Why do Lefties have a problem with our national flag? It’s a serious question. There are few nations in the world of which radicals should be prouder.
Which country, down the centuries, did as much to enrich working people and give them a share in government? Where, in the sweep of history, would you rather have been poor, or female, or from a religious minority? Seriously, where? Muscovy? Persia? Abyssinia?
What makes the latest bout of national angst about the Union flag interesting is the location. Some locals in the Norfolk village of Claxton are reportedly upset at plans to fly the world’s most famous banner outside their village hall on special occasions.
Locals in the Norfolk village of Claxton are reportedly upset at plans to fly the Union flag outside their village hall on special occasions
‘The flag is often used as a symbol against immigration and it would worry me if it was being used in the wrong way,’ said one resident.
‘It does have certain connotations,’ said another.
Yes, it does, and bloody good ones. It was under those colours that we extirpated the slave trade, defeated Nazism and Communism, and spread the rule of law across the world. It is the flag that our finest athletes draped themselves in when they won medals in Paris the past two weeks.
One of the few genuine St George’s Day folk-customs in England is the annual hand-wringing article about the need to ‘rescue’ our national symbols from racists.
Still, the fact that this bizarre self-loathing has spread to a remote part of East Anglia – Claxton is too small for a school, a post office or a pub – is telling. You’d think tiny hamlets would be our last line of defence against woke hysteria.
When anti-Britishness spills off campus and reaches the tranquil flatlands of Norfolk, identity politics can truly be said to have gone mainstream. I suspect that the complaints are coming from just a minuscule number of residents.
That is generally the way with wokery. Because any accusation of racial insensitivity, however absurd, makes institutions run for cover, and a handful of activists are often able to get their way against the polite and passive majority.
But let me again put the question. Even from a woke point of view, what do people have against the Union flag?
Our flag is, by its design and its history, deliberately inclusive. It was the first banner to celebrate a state that was civil rather than racial in its conception.
It is the flag that our finest athletes draped themselves in when they won medals at the Paris Olympics this summer, such as heptathlon silver medallist Katarina Johnson-Thompson
When, in 1606, King James I of England and VI of Scotland decreed the forerunner of the present flag, for use at sea, he was conscious of joining two ancient nations, each of which brought its folkways, history and ethnic identity with it.
That crude and wily monarch ordered ‘that from henceforth all our Subjects of this Isle and Kingdome of Great Britaine, and all our members thereof, shall beare in their main-toppe the Red Crosse, commonly called St George’s Crosse, and the White Crosse, commonly called St Andrew’s Crosse, joyned together according to the forme made by our heralds.’
Great Britain, unlike England and Scotland, was multi-national, representing the kind of unity in diversity that Lefties generally love. Back in 1606, Britain had no ethnic identity, no poetry or songs, no unique traditions. All that came later.
When, following the Act of Union with Ireland in 1801, our flag took on its present design, it was again supposed to symbolise a civil rather than an ethnic or religious patriotism. Ireland, like England and Scotland, had an old history. But everyone in the archipelago, regardless of ancestry, could share in a common identity.
Like all nations, the United Kingdom has had a chequered history. We have had our sublime moments and our shameful ones. But our flag, throughout its 223 years (or 418 years if we count its predecessor), has more often than not flown on the right side, championing ordinary people against tyranny.
Three times in the 20th century, countries that elevated the rule of law and personal freedom took up arms against militaristic autocracies. On all three occasions – the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War – the Union flag stood for liberty.
Around 2.4million Indian volunteers served under the Union flag during the Second World War, such as these Sikh and Punjabi soldiers at a camp in Egypt in 1940
It is easy to forget that, for most of that time, most British subjects were neither white nor Christian. When the call came, millions of young men from around the Empire and Commonwealth rushed to answer, seeing in those crazy-paving, red-white-and-blue shapes a promise of justice.
An extraordinary 1.4 million volunteers came from British India – that is, the territories now comprising Pakistan, India and Bangladesh – to fight under the Union flag in the First World War. It is worth stressing the word ‘volunteers’. There was no conscription in India. It was the second-largest volunteer army the world has ever known.
The largest? It came two decades later, when 2.4 million Indian volunteers served under the same flag during the Second World War, honouring their fathers as well as the ideals which Britain was defending against the Nazis.
Those volunteers, along with hundreds of thousands more who came from Africa, the Caribbean and the Dominions, evidently did not think the Union flag was racist or exclusionary.
How patronising, not to say arrogant, for us now to assume that we know better than they did.
And on the basis of what, precisely? Why are we the only country that has this problem?
I don’t mean that we are the only country to have disputes about what flag to fly. It often happens that flags are associated with a particular regime. In Belarus and Georgia, for example, Soviet nostalgics favour a different flag from pro-Westerners.
Pro-democracy dissidents in Venezuela today fly a version of their national flag with seven rather than eight stars, rejecting the changes made by the then president, Hugo Chávez, when he added the eighth (partly to symbolise his claim on the neighbouring country of Guyana). In Spain, Leftists occasionally fly the red-gold-and-purple tricolour of the Second Republic. Iranian monarchists fly their lion-and-sun flag. And so on.
When China snuffed out Hong Kong’s remaining liberties, local people proudly waved the Union flag, like this activist outside the region’s District Court in 2021 as nine pro-democracy protesters were sentenced
But all these are examples of a dispute about who should be running your country. They are not a rejection of the country itself. Only we British seem to have that peculiar psychosis. What is it that explains what George Orwell once called ‘the masochism of the English Left’, by which he meant a readiness to ally with any cause, however vile, provided it was sufficiently Anglophobic?
I think it comes down to our country’s historical success. A lot of Left-wingers will champion the underdog, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the dispute. The philosopher Bertrand Russell called it ‘the belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed’.
Britain was very rarely the underdog. The fact that we were the first nation to industrialise meant that we generally had a technological edge over our rivals. We used that advantage in all manner of virtuous ways, from stamping out slavery to liberating Europe. But, if you are predisposed always and everywhere to back the weaker party, that doesn’t matter.
When China snuffed out Hong Kong’s remaining liberties, local people proudly waved the Union flag. For them, there was no question about what it stood for: personal freedom, representative government and the rule of law.
We should hoist our colours proudly, in the same spirit, and for the same causes.
Lord Hannan is International Secretary of the Conservative Party and serves on The Board of Trade