St George is Cross

Is the England flag back on the map?

There has been a surprising level of outrage this week over Nike’s “playful update” to our nation’s flag.

In case you’ve somehow missed it, Nike, with the blessing of the FA, redesigned the England flag on the latest football shirt, transforming it into some blue and purple (with a bit of the original red) monstrosity.

Nike claims the design is a reference to the 1966 world cup winning team:

Together with the FA, the intention was to celebrate the heroes of 1966 and their achievements.

The trim on the cuffs takes its cues from the training gear worn by England's 1966 heroes, with a gradient of blues and reds topped with purple.

Nobody is convinced by this, however, including Joey Barton, who pointed out the similarity to the bisexual flag and claimed: “It’ll be to appease all of the lesbians who play for the Lionesses and in women’s football. Nothing ‘playful’ about it.”

Wherever you stand on the issue, or on Barton, I think we can all agree “It’ll be to appease all of the lesbians” is a sentence you’d have to have a heart of stone not to enjoy.

This is totally on brand for Barton, but the flag outrage has been so widespread that even Emily Thornberry—who was forced to resign in 2014 due to her open contempt for the England flag, and working people who take pride in it—has suddenly come out as a stanch patriot, lambasting Nike’s redesign across the media.

Of course, it is unlikely Thornberry has had a change of whatever she uses for a heart; she is simply taking the Labour line, set out by Keir Starmer, who has stated:

I’m a big football fan, I go to England games, men, women’s games. And the flag is used by everybody, it’s unifying, it doesn’t need to change.

We just need to be proud of it. So I think they should just reconsider this and change it back.

Starmer, in turn, is obviously just using this as an easy win to prove how sensible and patriotic he is, reassuring normal people that he totally won’t ruin the country with his deep-seated leftist ideals.

Rishi Sunak has issued a similarly bland statement, and the Tory X account has posted: “There’s only one St George’s cross”. Never mind that half of their party probably thinks the flag is a hate symbol (with Labour it’s probably more like 90%).

This is an easy win for political parties who can’t solve any real problems, and there is good reason to be cynical about it. In general, I’m suspicious when normies and mainstream politicians are almost more outraged than me on an issue, because on most issues that bother me they either don’t care, or are actively against my position.

Reading Camila Tominey’s piece in the Telegraph about the flag scandal, though, in which she takes aim at our “Anglophobic elite”, I did start to wonder if something bigger is happening.

Tominey observes:

As George Orwell once remarked: “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.” But what we’ve witnessed in more recent times is a move away from what I would call apologetic Englishness, a tendency to self-flagellate – to actually being metaphorically flogged by other people seeking to demonise who we are, and what we stand for. 

In condemning such flagellation, Tominey captures the public mood.

The sheer level of outrage over the redesigned flag, a story that, in light of the many horrors of the culture war and the destruction of our country by the political elite, is relatively minor, does lead me to suspect that we are dealing with something more than just the latest woke irritant.

The England football team has long been the one semi-acceptable outlet for patriots (and even the centrist dad metropolitan Remainer class) to express their national pride. But this latest scandal seems to go beyond that. It feels more like an outpouring of rage at the general sustained attack on English people and English values over the last several decades.

Much of this has been tacitly or actively approved of by ‘our’ politicians, which is presumably why Thornberry felt she could get away with sneering at the display of England flags on a house in Rochester in 2014.

Even back then, it turned out she had miscalculated, and perhaps the Nike incident is just a repeat of that same faux outrage, with Thornberry simply having taken a free transfer to the other team.

However, my gut feeling is that a slight change is emerging when it comes to the St George’s Cross, and all that it represents.

When I was a child, it was normal to fly the England flag, and we naturally thought of ourselves as English. Then somewhere in the 90s, presumably due to an evil scheme cooked up by Tony Blair, we were all suddenly ‘British’.

The Union Jack became not just acceptable but was even celebrated in the ‘Cool Britannia’ trend, a slightly cringe phenomenon that in retrospect was still much healthier than the anti-British woke garbage we endure today.

But even when the Union Jack was cool, its more based cousin the St George’s Cross was still controversial, due to its association with the ‘far right’, which back then occasionally meant actual far right groups, rather than just your nan who isn’t sure children should be mutilated by a surgeon because they’re going through a bit of a phase.

Now, perhaps, the good old simple red and white of the England flag might be about to make a comeback.

The build up of disgust at the constant attack on our nation by leftist scumbags who despise us for our positive qualities and successes, very much encouraged by our contemptuous political elites, may now be so great that we are ready to unapologetically embrace our specific flag again. Not the ‘cool’ Union Jack—which, don’t get me wrong, is great too—but the stark, non-inclusive, slightly Crusadesy cross of St George.

However, I may be getting too optimistic that this is a watershed moment for the mainstream. For even in Tominey’s Telegraph article, after she has correctly poured scorn upon the idea of “apologetic Englishness”, she immediately falls victim to that same malady in the very next paragraph:

They have revelled in talk of the St George’s Cross being “toxified” by far-Right hooligans – despite the fact that the vast majority of people who fly it are anything but thugs. They pretend that Englishness is indelibly linked to “whiteness”, when in fact England is one of the most successful multiethnic places on earth (far more diverse, by the way, than Scotland and Wales, which I will come to in just a moment). 

Once again we are led to believe that the strength of England lies in its diversity, which is bog-standard leftist drivel, and part of the unique mental illness of self-loathing that seems to only afflict certain white Westerners.

It looks as though politicians and mainstream journalists are finally ready to get behind the England flag, but only via a simultaneous denial that it pertains to a specific people, namely the English. A group with their charms and quirks like any other, but one that for some reason we must still pretend does not exist.

This, of course, renders the whole exercise meaningless, as how can one celebrate a flag whilst on the other hand denying all that it represents? And yet, for now, that is exactly what we are being encouraged to do.