Reply To: Flag onanists

[Gurnelista]

People fly flags for different reasons. I regularly have a flag featuring Mickey Mouse in the colours of the lgbtq+ rainbow fluttering high above my chimney pot!

Currently, some are ‘loving’ their flags because it signals to others that they have grievances. Many of those grievances are legitimate. People care about how much money they have in their pockets to pay the ever-escalating food and utility bills. And the state of the NHS is another worry – how long for a doctor’s appointment / operation, etc.

Everything is in such a mess. For the past 14 years the majority of media organisations and the bold campaigns – social and otherwise – of their often tax-exiled owners and journos told us to vote for Cameron/May/Johnson and Truss. And on top of that, to go out and vote for Brexit because the EU was the problem. Now, will these people U-turn and admit they made a series of catastrophic errors of judgment? Course they won’t! So they have to find somebody/something else to blame.

Step forward the migrant. It’s the kids in dinghies and grotty hotels who are the ones getting away with it, and making our lives a misery. Here we are, patriotic little Brits (look, you can see our flags!), being ignored, while they’re in 5* hotels, in the lap of luxury. Never mind that the Tories stopped legal routes and created a backlog of applications, so the kids need to be put somewhere while they’re processed, or that the ‘hotels’ are overcrowded shtholes.

But really. As if this was ‘the problem’. As if this were the reason your bills have gone up, or you’re waiting for your operation, which in all probability, will be done by a migrant doctor, while you’re cared for by a migrant nurse.

When times are tough, the right is worried that people might get angry and want to change society. People might stand up and rebel, breaking not just their contract with society to be peaceful and law-abiding, but perhaps breaking the law, and shop windows too, and maybe even voting for a radical party of the left.

So, they get people to look elsewhere, and the simplest of solutions is to blame people who aren’t like us. The masses always respond to that. We’ve seen it before, from the Jews to the New Age Travellers. Farage know this well, and has seized the moment to jump on the bandwaggon of opportunism, in a bid to whip up the mob for his own political fame and fortune.

The religious ‘fraternity’ like it too. The idea that it’s not politics but those of a different religion who are to blame for our contemporary woes is always a favourite. Remember pre-Brexit, how Les and the Jonathans were putting it about that 50,000 Turks were about to come?

But really, flags, who needs ‘em? Performative patriotism in your own front garden is so un-British.