Off Topic The Politics Thread

Star of David Bardsley · Oct 11, 2025 at 3:59 PM

Stroller said: ↑

Srewart Lee.....

I had planned to incinerate all the flags I tore down from bridges over the M6 last August bank holiday. But because they were made of a cheap Chinese plastic polymer they just melted into a congealed mess and stained the patio. I was disappointed not to see the flags engulfed in purifying flame. But at least the multicoloured residue they left behind was a good metaphor for the vibrant mix of cultures that is modern British national identity.

I don’t know why I tore all the flags down. Somewhere south of the Scottish border I just snapped. So whenever I pulled in for petrol I weaved my way through the service station back entrances to the nearest bridges and ripped dozens off the railings. Cars passing beneath tooted, whether in support or anger I didn’t know. Or care. Like the noble comedians that played the Saudi Arabian comedy festival last week, I didn’t do what I did for public approval or financial gain. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.

One driver pulled up on a bridge and sat watching me, doubled up with laughter. Was he chuckling supportively, or was he enjoying the ultimately futile efforts of a hot fat man trying in vain to stem the incoming tide of fascism? Either way, it was nice to have provoked unalloyed joy, something I rarely experience in my professional life as an “achingly politically correct, alleged comedian” (Sarah Vine, Daily Mail).

But are the flags that now bedeck our suburbs and estates patriotic or racist? It’s a nuanced notion unlikely to be adequately interrogated in a world where the main forum for public debate is an algorithmically amplified digital dogfighting pit presided over by a ketamine-cranked egomaniac. (Yes, that Elon Musk, who recently appeared on a big screen in Trafalgar Square alongside a throb-veined and fraudulent sunlounger magnate, apparently trying to incite a race war.)

For example, the phrase “Free Palestine” is not of itself antisemitic, but if that phrase is shouted aggressively after a goal is scored against a football team of young Jewish schoolboys, as a radio phone-in caller reported last week, it probably is. That said, I’ve never understood “the culture of football”, which just sounds to me like an unpleasant mould growing in an unwashed corner of Ron Atkinson.

As I drove east through Portsmouth last month towards Southsea, the proliferating England flags became conspicuously clustered outside mosques – intended, of course, to intimidate. They called to mind the territorial markers of human heads on sticks in Italian cannibal exploitation cinema that explorers ignore before being disembowelled by racist caricatures of indigenous people, albeit in a way that simultaneously asks questions about human nature and showcases Ursula Andress at her most fetching.

Later that same day I arrived further east along the coast in Emsworth, suddenly needing a haircut. But when I saw the massive England flags in the barber’s window I decided to stay shaggy. A cascade of prejudiced assumptions against probably blameless ordinary folk meant I didn’t want to have to listen to someone who, in the current climate, would choose to fly an England flag. And who, let’s not forget, would also have a collection of very sharp objects. I appreciate this is my problem. But symbols change their meaning. My flag is lost.

For example, the swastika is actually an ancient good luck charm, but its appropriation by the Nazis last century means you would be unlikely to send a drawing of one unsolicited to someone the night before their driving test. Similarly, the England flag is, once again, no longer a uniformly positive symbol, particularly to generations of Asians who can remember being beaten up in the 1970s by bands of flag-festooned fascist skinheads, a tradition commemorated in Claudette’s forgotten 1970 ska hit Skinheads A Bash Them. Remember when songs used to be about something?

Let’s not lie about what’s going on. We accept that a minority of the anti-genocide protesters may be antisemitic, yet politicians of all persuasions maintain the fiction that the flag-waving coke-thugs rabbit-punching the police and pissing everywhere on Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom marches are an expression of patriotism as innocent as morris dancing, cheese rolling and dwile flonking; and it’s just a coincidence, for example, that over two-thirds of the people arrested at Bristol’s anti-immigration Save Our Kids riots last summer had previous contact with the police over reports of domestic abuse. And, as the comedian Alasdair Beckett-King pointed out to me backstage at a benefit on Monday, their comical chant of “Allah? Allah? Who the **** is Allah?” is unlikely to represent a genuine inquiry. We have Google for that.

My problem with what flags mean is that I am old enough to remember my grandparents, whom I lived with as a child and who were otherwise kind and generous, being part of a delegation sent round to stop their neighbour selling his house to an Asian family in the Midland suburb of Shirley in 1974; and being told, when the five-year-old me questioned this, that it wasn’t racist but was about protecting house values. Oddly, we also had to have the television turned over whenever black people came on. Perhaps that was about economics too. Maybe Ken Boothe’s “coloured” face, singing Everything I Own on Top of the Pops, used up more expensive electrical energy than Colin Crompton dinging a bell on The Wheeltappers And Shunters Social Club?

I’m also old enough to remember when mainstream British politicians, who should know better, stirred up racial hatred as a path to power. You’re old enough to remember this too because it was last Tuesday. And it was Robert Jenrick. And if you still vote Conservative after that speech then you, sir, are a veritable scoundrel. Now, is anyone in the market for a flag residue paperweight?
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Not reading all that.

Steelmonkey · Oct 11, 2025 at 4:15 PM

Kilburn said: ↑

Had to look that one up....

List of prime ministers of New Zealand - Wikipedia https://share.google/1EKkm17Jlmktx4Arr
View attachment 379286

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Dude reminded me of this fella...

Stroller · Oct 11, 2025 at 4:45 PM

Star of David Bardsley said: ↑

Not reading all that.
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You should, it's funny.

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