Is my St George’s flag racist?
The red, white and white: is a flag always just a flag?
Oswald Mosley was the founder of the British Union of Fascists, also known as the Blackshirts, a group of racist, antisemitic, violent thugs that plagued 1930s Britain. Not a shrinking violet when it came to expressing right-wing ideology. And yet, even he employed dog-whistles – phrases or messages intended to convey a specific and often sinister meaning to a group that recognises them, while seeming innocuous or at least ambiguous to those outside the intended audience. Like dogs hearing the whistle humans can’t, Mosley’s racist, antisemitic troglodytes understood that when he said “international financiers”, he meant an international conspiracy of Jews.
If someone as out-there as Mosley felt he needed to use coded language when speaking publicly, then we should not be surprised when politicians, influencers and hateful groups find it necessary to hide their views behind deniable imagery.
Recently, in Britain (you’d think it would just be England but these numpties did this in Wales and Scotland too), a new(ish) dog-whistle has been unfurled – often used innocently, easily denied if used with racist intent: The England flag, aka St George’s flag. The red, white and white is the flag of England, and as such is not a hate symbol in itself. But then neither is the number 88 and Nazis make good use of it as such.
A spate of hangings of the England flag, without permission, from lampposts and the like, has been tied to right-wing ideology and anti-migrant hate by critics, but many people claim it is a display of “unity” or “patriotism”. This may be true of many people’s motives, along with a stupid “these days you get arrested and thrown in jail if you say you’re English” belief that “political correctness” and “wokeism” are suffocating common sense. But enough of the organisers of the campaign that sparked The Flaggening have been tied to far-right groups to make a nonsense of that. Spend any time at all in the comments of a local Facebook group discussing the latest patriotic fly-tip will expose you to xenophobia, “just you wait until Reform gets in” menace and straight-up racism from the flag hoisters.
What makes all this interesting as a dog-whistle is that it’s not, really. Everyone knows what the flags mean. Those pretending not to are trying to avoid seeming (or being) judgemental on one side, and dissembling to retain respectability on the other. The whole thing is constructed to make it impossible to prove – a clever gambit by stupid people.
Trying to point this out doesn’t help, obviously, because the whole point is to pretend it is not what it obviously is. But it serves as a helpful indicator of where people’s politics actually lie. There will be some exceptions, of course. Sometimes a flag is just a flag, like a financier is just a financier and an 8 is just an 8.
