Flags. Yeah. Flags.

If you spend any time at all on the interweb, and clearly you do because you’re here now, you’re probably already sick of people’s hot takes on the flying of England flags. So sorry. But also not sorry, because part of the reason I wanted to start blogging again was to move past hot takes on things and into really quite chilly takes. I wanted to talk about stuff with time to think about it, rather than ‘see it online, get cross, make cross comment immediately’.

For anyone not in England or who just doesn’t leave the house, flags have become a thing recently. People have been putting them up on lamposts, painting them on mini-roundabouts, and generally flagging the place up. Cue lots of think pieces about how national pride isn’t racist, and lots more about how actually in practice is quite often really really is.

And even as I’m typing this part of my brain is going ‘does the internet really need another person reckoning something on this topic?’ And alongside that I’m weary – weary of how politics is done at the moment – and that weariness leads to not really wanting to say anything much at all. But then, of course, quiet voices stepping back allows more space for loud voices to dominate everything. So here we go.

Seeing flags all over lamposts makes me feel really uneasy. I’m white. I’m about as English as one can be over lots of generations. There might be a sniff of Welsh or Scottish in there somewhere but it’s pretty well buried. I was born and raised in North Yorkshire, so there’s probably as much Viking as anything else. Anyway, very white and very English, but the flags still really really give me the ick.

Why is that? Well fairly obviously it’s because a flag is ultimately a symbol of something. And the St George Cross over recent decades has been a symbol of the far right. Maybe it shouldn’t be, but in reality it is, so when I see it I don’t think of stiff upper lips, or cricket on the village green, or multicultural inclusion. I think of racists.

And I think that a lot of the people behind the not-at-all spontaneous raising of these flags embrace that association and think that England should be white, and not inclusive of different ethnicities and not welcoming to refugees. And maybe some of the people actually raising the flag don’t think that. Maybe they think they’re reclaiming the flag for a more neutral statement of national pride, but they must also know what that flag represents to a lot of the people who see it, and at the very least, have decided not to care.

So unease number 1 is that national flags all over the shop send a message of exclusion and racism and that must be utterly awful for all the black and brown people jut trying to get on with their day and having to walk past that symbol every time they try to go to the shops or walk to work or get through the school run. And that’s unease enough to think it’s a bad bad thing. Any symbol that makes a whole tranche of your population feel unsafe can just get in the bin right now.

But there’s another unease that’s harder to define that ‘horrible racists are horrible, and people who are happy to go along with racists are fairly horrible too.’ It’s the idea of national pride itself. Supporting a national sports team I get. Sport is competitive and for it to be fun to watch you really do need to support someone to get the full emotional fix it can provide. It might as well be the ones who live nearest to you.

But national pride as a more general concept is baffling to me, and actually I think that ‘baffled’ is the correct English, and indeed British, response to national pride. I think we all absorb the idea that particular countries have particular characteristics. And I’m sure in some ways they do. Different cultural norms create slightly different ways of living and behaving. It can be mildly and largely harmlessly amusing to observe those norms, so long as we don’t kid ourselves that our norms are in any way more normal than anybody else’s.

For England there are two version of our national identity. There’s the one where we invade half the planet and try to export our way of life as the one and only correct way. And there’s the one where we mostly talk about the weather and find extremists a little bit in your face and ill-mannered. There’s the England of the crusades and the slave trade and the exploitation of the colonies. And there’s the England of live and let live, and taking the piss out of everything, and playing the Benny Hill music when the EDL try to rally in your city.

And of course we are both of those, and have been both of those, and have not been good at honestly discussing the first part at all. And recently the second part has been lost in a lot of heat and noise. The Tommy Robinsons and Nigel Farages – yes, they are totally part of the same continuum; how far along that continuum you feel comfortable is a question for you but I’d go with ‘a long long way away from it’ personally – should be laughable. They’re extremists in a country that, among its many confused and contradictory national identities, absolutely has one that giggles at extremists, recognising their lack of sense of humour as a big old red flag in its own right.

Flying flags isn’t part of that flavour of English national identity. It’s not part of the piss-taking, socially reserved, to each their own, flavour of national identity that is the one I’d choose to hold on to. It’s part of something louder, more earnest, less thoughtful, and, for me at least, much much less English. National pride in and of itself feels foreign to my very English sensibilities. At the very least it feels like something that one ought to do quietly to oneself at home. Displaying it all over the place is frankly not the done thing at all. Not in England.

So yeah, that’s some slightly half formed stuff I’ve reckoned this week. I might reckon something new next week, or before then, or not at all. There’s really really no system here.

While you’re here, making a living through writing is super tricky right now. Authors’ incomes are falling, and bills very much are not, so if you are able and you enjoy what I write it would be lovely if you could drop me a couple of quid by way of acknowledgement or thanks. I believe people generally say ‘buy me a coffee’ but I don’t like coffee and I’m lactose intolerant. So buy me a soya milk hot chocolate?