A symptom of the U.K.’s apparent slide toward political crisis.
The U.K. appears to be sliding toward profound economic and, quite possibly, political crisis. Just one of the symptoms of the latter has been a campaign to put up (mainly) English or British national flags (a distinction that matters in Britain’s increasingly fraught political debate). The other day I quoted an article by Aris Roussinos in UnHerd, in which he observed (among other points) this:
In England, flags are re-adopting a territorial nationalist or communitarian quality, just as they always have in Northern Ireland and as is increasingly the case with the Palestine flag in South Asian Muslim areas of Britain.
Some local authorities have reacted by taking down these flags, which, whatever might be thought of that on the merits, they are entitled to do when the flags are on public property — although in some cases they seem to have been quicker to do so than when the flags in question were Palestinian. Odd!
Dan Hannan in the Daily Telegraph:
Over the past week, we have seen the Ulsterisation of numerous English towns. St George’s Crosses and Union flags have appeared on lamp-posts. Websites have been promoting and keeping track of this pennanted profusion. One reports that 50,000 English and British flags were sold in three days.
The St George’s Crosses are largely a reaction to the Palestinian flags that have become widespread in parts of our cities. In the early days of the Gaza war, PLO colours signalled support for the Palestinian movement. But, as the months passed, they became territorial markers in Muslim-majority areas.
Just as in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, you can now infer the demographics of an area by its banners. . . .
There are allegations of double-standards: local councils are said to be rushing to tear down the St George’s Crosses while leaving the Palestinian flags untouched. . . .
Our country used to be known around the world as civil and orderly. But the social capital that sustained those virtues has been drained by official multi-culturalism and the deliberate slandering of our past. . . .
None of this needed to happen to Great Britain. We did not lose a war or suffer a violent social revolution. We have done it to ourselves through woolly thinking, virtue-signalling and cowardice. The country I love is disappearing.
Patrick West in The Spectator:
Some might rejoice that the ethnic English now feel sufficiently bold to assert themselves after decades of neglect and opprobrium. Yet the fact that photographs of southwest Birmingham or east London now recall past images of loyalist east Belfast should also arouse disquiet. With a profusion of Palestine flags across the land also denoting the establishment of ethnic fiefdoms administered by ‘community leaders’, we are witnessing the partition of urban landscapes into territories along sectarian lines. . . .
For years we were told to celebrate multiculturalism unreservedly. While most still abide to a tolerant, liberal attitude in regard to living alongside different peoples in the same country, only a remote elite still cling to multiculturalism as a state-promoted ideology, one that only leads to more division.
To be fair, that elite is not so remote as to be unaware that its message is not being received with universal delight. This fact goes a long way to explaining Britain’s increasingly draconian crackdown on free speech, a crackdown that (mainly) has its origins in Tony Blair’s disastrous premiership, but which was encouraged and/or enabled by the Conservatives during their years in “power,” and has now been taken to the next level by the authoritarians running the current Labour government.