OPINION
Andy Burnham's making me laugh my head off (Image: PA)
I can’t help laughing my head off at the horrified reaction of Britain’s elites to all these English flags popping up all over the place. They are “symbols of prejudice, not pride” whines a Guardian columnist. “It’s the far right”, cries the far left. It’ll “cause division” a resident of the leafy, privileged Birmingham suburb of Barnt Green tells the BBC. "It's like people are seeking confrontation”, says Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham. Well, some of us have been saying and writing for a quarter of a century that if you try to squash people’s sense of national identity, it’ll come back to bite you.
Isn’t it just? All those England flags popping up all over the country, even though the World Cup is still the best part of a year away? That’s English people, of whatever colour or creed, saying that they’ve had enough of being told that Englishness is somehow an embarrassing affliction that needs either to be totally eradicated or somehow subsumed into the wider and more nebulous sense of Britishness. We’re proud to be English, fed up of being told not to be, and we’re darn well going to show it.
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But, oh my, how they tried to make us feel ashamed. Particularly Labour politicians. Jack Straw, former home secretary, said that his countrymen were “violent.
Emily Thornberry, leading Labourite for more than a decade now, mocked a constituent for decorating his house with England flags.
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Labour politicians still to this day talk about “the nations and regions of the UK” – the nations, of course, being Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, while the “regions” make up nameless England. And even now, Keir Starmer can only bring himself to say he’s “proud to be British” (with no reference to England).
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The Tories weren’t much better. David Cameron tried with his English Votes for English Laws initiative, but that was quickly discarded. So, while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own representative assemblies, England has nothing.
Nor do we have our own anthem to play before sporting fixtures, having to make do with the British one instead, and while there’s a BBC Scotland, a BBC Wales and a BBC Northern Ireland, you guessed it, there’s no BBC England.
Until this month, it was as rare to see the Flag of St George flying as it was to see swallows in winter. Yet despite all that, more and more people report a greater sense of Englishness.
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More and more are English first and British second, and I’m one of them. And over the last few weeks, the genie has dramatically exited the bottle, and throughout the country the flags are demonstrating people’s true feelings.
Yes, of course, it’s illegal immigration that has set the whole thing off, understandably so. And yes, of course, it’s a symptom of our collective disgust at the way our politicians, both Tory and now Labour, have allowed immigration, whether legal or not, to spiral madly upwards.
But there’s something far deeper and bigger going on too. Sick of being told that their identity was a source of shame, English people are finally fighting back. Good on them.
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