The racist flag of Olde Englande...

The headline shrieked out from The Daily Telegraph, the other day: ‘Labour's shadow sports minister suggests St George's flag is associated with 'far-Right ideology'. Oh dear, how sad, never mind. Citizeness Khan becomes yet another foot soldier in the Battle against Britain. This is such a tired old saw and paired with the tedious business of calling everybody racist whenever they express an opinion which doesn’t please the politburo is becoming just as impotent.

Not that the play hasn’t been clever: Start out by saying that flying the St George flag offends muslims, due to its association with the crusades, etc. Suggest that it is an emblem of imperialism and drum into school pupils how monstrous those enlightened times really were. Extend the thesis to affirming that those who do fly the flag are expressing, albeit unconsciously, racist sympathies. Link to a bit of video football violence – largely unrelated to race, but it fits the ‘rise of the right’ agenda – and let time do its work.

Now, blow the Pavlovian whistle. Express concern that the flag has become tainted and watch as the hands start wringing and the dog pack of disgusting white working class experiences shame and guilt and quietly takes down its banners. That’s the theory, at least, and it worked a treat among the middle classes who, being better educated, are far more easily indoctrinated. But the workers – those stupid, ignorant bastards – are harder to condition, because where is their treat for obeying?

Nobody is patting them on the back and cooing ‘good boy!’ to them. The smugger classes do this for themselves, but when it comes to the masses it’s the stick all the way. Damned if they comply, excoriated if they don’t. But has nobody yet learned that when you’ve taken everything else from people, all they have left is the intangible? And in this case it is pride; it is their identity. Even when they were given a vote on their future it was on the understanding that they would come to heel and roll over for the EU.

And now you have people like Diane Abbott demonstrating the same sort of contempt for public opinion as she ineptly tried to attack the government for washing their hands of the jihadi ‘Beatles’. The establishment would never dare put capital punishment to a referendum, would they? Tony Blair famously had the ultimate sanction removed for treason; could it really be mere coincidence that shortly thereafter he put in train the conditions that would put him firmly in the treacherous frame? You decide.

Its bite is far worse than its bark.

One thing seems certain; our elected officials are afraid of losing control and flags have been used to rally armies as long as we have had recorded history. But the flag is only a piece of cloth; it is what it represents that you can’t take down. The Standard of St George is not only a flag, it is also a march. And a stirring one at that. The blood is up, the English are angry. And plenty have learned to their cost that you really, really, don’t want to make the English angry.