"It’s Just A Flag..."

Ain't it?

It’s Just A Flag

“It’s just a flag.”

You can hear the arguments before they begin.

“What’s wrong with being proud of your country?”

You might answer them simply by pointing towards Orwell’s seminal piece, Notes On Nationalism, except you know they don’t go in for “that sort of thing”. So, instead, you could try to explain to them about history beginning with the Crusades, then our colonial past, as well as modern notions of language, the whole postmodern notion of identity, or the state, or...

Well, they don’t go in for “that sort of thing” either, so you don’t bother…

And that’s the problem we continue to face. None of this is about “thinking” anything. It’s all about feeling. It’s about the gnawing sense of outrage that’s hard to quell but so easy to rouse.

I found myself reflecting on this after reading the news, over at The Guardian, that a campaign has started to get the flag of St George flying from lampposts across the country. It scares me. Not so much because I don’t understand the motives at work here but because I do.

I was born, raised, and now live in a working-class town in the North West, and I share a lot of people’s resentments towards London and politicians. I am unashamedly liberal (and feel like I get more liberal with each year that passes), but even I find myself grumbling on some days when I notice how our voices aren’t being heard.

By “our” I suppose I mean that peculiar mix of whatever I am: northern, working class, heterosexual, middle-aged, a carer, the product of a family torn apart by religion. I’m also part of an immigrant community, as my grandmother was Lithuanian.

I have written recently about my frustrations trying to be a writer from the North West, too often being told (or have it intimated) that I’m the one with privilege because I’m white and male. This was often by people living affluent lives inside London and deeply entrenched in the establishment.

My life does not feel very privileged from where I view it. Nor have I ever enjoyed much privilege.

My voice, and voices like mine, are rarely heard in the media, unless filtered through comedians playing the role of the “thick northerner”. That misrepresentation runs deep, and it feeds a wider discontent with the state of Britain.

No immigrant community is to blame for any of this. Nor are they to blame for centuries of privation among Britain’s working classes.

It’s the people who have always held power in this country. It’s the kind of men backed by (and represented by) Nigel Farage. It’s the old Tory class: the aristocrats, the city folk, the people protecting their fiefdoms inside Whitehall. It’s the capitalistic super-wealthy, the media tycoons, and those who are more secretive about their influence but are influential all the same. We are still less than a century since the last workhouse closed in the UK. These kinds of social and intellectual structures still exist within our society and ingrained in our politics.

That was the kind of inequality that Labour would, at one time, oppose. Yet it was also a worldview that Conservatives found easy to counter. They weaponised the aspirations of the working classes who were taught to fear taxation rather than see it as a mechanism for wealth distribution and the collective good.

What we’ve seen in the last decade is really a shift in the fundamental balance of our politics. New Labour did much that was good but, sadly, helped perpetuate the belief that all “politicians are the same”. They had to moderate to keep the right-wing press on their side, so they became Tory-lite. In their way, they discredited any notion of class war even more than Thatcher, who had herself used it to her advantage—changing the language of rich and poor, working and gentry, into that of the “hard-working” and the “scrounger.”

Farage and his type have simply taken that one step further by reintroducing the language of nationalism, which the BBC’s Question Time aided in either a fit of liberal delusion or calculated sympathy. They still oppose the scroungers but are much cleverer than the Tories, who alienated many working-class people by stereotyping a large underclass. Farage does the same but demonises even smaller groups with a more potent kind of toxin. It’s the ancient “Other” he turns into the enemy, and he’s aided in this by a media who rarely push back.

We can dwell too long on what Farage is doing, what his ulterior goals might be, and, indeed, who benefits the most by destabilising Western democracies, but I will say it’s a good time to be called “Vladimir”.

What’s more important is how Labour or the Liberal Democrats (perhaps) face down the challenge. I don’t see other parties with enough backing to create a functional counter to Reform. I certainly think the Tories are going to become increasingly the same in their drift to the hard (and perhaps far) right.

And the answer still lies in how government has treated many communities—especially across the North, but also in deprived parts of the South. Make no mistake: much of the blame can be placed at the feet of the Tories, but blame too should be apportioned to a liberal establishment who have created a culture of wilful disregard for entire generations of people.

Ask me to define myself and I would never define myself as being either British or English.

I am male.

I am northern.

I am working class.

I am forgotten.

That is a big part of Labour’s problem.