Across the UK, the St George’s Cross and (to a lesser extent) the Union Jack are being painted on roundabouts and churches and hung from lampposts.
The trend began in the West Midlands, spearheaded by a group calling themselves the Weoley Warriors — named after a Birmingham suburb — who describe themselves as a "group of proud English men with a common goal to show Birmingham and the rest of the country of how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements".
Birmingham City Council’s response was less than enthusiastic. Citing safety concerns and upcoming maintenance and upgrades to street-lighting infrastructure, the council has urged its residents to refrain from attaching any more flags to lampposts.
Elsewhere in the country, a St George’s Cross painted on the side of a church in the East Midlands town of Lincoln was described by the Rev Rachel Heskin as "an attempt to intimidate".
In Birkenhead, not far from Liverpool, the members of a Muslim centre found a Union Jack tied to the railings in front of their building. Although he acknowledged the flag was "intended to cause offence", Ibrahim Syed, a leading member of the centre, decided to display the flag proudly, offering what he claimed was a "strong and powerful response" demonstrating they were "proud British Muslims".
Given the number of English flags flown at protests against the housing of asylum seekers at a hotel in Essex and the total lack of them at, for example, recent pro-Palestinian rallies, the contemporary politics of English nationalism is undeniably skewing right.
Nevertheless, for left-wing political parties and movements seeking to recruit people who are not especially political — let alone progressive — failing to connect a basic sense of national pride, or even belonging, to the ideologies, manifestoes or policies they wish to promote, is to cede the terrain to their most implacable opponents, and thus remains a serious problem.
Moreover — and as the American political theorist Hanna Pitkin speculated in her seminal work on representation in 1967, The Concept of Representation — there seems to an inverse relationship between the substantive representation provided by functioning democratic institutions and people’s propensities to invest, emotionally and politically, in the symbolic representations supplied by flags, crowns, blood and soil.
For many people, whether they like it or not, nations remain fundamental constitutive elements of their socialisation and individual identities. The rituals and traditions we continue to honour — in politics, sport, religion or civic life — are overwhelmingly conducted at the national level.
Much of our historical and cultural education at school is devoted to specifically national narratives. When working people in the UK struggled for the franchise, they addressed themselves to the elites of their own nation and, to this day, democratic politics remains a largely national affair. To ignore the so-called national question is to ignore a lot.
Not only is there no quick fix to this problem, and much lost ground to make up, but critical ambivalence regarding national symbols is a necessary feature of any responsible political movement.
There is no doubt this is a harder task for the UK’s Left today than it is for the Right. The ambient sentiments of English culture have certainly drifted right, and uncritical nationalism will, perhaps naturally, always tend towards conservatism.
However, the nation — as a peculiar, modern and stubborn political, social and cultural reality — is just not the kind of terrain that can be ceded without political loss.
And the English Left has been losing for some time. — Newsroom
• Dr David Jenkins is a lecturer in political theory at the University of Otago.
