In the ancient history of 2007 Gordon Brown stood up in parliament to give his first speech as prime minister. His theme was “reinvigorating Britishness”, and he offered a series of policies to promote the idea. Prominent among them was the plan to end the 1924 edict that allowed the union jack only to be flown from public buildings on 18 designated days a year, including the Queen’s birthday and Remembrance Day. Instead, Brown announced, all public buildings were to be encouraged to fly the red, white and blue at all times, including schools, hospitals, prisons and police stations. “The union flag is one of the most recognisable symbols of the UK,” Brown’s proposals argued, “but while in other countries, such as France and the United States, the national flag is regarded as a source of pride, in recent years the union flag has all too often become the preserve of political extremists, a symbol of discord rather than harmony. It is critical that this symbol is not hijacked by those who seek to work against values of tolerance and respect.” The following day, as flags were hoisted over all government ministries, one unnamed Labour MP was widely quoted in the papers as saying: “I can see the array of flags from my window looking over Whitehall. It is an arresting sight and makes me proud to be British.” Brown toured the TV studios to argue that the flag symbolised British values of “liberty, a sense of responsibility, fairness”. He also proposed that all school children in England, Scotland and Wales should be required to pledge an oath of allegiance to Great Britain and her flag, in special ceremonies.
Looking back, this speech prompts a few thoughts. The first is, had Twitter been a thing at all in 2007 – it had only just been launched at the time of Brown’s government – it would have no doubt lit up with polarised outrage at these ideas, from the left as the “so-called” socialist prime minister draped himself in patriotism, and from the right as New Labour once again reimagined traditionally conservative clothes. As it was, the ideas were broadly welcomed. The speech is also a reminder of Brown’s prescient instincts as a politician – as well as a characteristically blunt way of addressing them. As a Scottish prime minister of the UK, perhaps the last, he understood only too well the potential fracturing of the union. He saw, optimistically, in his British citizenship ideas an opportunity to channel the unruly forces of nationalism to emphasise a sense of belonging in which different layers of individual identity – local, regional, national, European – could be celebrated.
In the event, none of these policies came to pass. Flags continued to fly over buildings much as before, there were no citizenship ceremonies, and the expression of the kind of inclusive patriotism that Brown had in mind was undone by the banking crash and the divisive efforts to avert disaster that followed. Fast forward to last week, and the announcement of the near-identical plans of Boris Johnson’s government to hoist the union flag over all of our civic buildings as an expression of national pride. Where a decade ago these proposals might credibly have looked like gestures toward national harmony, now they seemed designed to emphasise discord. To the nationalists in Scotland and Wales (Northern Ireland has its own flag laws), the policy was characterised as another thrown gauntlet from Westminster. To those who prevailed in the EU referendum, and to those who lost, it had the appearance of another victory parade. As ever, with the baggy symbols of sovereignty, context is all. It was hard to ignore the fact that the proposals for this more visible and insistent patriotism, came on the same day that Priti Patel’s Home Office announced measures to harden borders and enact further hostility to refugees fleeing persecution. The flag seemed to be hoisted not in the spirit of what Brown called tolerance, but as an emblem of cultural retrenchment and fortification.
It is tempting to imagine these battle lines of the “culture wars” as inventions of Brexit and social media. Nick Groom’s book The Union Jack, an illuminating history of the national flag, argues that such conflicts have been fought with different levels of intensity since the flag’s constituent parts were first sewn together in 1801. What the more strident voices of the internet currently like to characterise as “flag-shagging” – that apparently un-British arms race of union jack backdrops – was already a national sport in Edwardian times, when the poet laureate of empire Alfred Austin wrote of how: Its folds to all of Friendship speak, Of enmity to none, Protection for the wronged and weak, Wherever shines the sun. And when the ‘Union Jack’ is seen Rippling o’er wave and wind, Men hail it, for its tidings mean Peace unto all Mankind. The challenge of “progressive” politics has always been to find alternative threads of symbolism to that sentimental imperial fallacy.
The Wilson government of the 1960s took advantage of the pop art, mod fashion and minis of the Swinging Sixties, to reimagine the national flag as a modern cultural symbol as wartime memories receded. Whatever you thought of Cool Britannia, the identification of the flag with the spirit of Britpop – Ginger Spice, Liam Gallagher and his union jack duvet – was an expert exercise in gently detoxifying the flag-waving jingoism of the Falklands years. New Labour believed it had mastered the trick of having the union jack be something for everyone – a bit of fashion fun and a solemn symbol of Remembrance. Peter Mandelson believed they had “reclaimed the flag… as a symbol of confidence and unity for all the peoples and ethnic communities of a diverse and outward-looking Britain.” The high point of that relaxed inclusivity seemed to come with the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, which captured a playful patriotic tone and wove it into an emotional history of struggle and sacrifice and commonality, one that set the stage for the unifying heroics of Team GB that followed. One way of looking at the currents of the national story since then is to remind yourself that even as that pageant played out there were Conservative voices deriding its spirit as “multicultural crap”, who were made profoundly uncomfortable by the vision of a diverse nation at ease with itself, and who apparently didn’t want to cheer on athletes of all heritages and backgrounds in British vests.
I remember eavesdropping on a particular conversation I overheard in a queue at the Tory party conference (at which I was reporting on the bizarre rise of Jacob Rees-Mogg). One woman had what she called objective proof that Boris Johnson would make a fabulous prime minister. It lay in the fact that the decibel level at the Olympic stadium had been loudest when Johnson, as mayor of London, waved the union jack to open the Games (“much louder than when Mo whatever-his-name-is won his medals”). The thoughts of that woman have, post-Brexit, appeared to harden into a governing philosophy. It is that same voice that is raised in outrage at the mention of the battle hymn Rule, Britannia! being dropped from the Last Night of the Proms, or which angrily proclaims that “All Lives Matter”. It scours the television schedules for evidence of perceived metropolitan sneering at British traditions and institutions. In the run-up to the announcement about flags, it made a national incident of the mild sarcasm of the BBC Breakfast presenters Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty about the flag and portrait of the Queen in the Zoom background of Robert Jenrick, the housing minister. In the week that marked a year and 140,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic, this headline-generating “row” was further stoked by the Tory MP James Wild who confronted Tim Davie, incoming director general of the BBC, with the news that the corporation’s annual report featured not a single union jack. Davie suggested he did not recognise “that particular metric”. But the point had been made. No doubt he will make sure that next year’s report is suitable beflagged – just as he made sure that Munchetty, guilty of giggling at the size of Jenrick’s flag, was required to formally apologise for liking a tweet that referenced it. There remains a sense that Britain was, until quite recently, a nation that could quite happily have united around that giggle, knowing that it was directed not against the flag or the monarchy, but against the vanities of the government minister and his props. Performative patriotism is a trait that the British have long lampooned, from Colonel Blimp railing at foreigners in his bathtub, to Captain Mainwaring struggling to assert his status in Walmington-on-Sea, to the desperate efforts of politicians on Yes Minister or The Thick of It, to be more patriotic than thou.
In response to the video of Wild questioning Davie, former Conservative MP Anna Soubry tweeted that “the toes of sensible Tories will be curling up to their knees”, but the party she once imagined herself to belong to has, it seems, long gone. The one that has replaced it knows there are votes in such calculated acts of patriotic earnestness, toe-curling or not. Attacks on perceived metropolitan disloyalty at the BBC are nothing new for government ministers, but for the corporation the stakes have been raised by the sanctioning of two new competing cable broadcasters that come pre-festooned in red, white and blue, News UK and GB News. Andrew Neil, chairman of the latter, lost no time in jumping into the fray about Stayt and Munchetty’s giggles: “Sometimes the BBC forgets what the first B stands for.” The flag, we were led to believe, will be no laughing matter on GB News. The cracks in national unity that such arguments seek to expose are long established. Eighty years ago last week, at the most desperate juncture of a war of a very different kind, George Orwell identified exactly the divide that the government now seeks to deepen. “In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman,” Orwell wrote. “If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the Union Jack… It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.”
The Attlee government rose to that challenge by selling the post-war reconstruction of Britain with a combination of socialism and patriotism, making Blake’s mystical poem of blood and soil, Jerusalem, the anthem of its reforming zeal. How exactly to achieve that balance in 2021 is a question with which this opposition is struggling, and with which the government knows it is struggling. The leaked strategy document which suggested Labour must make “use of the [union] flag, veterans and dressing smartly” to help it win back the trust of disillusioned voters in the crumbled “red wall” of the north, was widely ridiculed by the supporters of the previous leader, (who felt himself unable to sing the national anthem at a Battle of Britain memorial service). The ironies of the government’s current efforts to wrap itself in the flag are not hard to identify – they come at a time when Brexit has made the dissolution of the union more likely than ever, when the armed forces are subject to severe cuts, when questions are widely asked about the flag fluttering over the nation’s 2,200 food banks – but history suggests that if the opposition is to regain those lost seats, it will need to do so with its own union flags to hand, and a very clear vision of the alternative values that they might represent. As in any war, even a cultural one, there will no doubt be a few commercial winners as this battle plays out. On Thursday morning I called one of the handful of traditional British businesses who are set to profit from the new union jack proposals. The Flagmakers company, based in Derbyshire, has been in business since the first year of the reign of Queen Victoria, when a young entrepreneur called George Tootle walked from Yorkshire to London to set up a business making banners for friendly societies and Methodist groups. He quickly realised there might be an alternative and steadier line of business in hand-sewn union flags. Since then Flagmakers flags have been to both poles, they were there at the D-day landings and at the coronation. Looking back at the accounts of the business, managing director Paul Noble suggests, is an exercise in patriotic history. During the first world war the company was making £1.5m in flag sales. It is, though, traditionally a cyclical business, driven by World Cups, jubilees – and now, it seems, by culture wars. In an average month Flagmakers might sell 2,000 union flags of all shapes and sizes. When Noble looked at his online sales the morning after the government’s announcement, there had already been a doubling of normal volume.
There will also, Noble suggests, be an obvious knock-on effect of the requirement to fly the flag 24/7 rather just on ceremonial days. As it stands the interruptions allow the flags to be taken down every month or so to be laundered and maintained (“if you leave a dishcloth on a line for three months how does it look?”). The new arrangement will require at least one spare, and an overnight replacement regime. Noble is not sure how the directive will affect business over the coming years, but one thing is certain, he says: “There’s going to be thousands of public officials up and down the land who have now got another thing on their to-do list.”