What's with the flags?

This week, we all breathed a sigh of relief as the Tories announced that all government buildings (with local councils urged to follow suit) would be required to fly the Union Jack flag at all times from this summer onwards. What the nation really needed, at this time of acute distress and uncertainty, was more flags. Thank god, we all said to each other, the government has got its priorities sorted and has the people’s interests at heart. We can finally have the summer we always dreamed of, safe in the knowledge that wherever we are, a flag will not be too far away.

All jokes aside, I’m very interested in how British nationalism is developing, and I think flags are a significant mechanism in this. This debacle has been described as a bid to unite the nation. It is, to me, an attempt to solidify a sense of ‘British values’, of who we are. The thing is, we are grasping at empty symbols at this point, symbols that only attempt to cover up what is crumbling behind the scenes. Are we entering a new era of ‘flag nationalism’, where we use symbolic gestures to obfuscate suffering infrastructure and divided values? This has been the time, remember, when the Tories have clapped for the NHS while they’ve continued to underfund them; an era where those in power are taking away our right to question and protest the imposed order of things. Symbolism will only get us so far.

Talking of symbolism, though, when I look at a Union Jack now, I think of the BNP, of Brexit, and of the xenophobia and ignorance that undercuts their rhetoric. We are a nation that defines itself in relation to others. Throughout our colonial history, we uplifted the ‘civilised’ British identity against the ‘uncivilised’ peoples of the countries we invaded in order to justify our exploits, inhumanity, and violence. During the war, we defined ourselves against the evil of Hitler’s regime, finding unity in a collective sense of greater good against this. Now, as a nation, we define ourselves against the ‘swarms’ of immigrants that the government and media want us to believe are a similar threat against which we must prevail.

Ministers have said that the new flag bill would be a ‘proud reminder of our history and the ties that bind us’. Or, if you aren’t white, a reminder of the histories and values that exclude you.

Blind patriotism seems to be the new brand of right-wing nationalism both in the UK and the US. At a time when people are waking up to the deep-rooted and insidious inequality present across our societies, this brand of patriotism demands that in order to ‘love’ our country, we must see no fault with it. It obfuscates the need for progress, reaching back instead to ‘traditional values’. British citizens with non-British heritage are asked why they stay in this country if they dare demand better of it. But blind patriotism does not indicate a person’s love for a country, it only indicates an insecurity, a need to keep a particular (white) version of the country safe, a version which refuses to acknowledge the presence and history of so many others. If you love your country, you believe it can do better; you don’t need to brandish a piece of fabric in everyone’s faces to confirm your faith in what its values should be.

There is also a constructed victimisation of Britishness represented by this new flag nationalism, seen most prominently in the Brexit campaign. This pushed the idea that we were locked in a fight to become ‘independent’ of the shackles of dictated values (like the EU’s human rights act – imagine!). Now, if a country has actually been invaded and colonised, flags can be instrumental in recreating a sense of pride in national identity when it has been systematically oppressed. The only systematic oppression experienced by the UK on a national level, however, is that which we have inflicted on others.

This flag-waving, then, feels a bit empty. The flag is a paradox: it represents our violent history, our determination to divide and conquer, our own exclusionary brand of national values. But it is exactly this that the country attempts to conceal as we enthusiastically hoist it above our cities and streets. There are only so many failures that you can hide behind a piece of fabric, and only so much cohesiveness you can gain from red, white and blue stripes.