United Kingdom: Is flag waving patriotic or cringeworthy?
In what other country would a cabinet official be sneered at by the state broadcaster for having the national flag in his office? asked Amanda Platell in the Daily Mail. That’s exactly what happened in the U.K. last week, when BBC Breakfast hosts Naga Munchetty and Charlie Stayt interviewed the minister for housing and local government, Robert Jenrick, over Zoom. At the end of the section, a smirking Stayt quipped that the large Union Jack displayed in the minister’s office was not “to standard-size, government-interview measurements.” A snickering Munchetty, meanwhile, mocked the framed portrait of Queen Elizabeth II that was hanging nearby. Viewers weren’t so amused by this sneering show of the “anti-British culture” that infects the BBC—and they complained in droves. The hosts were reprimanded, and Munchetty apologized for “liking” tweets that ridiculed “flag-shaggers” and “the flag-waving government.”
The red, white, and blue is suddenly everywhere in politics, said John Harris in The Guardian. The newly decorated briefing room where Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson meets the press is bedecked with “no less than four Union Jacks.” And now the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Keir Starmer, has begun appearing “in front of his own Union Jack.” This ostentatious patriotism smacks of desperation. It is a “wearied and embattled” attempt to shore up “a common British identity” even as that identity is crumbling everywhere but England. In the other three nations that make up the United Kingdom—Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales—polls show support for breaking away from
London at anywhere from 23 percent to nearly 50 percent. Insisting on a “hyper-unionism” and festooning everything with flags may actually be “deepening the U.K.’s fault lines”—and verges at times on the “downright camp.” Spoken like an urban elitist, said Sherelle Jacobs in The Daily Telegraph. Woke leftists regard the Union Jack as a “badge of imperialism and demagoguery.” Most Britons, though, don’t see the flag as jingoistic. For us, pride in Britain is an integral part of life, “as humdrum as crotchety March weather or a morning cup of tea.”
Jenrick is now getting his revenge, said Tom Peck in Independent .co.uk. The Department for Culture has just decreed that the Union Jack should be flown from national government buildings every day, and Jenrick has urged local authorities to fly it as well. Before last week, the flag was required to be flown only 20 days a year, “to mark significant moments in the life of the nation, like Prince Andrew’s birthday.” Still, perhaps it’s good that we’re changing our “dysfunctional” relationship with the Union Jack, long seen as “something rather naff, rather frankly un-British,” and associated with far-right skinheads. That changed during the Brexit campaign, when the pro–European Union side made the fatal mistake of adopting the blue-and-gold EU flag as their symbol, allowing pro-Brexit folks to grab the Union Jack and make leaving the bloc seem patriotic. Soon all parties will be fervent flag wavers, and the Union Jack might be as ubiquitous here as the Stars and Stripes in America.