the brilliantly leaping gazelle

I’m still here on holiday in Herne Bay and the weather is still glorious. I was here last at the same time last year and it was even more glorious then. What made it even more glorious wasn’t because the sun was shining especially brighter, nor had the chips more of those deliciously crispy bits of batter one finds hidden amongst them. No, the main reason why it was so glorious was that on the drive into town every lamppost had a flag with the Cross of St.George on it. 

I don’t know why exactly it pleased me, but pleased me it did. I’ve never considered myself in the least bit patriotic. I’d never even given it any thought. My parents were the type of immigrants for whom their past was better off left in their past. They weren’t the kind of immigrants who would compare their past with their present and who would invariably find their present worse.  They weren’t misty eyed about the ‘Old Country’. They weren’t nostalgic for it and they hardly ever spoke of it much. In fact it was only during my first holiday to Ireland where I met met all of my Aunts and Uncles, that it  dawned on me that my parents had been born there. 

For me, home was wherever I happened to be at that particular time and it just so happened that London was where I spent most of my childhood. Which I was more than happy about.  The more I saw of the world – through TV, magazines and books – the more I appreciated having been born here. Except that it wasn’t a conscious appreciation. It was a vague sense that there was an order  to everything around me.  That where I lived had rules and that people – more or less – abided by them. That these rules had been made by people who had to abide by other rules. Other places didn’t and they seemed all kinds of worse.

Except now those same TV programmes, books and magazines which shaped my worldview are damned by people who have created a job for themselves by damning things. Who have somehow managed to carve out a very lucrative career for themselves by damning all manner of things and damning the people who oppose their damning. How exactly this has happened, quite how we find ourselves living in an increasingly censorious time I don’t know. I also know that I’m unsure of all the myriad and opaque connections that have over time led us here to this sorry state of affairs. But I feel certain that Fifth Columnists are involved somehow.

For a long time now, I’ve been convinced that there are Fifth Columnists busy at work in the UK. Exactly who they are and exactly how long they’ve been working as Fifth Columnists, I’m not sure either. Which is precisely the way they’d want it. Other people may have a different definition of what a Fifth Columnist (FC) is, but to me a FC is someone who works to undermine society by whatever means possible. Secretly, sometimes peaceful, sometimes violent, sometimes not even being aware that they’re being manipulated by other FC;s   I know that the term is usually applied to domestic actors in times of war, but if a little artistic licence is employed, and if we then imagine ourselves in a cultural war, then their malevolent presence is undeniable.

The various nonsenses concerning the flags along Herne Bay seafront demonstrate this. If anyone is guilty of hijacking the Cross of St.George ‘for  political purposes’, then it is the various grifters, activist and other busybodies who are. They bang on about community tension being inflamed by extremists, hoping that no-one will notice that they are ones doing the all the inflaming. Are not community tensions exacerbated by prioritising one community over another? Is that not more divisive? Other than it being claimed to exist, is there any actual evidence that it causes anxiety? In what way exactly does it make people feel unsafe?  

Such questions never seem to be asked. No proof is ever  demanded to substantiate them. They’re just meekly accepted as a self-evident on no other basis on them than having been asserted to be so. This is where the FC in the media come in. They’ve already prepared the groundwork. After all the ‘re-appraising’, ‘confronting our historical legacy’ and ‘acknowledging the evils of empire’, the flagellation can really begin in earnest. And this where the other FC’s play their role, and to give them their credit, the play it very well. Politicians – both local and central – reinforce and amplify the message, that English patriotism – and only English patriotism – is wrong and that the flag of the Cross of St.George is the ultimate expression of just how wrong it is.

But as the child of immigrants, this doesn’t make sense on any level.  How is the flag of the country people have come from somewhere else, suddenly such a cause for so many concerns? Were these concerns always there, or have they been, if not invented then massively amplified by FC’s in pursuit of their own agenda’s? Separate agendas to be sure, but all mutually reinforcing each other. And why is that whilst the flag of England is endlessly suspected of being a harbinger of all manner of unpleasantries, the Palestinian flag is immune to similar censure?

The flag which was so enthusiastically brandished by large numbers at the Gaza hate marches, how is that not considered even more disturbing? The Crusaders committed their atrocities nearly a thousand years ago. The genocide committed by Hamas on Oct 7 was a bit more recent than that. But there is no widespread demonisation of that flag, no impugning the motives of the people who brandish it, a near total absence of any negative associations anywhere.

I’d be ashamed to wave a Palestinian flag. I wouldn’t feel ashamed to wave an English one. I don’t know why anyone would. In England there exists the freedom to be ashamed of the English flag, to heap opprobrium on it and to damn it six ways to Sunday. Even to burn it. Try doing that in Gaza and see what happens. Nothing good, I’d wager. That’s why the sight of the flags along the seafront pleases me so. Because it’s a visual representation of my freedom. Free to think what I like and free from anyone telling me not to. 

Well not yet, anyway.