I was amused by this tweet by Naga Munchetty:
I 'liked' tweets today that were offensive in nature about the use of the British flag as a backdrop in a government interview this morning.
I have since removed these 'likes'.
This do not represent the views of me or the BBC.
I apologise for any offence taken.
Naga— Naga Munchetty (@TVNaga01) March 18, 2021
It was made in response to tweets like this, and the comment of her colleague on air yesterday:
https://twitter.com/haggis_uk/status/1372454942716391425?s=21
I have no doubt that Naga Munchetty was leant upon to issue her apology.
But what really amuses me are the number of replies. I have not, of course, read them all, but the overall sentiment was that she and her colleague were absolutely right to be facetious about Robert Jenrick's flag.
I am amongst those deeply offended by the current proliferation of Union Jacks in politics. And yes, I know it is supposedly our national flag, although that assumes that the identity of this nation is fixed, and it is not.
More important, that identity is now in itself seen by many as oppressive. Within that current sense of oppression is deep disquiet about what we have been as a nation, and not without good reason and a sense of remorse and regret about past abuses, which cannot and should not be denied, but to which the use of the flag as a political gesture appears a current affront.
There is, too, deep disquiet about the current state of our nation even if it is of agreed identity, lost and adrift as it is after Brexit, projecting a pretended status to the world after Brexit, whilst apparently unable to comprehend, let alone comply, with the legal obligations into which it entered as a consequence of that deal, which it chose. The flag does, in that case feel like a projection of aggression.
And maybe this is an age thing, but there is deep within me a mistrust of politicians who use their national flag as a symbol. There is within the message that they are seeking to project the implication that they alone are the patriotic choice of a nation, and that to choose another politician would be an act of betrayal. The suggestion is that there can only really be one choice. The message implicit in that is that democracy, by offering the option of an alternative, is not acceptable. The suggestion is that there is but one true party. The aim is to undermine democracy itself.
And that denial of choice happened in my parent's lifetime, but also in mine too. Spain and Portugal were fascist dictatorships when I was a teenager. The Colonels ran Greece in my lifetime. And then there was the oppression of the Soviet era within Russia itself and in Eastern Europe and the other satellite states.
It is an uncomfortable fact that democracy is hard to deliver and harder still to maintain.
The message I get from the current bout of flag waving is deeply divisive. It is that this country is not united at all, but is instead deeply divided. And it is that those who sowed this division are intent on maintaining that division by claiming that theirs is the only true identity with which we must associate.
Naga Munchetty and her colleague were right to point out that one small flag is already insufficient for this purpose. Multiple flags now seem to be required. Soon arm bands will follow, to replace the absurd lapel badges of recent years. Then there will be banners flowing down buildings.
Nothing about this suggests outcomes that might end well. Democracy is dependent upon the tolerance of the right of others to rule. This flag waving is clear indication of intolerance to that idea. My offence is in that case not purely aesthetic. It is instead based upon a deep sense of disquiet that the tolerance of the ‘other' is ending in this country. My sense of loss is real. My sense of foreboding is bigger. I am worried.
It is time to get rid of the flags before this ends in tears, or worse.
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“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”. A quote from around 250 years ago. Same old, same old.
By another Johnson, Dr. Johnson of the dictionary.
Often rendered as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel is to wrap himself in the flag.’
Ministers , I note, have one flag, (Grant Shapps used the civil air ensign for some reason; maybe the only one he had.)
The Downing street briefing has two.
The new setting for the Govt. spokespersons has FOUR.
One definition of love is wanting the best for another. My definition of patriotism is ‘wanting the best for the country, all of us, not just the few’.
It is not doing impressions of Churchill in front of flags.
I totally agree.
I’ve also noted how many Tories ensure they have a picture of Queenie on the wall behind them as they speak. Mind you she is in charge it seems, having expanded from Jersey into the mainland UK.
How long do you think before they drape huge versions of the ‘Butchers Apron’ over the Admiralty in London and elsewhere?
The Union Jack – I have a love/hate relationship with it. When I’m abroad and see it I feel OK with it but when at home I just see it as a sign of working class oppression and false democracy.
I want a new flag, a new national anthem and a new form of Government and democracy.
BTW, listening to R4 this morning they spoke to someone from an investment bank or something at around 06:27 this morning and he said when speaking about the ‘deficit’ that:
– interest rates were the lowest ever, so it wasn’t as bad as people thought – it was affordable.
– There had been worse fiscal situations in the past – this wasn’t the worst we’d ever seen.
– That the deficit could be held in perpetuity.
Yep – that’s what he said! It was different. But the BBC chose not to discuss that point of view further – they just seemed to shrug and move on. This is where it goes wrong. They’re useless.
‘useless’ PSR? Seems more like mendacity to me.
I would say the net effect is one of uselessness, no matter what the intent.
Hopelessness sells in the media.
Business opportunity in armbands for one of Hancock’s friends?
Actually, I see another business opportunity and it occured to me as I read this: “Multiple flags now seem to be required.”
Readers of this august organ will be delighted to hear that I have finally located a toilet roll manufacturer (in India) that can print the Union Jack on toilet rolls.
Thus one need never be far from this flag.
I wonder if those of a tory persuasion will buy any, doubtless I will find out in due course and importing from India will show that indeed the Uk is open to trade with the world.
One of the reactionary rent-a-gobs was moaning yesterday about Kew Gardens wanting to recognise its colonial legacy (duh – where did all the plants come from?), saying knowledge about such historical facts was “preposterous posturing by people who are so out of touch with the sentiment of patriotic Britain”. There we have it. Acknowledging our history is unpatriotic.
He has form. He was part of the group that described the similar and entirely justified historical research by the National Trust as “cultural Marxism”. I guess ignorance is bliss. And patriotic to boot.
‘Cultural Marxism’ is, of course, an anti-semitic trope
Andrew, do you mind telling me who this particular anti-semitic ‘patriot’ was? I did briefly see something about this nonsense but couldn’t be bothered to follow it up
John Hayes. More here: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/mar/18/kew-gardens-director-hits-back-at-claims-it-is-growing-woke
And: https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkdpby/tories-telegraph-cultural-marxism-letter
He represents a very safe and largely rural seat in deepest Lincolnshire, which he has held with increasing majorities since 1997.
Apparently a member of the “Common Sense Group”, whose mission is to “to ensure that institutional custodians of history and heritage, tasked with safeguarding and celebrating British values, are not coloured by cultural Marxist dogma, colloquially known as the “woke agenda”.” So “common sense” is apparently used here to mean “unhinged”. I suspect he might claim without irony to represent the silent majority.
He is almost a caricature of a right-wing Conservative. He opposes abortion in all cases, and has opposed same-sex marriage, and wind farms. He wants “British jobs” for “British workers” (dog whistle, anyone?), and supports Brexit, the death penalty, and any almost military intervention the government cares to propose. And he served (almost anonymously) as a government minister for eight years from 2010 to 2018. To bring some balance, he suffered a severe head injury in early life and has done good charitable work in that area for the brain injury association Headway. But he still supports boxing. In a plot twist, he was a chairman or vice-chairman of the British Caribbean Association for many years. But for some reason something changed in the last couple of years and he no longer seems to hold that role.
As character assasinations go, that’s a model of the type
“Character assassination”? Ouch! I was merely seeking to present the facts as best I could, gleaned the sources available to me. If there is any wounding, it is self-inflicted.
For a more rose-tinted picture, see https://www.thersa.org/events/speakers/john-hayes-mp which discloses that he likes to make jam. So not all bad.
🙂
Oh, he is in the news again. He really is like a dog with a bone. Or perhaps a horn with one note.
A report by Historic England into sites in Lincolnshire with links to colonialism and slavery should be shredded: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-56447347
“It has no use whatsoever and it’s indicative of an organisation that needs to be brought to order” [brought to order? by him? or some sort of state body empowered to enforce orthodox thought?]
“Of course slavery was awful and of course it was right we abolished it, but I am not sure we need to go through this kind of comprehensive report linking tangentially all kinds of places and buildings to that effort.” [no, no, better to live in ignorance than to have comprehensive information]
Here he was in Parliament last autumn. https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2020-10-20/debates/5B0E393E-8778-4973-B318-C17797DFBB22/BlackHistoryMonth
“Each group claims a spurious moral authority founded on its own sense of oppressed marginalisation.” [each group, including him and his kind, hmm?] “The historical truth is dismissed, in cultural Marxist terms, as a construct of persecutors: only they really understand the past and the present, and they now assert that others must be forced to be cleansed by acknowledging their guilt and by recognising their unconscious bias.”
“the Minister for Equalities, … the Home Secretary [and] the Attorney General … are in the vanguard of the battle against this kind of dogmatic, doctrinal cultural Marxism, because they know that politics is palpably about values, not just about dull, mechanistic, economic minutiae.” [who wants dull little facts when they could have vibrant values splashed around with broad brushstrokes in full technicolor?]
“I am a trained history teacher, so of course I understand that there are differing interpretations of history. The problem I was describing earlier … is that there are those who want to sanitise and reinvent history.” [who exactly? him?]
“now culture warriors are determined, by reinventing the past, to dictate the future.” [that is the crux: how dare other people challenge the establishment’s cultural hegemony, which is of course their own reinvented and sanitised version of the past]
“The overwhelming majority of the British public, and in particular the working classes … take a view different from that of the bourgeois metropolitan elite” [ah, there is the silent majority]
“My hon. Friend [James Sunderland] has, among other colleagues, played a noble role in challenging some of the institutions that have bought exactly the cultural Marxist agenda that I describe. I am thinking in particular of the work that he, I and others have done in ensuring that the good names of Sir Winston Churchill and Horatio Nelson are not besmirched.” [one might hope a “trained history teacher” would want to engage with the sources about exactly what Churchill and Nelson said and did, good and bad, rather than cheering along with the heroic myths, but there we are]
Ugh.
Ugh, indeed
One of the Nazis favourite songs was “Die Fahne flattert uns voran” – “the flag leads us onwards ”
it had a catchy tune and was a big hit in 1930’s Germany – enough said
And poppies. Same. Now you have to have a poppy on the radator grill of your motor car. And a big one too. Not so much virtue signalling as patriotism signalling. Tribal fetishes.
When did US presidents start wearing little lapel badges of the stars and stripes flag? It’s spreading. Eventually it’ll get to the UK. And in a few years time, we will see Prime Ministers of the UK (or England) doing the same – if Boris doesn’t decide to do it next week. And there will be a union lag in the corner of every school classroom. And maybe Priti will have the children place their hands over their hearts and swear allegiance to the flag. And we’ll all have to do it.
In the fifties, when I was a little lad, I remember the rush to the doors in the cinema aftter the end of the last film. Most folk wanted to get out before that tedious minute of listening to that dismal dirge, God Save Our etc, the worst national anthem in the world. (For the benefit of the younger of readersthey used to play the national anthem and show a pic of the queen sitting on a horse at the trooping of the colour ceremony). Most of those rushing out were men and women who had lived through the second war – and quite a few through the first one with memories of Dunkirk and the Blitz and Alamein and D-Day etc. They were quite happy – indeed eager – to leg it out the flick house even as a very few old colonel Blimps stood to attention and growled at the rest of us for being so disrespectful.
I grew up in a Scotland in which I was taught at school that we must never fly the Saltire except below the Union flag; indeed we were solemnly assured it was illegal – and in the 1950s the Saltire was almost nowhere to be seen. The royal contempt shown to the Honours of Scotland at the time of the coronation, i.e. not only did no Coronation happen in Scotland, but the monarch was carefully prevented from touching the Scottish Crown when it was paraded in St Giles, was further compounded by the imposition by Westminster diktat of the wrong royal numeral and even I could not but become aware that there was a steady and deliberate insulting of my nation. All this percolated through to a child wildly enthusiastic about all the royal flummery of 1953 – a model Royal Coach, a huge Coronation jigsaw and cheered myself hoarse as she was driven once round a Hampden Park crammed with schoolkids. Alas, the insults have never stopped and are now to be redoubled with Union’flegs’ scattered like poisonous confetti on everything from driving licences, to the guidebooks to our – Scotland’s – national monuments and with a new Downing Street campaign to try to force local authorities to fly the Butcher’s Apron on their buildings. In contrast, and amusingly, one Dutch town responded to Brexit by replacing the British flag with the Saltire in its public displays.
So, while I agree that ‘flegs’ are the crudest of nationalist or in the ‘U’K’s case – Imperialist – propaganda, I would counsel against ignoring their provocative capacity for stoking resentment or even worse.
Perhaps George Dangerfield in “The Strange Death of Liberal England” punctured the nonsense of ‘fleg’ waving best, when he wrote of Sir Edward Carson’s attempt to threaten Orange insurrection in April 912….
“… a Union Jack was broken from the flagstaff. It measured forty-eight feet by twenty-five. It was the largest ever woven. Patriotism could do no more.”
And let’s remember how that turned out!
It might be just me, but I have always had the feeling that it’s terribly Un British to do a lot of Union Flag waving. The Union Flag and photos of the Queen have their place of course, in the Offices of British Diplomats and Service Officers offices, but anywhere else it just looks wrong and gives a very creepy vibe. It’s almost a lack of confidence in ones country if one has to make an ostentatious show of the flag. Britishness to me has an air of unostentatious confidence and understatedness rather than jingoistic flag waving. So the more that Union flags are presented it’s far less British to me. Perhaps it’s the Tories wishing to associate a Vaccine success bounce with that of the Falklands War – which is the last time I remember flag waving to be a big thing. But just like the Falklands War, if the government had been doing it’s job properly. we wouldn’t have been put in the situation in the first place.
It also reminds me of one of Eddie Izzards best sketches, the Flag Sketch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9W1zTEuKLY&ab_channel=EddieIzzard
I find this retraction by Naga Munchetty, forced on her no doubt, by the new BBC policy of not wanting to appear ‘biased’ to deeply biased right wing gobshites disturbing and sinister. All she was doing was laughing at the ludicrous posturing of this tenth rate politician wrapping himself in the flag. This is effectively censorship, like the cowardly new DG at the BBC cancelling the MASH report as ‘biased’. So political satire at the expense of this ‘government’ is now banned at the BBC?
So much for free speech then. Or rather, free speech as long as its right wing speech only?
Like others here I’m becoming increasingly sick and tired of having the union flag and poppy shoved down my throat. And Mike’s point about people rushing to leave the cinema when our ghastly national anthem came on is brilliant. And to the point.
Unlike the right’s gutless keyboard warrior ‘patriots’, whose only fighting has been on Twitter and FB, these people had actually fought in and lived through wars.
While it isnt perfect the USA has a statutory flag code that lays down the rules for displaying the Stars and Stripes.
Perhaps we need the same?
Its been a while since I did it (Anyone remember the Millbrook Steamboat and Trading Company) but I rather liked taking the boat from Plymouth up the Tamar to Calstock, the Tamar marks the Cornish Border and seeing the Cornish St Pirran flags on the West Bank indicating a different world.
Thinking about it, can you get a T Shirt with an upside down Red Ensign on it?n If so I might get it.
(For non sailors, the Red Ensign is flown by British Registered Ships, and flying the Ensign upside down is a recognised distress call)
I think flag waving is a sign of nationalism, not patriotism.
Why do so many people confuse the two? Patriotism is to love one’s country. Nationalism is to hate others. Not the same at all. Not two sides of the same coin. Just two completely different (and often mutually exclusive) things.
I think that’s an oversimplification. In Scotland, waving the Union Jack is often a sign of aggression, as in the violent ocupation of George Square by British Nationalists on several occasions in recent times and its use by confronational gangs of Rangers supporters and Orangemen. On the other hand, crowds lining the streets of London waving the fleg as royalty pass by is just a bit of fun and enthusiasm for the royals and without malicious intent. Not that I’m saying the blind worship of hereditory feudal authority is harmless.
I am of English origin, but have lived in Scotland for nearly 30 years now and support independence for Scotland. What are we to make of huge numbers of folk going on marches in support of that aim and making the streets of Glasgow, Perth and Edinburgh blue with Saltires, with a mix of Lions Rampant and Welsh Dragons and a good few flags of Catalonia and Tibet. I would say that is an expression of hope and optimism rather than hatred.
There are, of course, ‘blood and soil’ Scottish nationalists, but the vast majority attending All Under One Banner marches are of the “We’re all Jock Tamson’s Bairns” outlook: friendly, inclusive, welcoming. The only faces expressing anger and hatred at such events are those in the small static enclave of A Force For Good, a band of Union Jack bedecked Unionists surrounded by police guards and present at every march, complete with Land of Hope and Glory blaring on a tinny PA system. The marchers walk by, cheerfully, some wave, some laugh; I’ve never seen any aggression to warrant the police presence, though the cops look a bit tense sometimes.
The use of big flags, sometimes more than one, as a background to lend authority to ministers’ duplicitous statements, seems to have been caught from America, where their flag is usually conspicuous behind any talking president. Obama was keen on this and had some enormous ones as background. The new utterly vulgar £2.6 million ‘Briefing Room’ at 10 Downing Street is obviously modelled on Trumps’ liking for bright blue, gold and lots of flags.
I agreed with Naga’s original comment… and found the below- the – line discussion really interesting. I learned a lot. The inclusion of URL links is really helpful. Thanks to all contributors
The control of media and propaganda is always the aim of totalitarian governments. Having tried and failed to destroy the BBC the new aim is to infiltrate it and control it. Part one install a stooge to run it then gradually undermine and get rid of undesirable elements who don’t toe the state line. Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda is one of the aims of this bunch of gangsters.
Exactly. Which is why I’m going to write to the BBC to complain about the cancelling of the MASH report by the new DG, and the sinister forced retraction by Naga Manchetty of her perfectly innocent remarks.
Nothing to add really except to say that the kind of countries and leaders who make a big thing of flags are not ones you want to emulate.
The St George’s flag was besmirched by its adoption by the far right and racist groups. It looks as though the Union flag may be going the same way.
Slightly off topic, but when I complete my census form in the next couple of days, on the question of how I see my identity in protest I will write European. I’ll do it now, it could be a 10 year offence soon.