Wrapping ourselves in the flag? Why would we do that?

Like that outstanding journalist, the Guardian’s Marina Hyde, I agree that “not hating your country isn’t the category-five alarm bell that Jeremy Corbyn’s OnlyFans subscribers seem to think it is”.

Sodium glow:
the light that said ‘England’ to me when I was a child

Indeed, I know that tug on the heartstrings that one’s own country can sometimes exert. As a child – a deeply, intensely English child – in Rome I remember my eyes watering when I saw a photo in a textbook, of one of those yellow sodium streetlights from a London street at night. The photo wasn’t even in colour, but I could see the yellow, just as I could smell the damp of the pavement at night and feel the chill of an autumn evening. 

Later, I took joy when the English general, Mike Jackson, told his American NATO commander, Wesley Clark, “I’m not going to start the Third World War for you”.

I love the fact that the Northern Irishwoman, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, discovered Pulsars, one of the stranger kinds of bodies in space and, though she was denied the Nobel prize (which went to her PhD supervisor), she won the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics fifty years later. 

It was a delight to see the Englishwoman (with a Jamaican dad), Jessica Ennis-Hill, wrapped in a Union Jack on winning yet another heptathlon gold medal. 

She had every right to wrap herself in the flag. She had competed for Great Britain and in British colours. It made sense that she celebrated in the flag.

Jessica Ennis-Hill wrapping herself in the flag
to celebrate another gold medal

But the rest of us wrapping ourselves in the flag? That’s what the Labour Party is proposing to do. Promoting patriotism and flag wrapping. That’s not just about feeling affection for the country, it’s about a lot more. There is, for instance, an element of pride. Indeed, patriots often denounce the lack of pride in nationhood displayed by others.

But what’s there to be proud about?

If I’d contributed to General Jackson’s cool command and powerful leadership qualities, I could take some pride in his achievements. If I’d helped Bell Burnell working through the night listening to strange radio signals from deep space – even if it had only been to make her coffee – I could have felt some pride over her success. If I’d contributed to Ennis-Hill’s training programme, I might have had pride in that.

But pride in no more than the fact that we’re nationals of the same country? All three of those people owe their nationality, as do I, simply to birth. And frankly, being born is something most of us have proved capable of, haven't we?

“Patriotism is not enough,” Edith Cavell claimed, when she was about to be executed as a spy for having nursed wounded men from both sides of the First World War fighting in Belgium. Not enough? I’d say it’s a great deal too much.

In fact, I’d say patriotism is just nationalism in its best party clothes, with face and hands well-scrubbed, to charm the grown-ups. Give it five minutes in the field at the back of the garden, and it’ll be as filthy and repulsive as ever.

That union flag that Ennis-Hill wrapped herself in, the flag under which Mike Jackson served and the flag of the nation that sponsored Bell Burnell’s research, was the same flag that flew when:

• Indians who fought for their independence were fired (literally) from canon as mutineers;
• Kenyans who were sick of being colonised were locked in concentration camps and subjected to torture;
• Thousands of British ships carried Africans across the Atlantic to slavery in the West Indies and North America

‘Sepoys’ - native soldiers - about to be fired from guns
for ‘mutinying’ against the British Empire

Now, why exactly should we all be wrapping ourselves in that rather bloodstained and badly worn cloth?

Of course, the reason the Labour Party wants to sound more patriotic is that it thinks that will win it back some of the voters who’ve swung nationalistic, in the old ‘Red Wall’ constituencies that went Conservative in the last election. That’s a hiding to nothing. These people have swung right-wing because they want right-wing. We can’t compete with the Tories at being nationalistic. They’re much better at it. It’s their natural territory; it’s alien for Labour, which is internationalist or it’s nothing.

Rather than following the voters to the right, we need to develop a will to lead, showing that there’s a preferable alternative on the left. That means fighting nationalism, not accommodating it. And, boy, do we need to fight nationalism.

Look at the gloating that Brits engaged in after it emerged that the UK had taken a huge lead in vaccinating its citizens against Covid, leaving the EU far behind. So many seem to feel that there’s something to celebrate in this ‘win’, rather like Jessica Ennis-Hill on taking gold, justifying an orgy of wrapping up in the flag.

What this ignores is that if the whole of the UK is vaccinated but Europe is not, new variants will still be able to develop on the Continent. If they are, and they spread out of control, it is inevitable and only a matter of time, that they’ll appear in Britain. At some stage, one of those variants will prove resistant to the vaccine.

It isn’t just Europe that suffers if Europe, or indeed the world in general, doesn’t get vaccinated. It’s the UK too.

You’d perhaps like to believe that this kind of gloating nationalism isn’t that prevalent in Britain and doesn’t need fighting. Sadly, it is, and it does. That’s why it’s so important to refuse flag wrapping. The most worrying aspect is that the temptation to go along with it is as strong on the left as on the right - another reason Labour may be tempted that way, and another reason it needs resisting.

Here are two comments on the so-called British victory in the alleged vaccination race, one a Labour voter, the other from a Tory:

I sound like a Brexiteer here which I really am not, but as far as the EU is concerned, what goes around comes around.

I’m not a Brexiteer... far from it.... but well done to Britain as a direct result of Brexit that we are putting Europe to shame with the number of vaccinations. 

Note how important the word ‘but’ is in both comments. How it’s used to admit embarrassment at the nationalist sentiments, while going on to espouse them.

Most important: which is the Labourite’s remark? which the Tory’s?