The takedown of the Union Jack is a lesson within the ethical cowardice of Britain’s cultural elite

The UK’s tradition conflict is at a stage the place respecting your flag is equated to racism and xenophobia. The Union Jack is ridiculed on nationwide airwaves, and even schoolchildren are allowed to disgrace their academics into taking it down.

Britain is among the few locations on the planet the place schoolchildren have permission to precise contempt for his or her nation’s flag. So it’s hardly stunning that pupils at Pimlico Academy in South London protested in opposition to their faculty’s coverage of flying the Union Jack.

Neither is it stunning that the college swiftly caved in to the youngsters’s demand to take down the ‘racist’ Union flag.

What is actually exceptional shouldn’t be merely the ethical cowardice of the college leaders, who refused to uphold and defend their nation’s principal image, but in addition that the headteacher apologised and really praised the scholars’ behaviour!

“Our college students are vibrant, brave, clever younger folks, passionate concerning the issues that matter to them and acutely attuned to injustice. I love them massively for this although I remorse that it got here to this,” wrote Daniel Smith, the headteacher.

It’s doubtless that Smith and a number of the different faculty leaders had been conscious of the intense implication arising from a state of affairs the place a faculty in England is compelled to take down the Union Jack. However as an alternative of addressing this problem, Smith deflected the issue by stating, “We acknowledge that this image is a strong one which evokes usually intense reactions.”

That’s one other manner of claiming that an expression of hatred for Britain is an comprehensible “intense response”!

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It isn’t stunning that the youngsters at Pimlico have been so simply incited to hate the Union Jack. Sneering on the Union Jack has change into de rigueur for members of the British cultural elites. It was not that way back that two BBC Breakfast presenters, Charlie Stayt and Naga Munchetty, took it upon themselves to take the piss out of Native Authorities Secretary Robert Jenrick for displaying the flag in his workplace.

In the course of the course of an interview with Jenrick, Stayt mentioned, “I believe your flag is less than normal dimension, authorities interview measurements. I believe it’s just a bit bit small, however that’s your division actually.”

Within the background Munchetty may very well be seen laughing into her hand. Evidently, she thought authorities minister standing in entrance of the nationwide flag was such a ridiculous sight that it was OK to sneer at his gauche behaviour.

Perversely, it’s the individuals who problem the contempt directed at their nation’s flag that always get accused of beginning a tradition conflict. Wading in protection of its anti-British colleagues, the New York Occasions notes “the flag furor is a helpful culture-war problem” for the federal government.

The anti-Union Jack foyer usually professes its distaste for many who wave flags. Nevertheless, they’re very selective about which flag can and can’t be waved. In latest many years, a lot of them ostentatiously wave the flag of the European Union to spotlight their loyalty to this transnational establishment. In the course of the Final Night time of the Proms in 2019 they handed out hundreds of EU flags and by no means stopped waving them.

Nobody from the BBC sneered at this over-the-top show of loyalty to the flag of the European Union.

The occasions at Pimlico Academy are underwritten by an elite tradition that despises its personal nation and regards any show of patriotism as a marker for xenophobia. Shows of contempt for Britain’s previous and its nationwide symbols are not often challenged. Sometimes, the sense of frustration on the derision directed in opposition to a selected British customized results in a backlash. The outcry provoked by the BBC’s announcement that Rule Britannia won’t be sung on the Proms is an instance of such a response. Nevertheless, a backlash by definition is never capable of match the drive to which it reacts. It’s solely reactive and defensive.

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Again in 1941, George Orwell remarked that “England is maybe the one nice nation the place intellectuals are ashamed of their very own nationality.” Have been he alive as we speak, even Orwell can be shocked by the extent to which such sentiments abound, unchallenged, in public life.

What will surely shock Orwell is that even faculty youngsters have change into educated into believing that hatred for his or her nation’s flag is admittedly cool and that the nation which they inhabit needs to be ashamed of its previous.

Orwell invested his hope within the frequent sense of extraordinary working-class folks to face up and be counted. For the sake of our future, let’s hope that he was proper.

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