Flag Shagging
The English flag - the cross of St George - is in the news at the moment. Supposedly, according to news reports, England flags have been hung from every lamp-post and painted on everything white (including roundabouts, zebra crossings and, er, information panels at places of interest) across the whole country - obviously not in Scotland or Wales.
The news would have you believe that this was an organic movement, a grassroots thing that just developed as English people just randomly coalesced into a swelling of national pride and wanted to express that in flag form over the last decent Bank Holiday of the year.
In reality the whole campaign had been started by hateful nationalist Steven Yaxley Lennon (or "Tommy Robinson" as he calls himself) as a protest on immigration. Yaxley Lennon has form for racist and xenophobic comments. Recently he tweeted a video of a black guy playing with his lighter skinned kid and kind of suggested the guy was a paedo, an illegal immigrant paedophile grooming a small girl. This led to the guy getting death threats from Lennon's multitudinous followers, who treat everything he says as the whole truth.
Yaxley Lennon and his followers have a particular bee in their bonnet about "illegal immigrants" - it's a hot topic at the moment as, since Brexit, the numbers of people crossing the English Channel from France has increased dramatically (as England & France up to recently had no agreement on controlling this).
This influx of people has been cynically couched as the reason the National Health Service is struggling to cope, why UK food prices have shot up, why rents have massively increased, why you can't get a doctor's appointment, why the roads are full of potholes, why the high street is dead, why you can't get an NHS Dentist and why Britain has become mostly shit since 2020.
In reality these things have basically been caused by two things:
- Continual swingeing budget cuts to public services by successive Conservative governments, started in 2010 by David Cameron and George Osborne.
- Brexit. Brexit has hobbled the UK economy by about £40 billion according to some financial experts.
The fact that the number of people crossing the channel has increased has nothing to do with any of it.
But oh no, here they come - them illegals - coming over here on a rubber ring, getting a free house and £2k a month in government handouts. Then you know what happens next; they bring their whole extended family over, all forty of 'em, all getting free houses and free money, speaking all foreign, clogging up the hospitals in their foreign clothes, taking all the spaces in the dentists and doctor's surgeries, when our sweet, white, English granny Doreen lives in a rotten council flat and hasn't had that appointment for her painful hip in three years and she's paid her taxes for 40 years unlike these vermin - that's the mindset of a lot of Yaxley-Lennon's followers.
So the flags, they're not some spontaneous outpouring of honest patriotism. They're racist dog whistles. They're signals to immigrants and to non-white people - regardless of whether they or their forebears were born here or they had just arrived: "You are not welcome here. See this Street Of Flags? We don't want your sort here."
The media have painted this terrible nationalistic shit as some kind of innocent grass roots upwelling of patriotism, totally ignoring its racist origins and thus legitimising the far right's position.
Politicians, including the Prime Minister, scramble over themselves to describe to the voting public what terrible things will happen to people using unofficial channels to come here. Human white dog shit in a suit Nigel Farage today suggested giving Afghani immigrants 'back to the Taliban' and instead of expressing their outrage or horror at such a comment by a member of parliament, Starmer said nothing and the Tory party might as well have suggested catapulting all middle eastern looking people into the sun.
This country looks like it's going down a dark path. Starmer seems to be set on destroying the Labour party by being a terrible Prime Minister with terrible policies, thus paving way for populist shitstain Nigel Farage and his party of bigots to swoop in and do to the UK what Donald Trump is doing to the US.
Theres a few more years to go before that happens, I hope there's some kind of turnaround. I don't want to live in a nation or racists.
This was meant to be a post about patriotism v nationalism as regards the British and English flags, but I got sidetracked. Maybe that's a whole other rant...