted the flag down the trail of her wedding dress.

The co-opting of the English flag by a small subset of society reflects a dangerous movement. By adopting the flag of an entire nation, groups such as Tommy Robinson’s rioters, the EDF, and Operation Raise the Colours can purport that they stand for its whole population. This is not true. Despite the disproportionate focus which the media affords these groups,  Reform gets over 100 times more mentions in the media per MP than the Liberal Democrats, who represent a significantly larger voter share — they do not stand for the entire country. They do not even stand for a majority of it. In fact, when asked whether immigration has had a net positive effect on Britain, 65% of respondents either agreed or were neutral.

What makes the flying of the St George’s flag so scary is that these extremist groups are invoking the power and legitimacy of the state for their cause. When caught in a swirling crush of rioters outside Victoria tube station, it is not a small sect of radicalised and misinformed extremists surrounding you. It begins to feel like England itself.

To the foreign reader, the sudden surge in the use of the flag may not seem like a pressing issue. The US flag, for example, is fairly ubiquitous. It waves from most front gardens, blends into most backgrounds. The same goes for Denmark, Türkiye, India, Switzerland, Sweden, and Finland — the latter of which actually has flag days mandated by law. This has never really been the case for England. I am not saying, to any extent, that all of these countries have a wholly positive relationship with their states or their flags. What I do want to convey is that this is not the norm for England: the sudden appearance of St George’s crosses across the country reflects an unprecedented change.

I believe that the absence of the flag from the non-extremist British consciousness reflects a lack of healthy everyday pride in Brits for their country. We cannot function as a healthy society if we don’t share the belief that we live in a great country. That while every state has issues and faces challenges, we are better off here, together, than we would be elsewhere.

I don’t see that in my everyday life or in the people around me. I see growing levels of shame and burgeoning despair. This leads to a negative feedback loop. Shame of our country blocks out the space to celebrate any positive progress made, creates feelings of repression (a callback to the Victorian era — did that end well for us?) and anger, which then explodes into riots such as we saw this summer. And those riots are due to reason to feel ashamed of our countrymen — so the spiral deepens.

But this is not a problem of individuals alone. It’s a political phenomenon which has been harnessed over the past decade by a variety of actors. I’m drawing this circle at a decade, the year during which UKIP gained its highest vote share and sparked the Brexit debate. Since then, political actors such as Nigel Farage and Tommy Robinson have been weaponising genuine issues, rebranding them as a result of immigration and funnelling people’s hate into a volatile mass. It doesn’t help, of course, that the media has afforded them outsized attention. Nor that they have adopted the flag of an entire country as the symbol of their cause, effectively claiming spokesmanship for all English people. 

So what does it mean to be proud of your country? Surely not this. Pride is not exclusionary or hateful. It is joyful and inspiring. Racial hatred is not.

What are you proud of in your country? What makes you happy to live where you do? I’m proud of the UK’s science sector, of our progress towards renewable energy. I’m proud of the role we occupy on the global stage, our support for the growth of Commonwealth states, and the steps we’re taking to repair our relationship with the EU. As of ten years ago, I would have said that I’m proud of our values of cosmopolitanism and unerring, borderline suffocating politeness. I wish I still could.

Illustration from Wikimedia Commons