Few people have stopped to ask why a mere flag can be the cause of so much anger. In my opinion the question is a good – and logical – place to begin. After all, a flag, if nothing else, is a symbol of unity; even if that is the primitive unity of the tribe against the other. Thus, the simple fact of the current unrest is an indication that all is not right within the English tribe. The reason, as is often the case, is in the definition. There is none.
For a symbol to mean anything we have to provide it with meaning. Certain species of knowledge are perhaps innate, but let’s assume that there are no cognitive structures that imbue a flag with any innate meaning beyond, perhaps, the Platonic reality of two-dimensional shapes. The question is thus, ‘What does the symbol of the English flag mean?’ Only once we know this can we hope to understand the current situation.
What is the English flag?
Well, a little more throat-clearing is required before we can offer a meaningful response. What is the English flag? Does it mean something different to fly the Union Jack rather than the St George’s cross? Or, more precisely, is there a difference between the concepts of ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’ that holds any meaning, and is this difference represented by either the Union Jack or the St George’s Cross? Is it true, as it is often held to be by the intellectual class and the mainstream media, that the St George’s cross is merely a symbol of hatred? Is it a sure indicator that its bearer is little more than an uneducated, working-class, far-right, white, van-driving hooligan, removed only in time from the hooligan of the Church-and-King mobs, the jingoistic supporter of the British Imperialism of the 19th century, and the Falklands enthusiasts of the last century? If so, is this also true of the Union Jack? Or is there any place in the interpretation and definition of flag-wavers for that lover of England as described by Orwell (who, it may be noted, was always ‘English’ and never ‘British’) in his essay The Lion and the Unicorn1? That England of ‘solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes’ which ‘stretches into the future and the past, that persists, as in a living creature.’
Something perhaps surprising to those enlightened few who hold the preconceived conception of working-class whites as inherently racist (a generalisation that would perhaps be impermissible in other contexts) might be the sheer number of Union Jacks currently in bloom across Newcastle upon Tyne. They probably just outnumber the St George’s cross, and their distribution seems consistent across the city. It also seems clear from the distribution of all flags – highly concentrated in council-built estates – that the notion of class, whether consciously or not, is somehow involved.
Presumably, in this context, the two symbols can be taken as representing the same thing; the question of what that thing is we must still strive to answer. And that the two are used synonymously suggests that the meaning of the flag protests is not simply bound up in versions of Little England Toryism, or some nostalgic pining for the days of Empire when the whites ruled and the brown faces knew their place. For one thing, the working-class whites have always known their place in the history of this country. That is, they have always known that ‘only hunger can spur and goad them on to labour;’ that while the slave is compelled to work, they have always been free to choose between labour and starvation, between degradation and death. It is therefore essential to determine what England is, before guessing at the root of the torrent of emotion aroused by the flag.
What is meant by Nation?
Once again, we fall at the first hurdle: definition. Most nations, ancient and modern, have an agreed name. But we do not know whether this nation inhabits England, Britain, the British Isles, Albion, or the UK. The only accurate nomenclature is the one that nobody employs – ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.’ Shifting our lens from the macrocosm to the microcosm, it is also true to anyone who spends any time in one of England’s regions that there is often as much ‘national’ feeling as in the national ‘regions’ of the Kingdom itself; as much, perhaps, as in the former city-states of Europe, or the former colonies of the Empire. The people of Newcastle are proudly Geordies before they are English – almost never the other way round – just as the Scottish are Scottish and the Welsh are Welsh before they are British (never English), and just as the Romans are Roman before they are Italian.
Much of the issue of definition, then, derives from the essentially mythological and intangible nature of the country itself. Sure, the nations of Europe which were carved from the Habsburg carcass are the result of a variety of mythologies and pseudo-scientific, quasi-historical notions of an ‘indigenous people’ and a ‘national language,’ but their formation was a very real historical event. Propaganda and myth-making aside, the Italian, for example, can refer to such material facts as a year of conception, a Garibaldi, a Mazzini, a father of the language, a national poet, a national history, a written constitution; and it is not surprising that a musical artist such as, say, Fabrizio de Andre can compose songs in Neapolitan, Roman, Sardinian, Genoese and yet be considered an authentic chronicler of Italian national life and history.
Mussolini knew he needed to create Italians; but he and the Italians knew they belonged to Italy.
To who or what can the average Englishman refer? St George and the mythical Constitution? King Arthur and Robin Hood? Even our real national figures and institutions are raised beyond the realm of reason and critical discourse. The myth of Churchill, the cult of the Windsors, the sickly devotion to ‘Our NHS’ are obvious examples of this national character. Take the demise of our most recent monarch. Her death led to an outpouring of irrationality and stupidity that would befit any banana republic. The days of mourning, the prohibition on laughter and merriment, the overt solemnity, and unctuous tones of reverence for a fellow mammal, the banal face shown on every telescreen; yet was any of this acknowledged? Of course not. The unquestioning fealty to national mythology means that the country cannot look its own history in the face.
Whose country is this?
It is telling that there is no book analogous to Howard Zinn’s ‘A People’s History of the United States’2 in England. Any history of England, or Great Britain, or this green and pleasant land, is a history of monarchy and privilege. The origin of this country is the polite and benevolent ceding of power from one ruling class to another. This, if nothing else, is the result of our own ‘Glorious Revolution;’ or as E.P. Thompson3 called it: the ‘compromise’ between ‘the oligarchy of landed and commercial property.’ A people’s history of England would deny the essence of the myth. It would be to see the country for what it really is; and that we must never do. Thus, Walter Bagehot wrote in his essentially religious study of that mythical beast ‘The English Constitution:’4
“As long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffuse feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to understanding.
“A secret prerogative is an anomaly – perhaps the greatest of anomalies. That secrecy is, however, essential to the utility of English royalty as it now is. Above all things our royalty is to be reverenced, and if you begin to poke about you cannot reverence it. When there is a select committee on the Queen, the charm of royalty will be gone. Its mystery is its life. We must not let in daylight upon magic.”
Or as Lady Bracknell phrased it in her recommendation on the beauty of ignorance – ‘Like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone.’ The opprobrium aimed at the uneducated men and women of the council-built estates – the ‘flag-wavers’ – by the middle classes and the intellectual elite is merely a reaction against rationality. It is the survival mechanism of ignorance. They are saying to the working class: ‘don’t remind us of the exploitation and the torture on which our material comfort rests, on which our entire system is based; let us live in blissful ignorance. Know your place.’
This, after all, is their country. Hence when the flag is used by the right people there is no argument: the Proms, the Olympic ceremony (look no further than this for an example of the banana republic mentality; imagine, say, the Americans depicting slavery in the same way the British depict the exploitation of the labourers, the entire uprooting and dislocation of a culture and society, the child torture, the forced-feeding of the Suffragettes, the Irish famines, the Gordon Riots, etc., and think what the enlightened might say), and the Monarchy. All correct and proper displays of British (or English?) patriotism because the right people hold the flagpole. Thus, the basis of the entire argument might simply be: whose country is this? The flags, then, are an expression of this schism.
Flags: protest symbols of a ‘notion of right’?
If we view the origins of modern Britain soberly and without recourse to ideological comforts, there is, in fact, a book analogous to Zinn’s history of America. It is E.P. Thompson’s ‘The Making of the English Working Class.’ Just as Zinn inverted the traditional history of the American nation, and raised the average ‘American’ from the role of passive observer of great men to active participant in the progress of history, so Thompson argued that the history of democracy in Britain is the history of protests and riots; or ‘popular direct action.’ That is, a people’s history:
“Too often, since every account must start somewhere, we see only the things which are new. We start at 1789, and English Jacobinism appears as a by-product of the French Revolution. Or we start in 1819 and with Peterloo, and English Radicalism appears to be a spontaneous generation of the Industrial Revolution. Certainly the French Revolution precipitated a new agitation, and certainly this agitation took root among working people, shaped by new experiences, in the growing manufacturing districts. But the question remains – what were the elements precipitated so swiftly by these events? And we find at once the long traditions of the urban artisans and the tradesmen. . .”
What the protestors are doing by hoisting the flag is continuing an argument that was never quite concluded to the satisfaction of the working men and women of this country. They are continuing the ‘long traditions’ of the tradesmen and urban artisans that go back at least to the argument between Cromwell’s officers and the army agitators, exemplified by the revolutionary challenge of the Leveller Colonel Rainborough:
“For really I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he; and therefore, truly, sir, I think it’s clear, that every man is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government. . . I should doubt whether he was an Englishman or no, that should doubt these things.”
The average flag-waver today might survey the state of the nation his ancestors fought for, and conclude, as did Rainborough, that he has “fought to enslave himself, to give power to the men of riches, men of estates, to make himself a perpetual slave.” And the benign intellectual, the false-prophet, that arbiter of truth and untruth, right and wrong, might respond along with Ireton5 and Cromwell (if he is being honest), that, the worker has “fought for three things: the limitation of the prerogative of the Crown to infringe on his personal rights and liberty of conscience: the right to be governed by representatives, even though he has no part in choosing them: and the freedom of trading to get money, to get estates by – and of entering upon political rights in this way.”
Even a cursory glance through history tells us that popular action does not form spontaneously out of a vacuum but explodes into life when suitable conditions arise. One essential condition is an illegitimate authority which exists to subjugate and exploit one group in its own material self-interest. Watered and nurtured by continued and increasing exploitation and neglect to a saturation point, these seeds occasionally sprout the flowers of riots, violence and, if everything is just right, popular action. Thus, not all examples of riots and ‘mob’ action are conscious forms of political or revolutionary feeling, but as Thompson noted in his analysis of the era of riots and ‘the rabble,’ “behind every such form of popular direct action some legitimising notion of right is to be found.” The refusal of the elite institutions – the mainstream media, intellectuals, politicians – even to engage with the idea that there is some ‘notion of right’ underlying the flag protests is not surprising. It is the history of the country.
A country based on the ideal of shared humanity.
Therein lies the ‘legitimising notion.’ It is the demand for a country which represents the will of the majority who inhabit it, not just those with wealth and property, nor the dead. It is the demand for equality, not on the basis of minority status, or colour, or wealth, or sex, but based on our shared humanity. It is a demand for the recognition of the true history of this nation. It is the demand for freedom from tyranny and oppression. It is the demand for true freedom of thought and expression. Truly it is the same demand for that which was given by Tom Paine in Rights of Man: a constitution which represents the character of this nation and the ideals for which its people stand.
This is what is meant when the flag-wavers refer to the ‘Western’ ideals, whether they are conscious of it or not. That the flag is used to represent these ideals rather than Rights of Man is merely an expression of the primitive state of modern discourse, in which there is no common stock of knowledge, no Bible to which we can all refer, as did Paine, and images – or symbols – are the predominant form of communication.
1Orwell, George; ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ Part 1; 1941.
2Zinn, Howard; ‘A People’s History of the United States;’ 1980.
3Thompson, E P; ‘The Making of the English Working Class;’ 1980 edition.
4Bagehot, Walter; ‘The English Constitution,’ second edition; 1873.
5Ireton and Cromwell; see ‘Putney Debates;’ 1647.
This article was first published in a longer form in ZNetwork
