Flags have been part of human culture for centuries, for one simple reason. Flying the flag of a nation, army or a group of people signals to everyone who you are – and who you are not.
Flags bind nations, tribes and groups together. But they can also be used to divide “Us” from “Them”, and provocative flag-waving can cause offence and lead to violence. For centuries, ships at sea – especially warships – made sure their national flags were huge and visible, flying on the top mast to make it easier to separate friends from foes.
Right now, flags have become the subject of a different type of conflict, political rather than military. It’s a conflict about identity and belonging (or not belonging) in Britain, the US and elsewhere.
US President Donald Trump has suggested that protesters burning the American flag should be treated as Un-American criminals, saying, “you burn a flag, you get one year in jail”. Others argue that free speech can include the right to use flags to cause offence.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen how that works in Northern Ireland’s violent “Troubles”.
Some members of the majority Protestant or “Loyalist” community have for years decorated lampposts and kerb stones with the Union flag or the Ulster Banner, the flag of the former Northern Ireland government until 1973. Loyalist marches are full of flag-waving. Members of the minority Catholic community, however, often fly the Irish flag, a tricolour of green, white and orange.
If the two groups happened to meet, it sometimes wasn’t just flags that flew. It was insults, bottles, fists, rocks and occasionally bullets.
A flicker of that emotional flag-waving behaviour (though thankfully not the ferocious violence) is evident in England right now. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party is trying to wrap itself in the flag – or flags. Reform party supporters wave the Union flag representing all of the UK. At other times they wave the St George’s flag of England.
Meanwhile, anti-migrant protesters including far-right troublemakers sometimes turn up at hotels where migrants are being housed and wave both flags as part of their demonstrations of supposed “Britishness”. Some demonstrations are peaceful. Others are rowdier and cause fear. As with the Northern Ireland experience, the question is whether flags are used as a celebration or a provocation.
As a Scot, I was delighted to celebrate the Lionesses England football team (plenty of England flags in evidence) during their most recent Uefa European Cup success. Flags then were inspirational. At Christmas, where I live in England and also during an annual summer festival, the celebrations include decorating streets with bunting, small Union flags hung across roads and on lampposts.
But others use flags perversely. This summer, there has been an outbreak of vandals spray-painting England flags on road signs, roundabouts and elsewhere. The culprits typically don’t paint the British Union flag – probably because the red, white and blue pattern is so complicated. In fact, some pretend-patriots even make the irritating error of flying the Union flag upside down.
More seriously, the English flag of St George has also become a plaything of the political far right and their assertion that migrants (“Them”) somehow will never fit in to England (“Us”). These far-right flag-wavers seem not to understand who St George actually was. He was not English. He never came to England. St George was a migrant from Cappadocia, now in modern Turkey.
These far-right activists have been enlightened on the real St George by Baroness Warsi, a Conservative member of the UK House of Lords and the first Muslim woman to sit in the British Cabinet. She wittily offered some real facts to correct those who use the flag of St George as part of their white nationalist, anti-Islam and anti-migrant campaigns.
She wrote that St George was “born in Turkey, raised in Palestine, a ‘foreigner’ who never visited our shore and who died for his belief in the One God – a basic tenet of Islam and a fundamental belief of all the Abrahamic faiths. St George was canonised by a Catholic born in Tunisia and is the patron saint of [amongst others] Ethiopia and Catalonia”.
Baroness Warsi concluded that “St George was a symbol of internationalism and multiculturalism” and we should therefore “celebrate our nation for the amazing diverse melting pot it is – in line with the great tradition of our patron, St George”.
The British lord's pointed historical summary will probably not change the minds of those white nationalist pretend-patriots who prefer division to diversity and celebrate the myths of St George rather than the reality of a great historical figure.
One lasting St George myth is that he rode on his horse to slay a fire-breathing dragon. Slaying non-existent dragons seems to provide an opportunity for a few troublemakers of the far right to use flags to sow division. And as Baroness Warsi suggests, would those far-right activists today really welcome to England their hero – a migrant like St George, born in Turkey, travelling through Palestine, canonised by a Tunisian?
I suspect we all know the answer to that.
