aka I hate my country’s Flag
(…Thoughts on English nationality, nationalism and international football)
I’ve never been comfortable with the St George’s flag.
I’ve never been comfortable with English nationalism, or indeed nationalism of any sort.
Considering images of ‘love for England’, I picture myself in the trenches of the Somme with the English (British) infantry rank and file in the 1914-18 war. I’m sitting in the same mud as I’ve been sitting in for the last three weeks, my clothes are constantly stinking wet, my feet are rotting, I’m crawling with lice and in a few minutes I’ll be given a massive belt of nasty rum and ordered to climb out of this hell hole and stumble, under scything machine gun fire, across a wasteland of hell holes, to arrive at – if I’m lucky, not dead – another set of hell holes where – again if I’m lucky – I’ll kill more people I don’t know and don’t have any quarrel with than will kill me, so I’ll be able to sit in their hell hole.
And this is… for Love of my country.
(Actually it’s to prevent another power, equally rapacious as England (Britain) from stealing other powers’ land. But that’s another part of the story)
Proud of my country?
Proud, no.
Love? Hmm yes, love of the country. That is, the Country.
Wouldn’t live anywhere else … or if I did, it would be with an always home here.
Love the English (British?) sense of decency. The Right Thing.
Love the unpredictable natural environment. The fuckn weather.
Love the north Norfolk coast, vast expanses of superhuman beach that appear, disappear and reappear under trillions of litres of water twice a day, never altering – except the timing, which alters twice a day every day – in between a marsh, also always changing always the same.
Love the English (Britsh) wit.
The language? Ain’t no word for my love of that. Best the world got, demonstrably.
BUT
erm … language? Let’s enquire how it came to be the world’s most used (Watch out, English – Mandarin hot on your heels).
True historical perspective:
Theft on a grand scale.
Not just theft. Straightforward appropriation of assets on the Fundamental Principle of Extortion: ‘Your home and everything you have is ours now because we are cleverer and stronger and have more sophisticated weapons. So – now we are your masters and rulers. Options? – 1. We kill you; 2. You fuck off somewhere else.’
Yep. Imperialism. The English (British?) – the biggest and most ruthless and relentless executors of said political strategy in history. Make Genghis Ghan look like kids’ playground etc etc.
My education involves a degree in history at one of England’s (Britain’s?) oldest and most globally distinguished universities.
A University is a place where you go to learn to ask questions.
At my said distinguished University, in the 1970s, there was no suggestion – for me, at any rate – that England’s (Britain’s?) global activities in the late 18th / early 19th centuries were anything other than … what we did. And therefore to be recounted, but without a ‘commentariat’. (Can this be true? It’s not how History is taught nowadays, even in schools.)
…That the English (British?) were the greatest thieves, blackmailers and straightforward rapacious landgrabbers in history was never mentioned or discussed.
It took me 45 years after my degree – and only by reading a novel, The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton (Granta Books 2013), that gave background detail on the Opium Wars of the 1860s that I found out England (Britain?) was also the greatest drug trafficker and dealer in history.
Perfidious Albion or what?
So … St George’s Flag, the red cross on the white background which we all know so well:
My earliest experience of same was St George’s Day celebrations in my childhood home town of Worcester, 23 April 1963, when I was 12. I was a ‘Cub’ – a baby Scout, part of Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scouts movement in England (Britain?), and as such obviously would take apart in the St G’s day procession, under the local Boy Scouts’ flag, through the main streets to Worcester Cathedral, where there would be… I dunno, hymns and prayers.
Thing is, I had what I called then (and what I call now), a ‘weak bladder’. Needed a wee. Increasingly desperate, no getting round this one. No suppression till an appropriate moment available. We were in pews, 12 to a row. No exit, no escape.
OK, let go.
Liquid warmth floods through my grey shorts and across the seat towards the boy next to me, who bum-shuffles and moves away as far as possible, which on a Worcester Cathedral pew is not very much.
I am alone.
And above me hangs St George’s flag.
No help there.
Mostly after that it didn’t appear in my life – until football. Which I don’t hate or despise or anything, it just doesn’t take me as a sport. I was born in Sunderland, so I followed the team for a couple years in the 90s when they were top dog or nearly, and when I had a mate with a season ticket to Arsenal, where I saw them play – Niall Quinn, Kevin Phillips… all thems.
Impossible to ignore Football and the St G flag in the face of international competitions, partickly this one. Thus the whole “Engerland” factor, nationalism in full force, fulsome and self-definingly aggressive – is raised.
I hate the England flag.
And I’m pissed off with the people who’ve made me hate it:
The red-faced thick-bodied Englishmen (and Irishmen and Welshmen and Scotsmen and … Albanians and Mexicans and … yep mostly men. All men) who shout at each other in pubs about football.
Not got a war? Oh well, let’s have football instead.
Worse still:
St George’s flags hanging from lampposts in quiet residential streets or unassuming provincial towns. ‘Yes, because we love England.’ But spoken or unspoken, illegal flag hangers (how do they do that? They must have cherry pickers), your ‘love of England’ belies your hateful intent to make the black or brown people you think of as invaders or immigrants, or – at the very least – who don’t ‘belong’ here – uncomfortable. Drive them away.
Flying this piece of cloth in the public realm without public permission, you are telling them you don’t want them, you want them gone, they are not English (British?), they have no right to be here, they don’t belong here.
So – doubly uncomfortable with the St G flag. A symbol of England hijacked by the Right to send decidely ‘un-English’ (British?) messages – or at least, un-English to me and a great many other people who see as English the virtues of tolerance, inclusiveness and hospitality.
Mostly, since their prevalence last summer on local lampposts – Oxfordshire County Council even managed to get an injunction against them and had them taken down – they have faded away. But now they appear again as a signifier of support for the England football team, and the same reactions flood through my veins.
This is not who / what I am. And is it English (British?)
It may be what my country is, but, English (British?) as I am, it ain’t me.
Aidan Walker 