Like a vote for Ukip, to fly the St George's Cross is as much to declare one's antipathy to the liberal, metropolitan well-to-do middle-classes as it is a protest against the EU.
Like a vote for Ukip, to fly the St George’s Cross is as much to declare one’s antipathy to the liberal, metropolitan well-to-do middle-classes as it is a protest against the EU
In the wake of Emily Thornberry’s unwise tweet about English flags on a house in Strood, much has been written about the Labour Party being ‘out of touch’ with the provincial, English working class.
There is a case to be made for this, but to me, the central issue is that metropolitan liberals often don’t understand what is meant when people fly the St George’s Cross.
It isn’t so much displayed as a nationalist flag, as one would assume, but as a flag to represent the English working class.
Like a vote for Ukip, to fly the St George’s Cross is as much to declare one’s antipathy to the liberal, metropolitan well-to-do middle-classes as it is a protest against the EU and immigration.
I have lived in Kent for six years now and I have seen how St George’s Crosses have proliferated in this time.
As a born and bred Londoner, I was at first somewhat taken aback by the number of English flags and Union Jacks that I saw in the county when I first started visiting it regularly in 1998.
I put it down to the county’s naval tradition and its proximity to France, but an exponential increase in their display after the 2007 recession and the rise in immigration in the last decade wasn’t coincidence.
Sure, there is a lot of hostility to immigration in these parts. It isn’t particularly ideological. The Kent working class aren’t especially worked up about the EU.
Neither are they especially fussed about the colour of people’s skin.
Talk to people in pubs here and the two main gripes are: 1) ‘I don’t like having loads of people who don’t talk English’ 2) ‘I can no longer get my child an appointment at a GP/dentist/hospital’.
One appeal of the St George’s Cross (and UKIP) is that it’s very much disliked by the ‘out-of-touch liberal metropolitan elite’ – one of Nigel Farage’s favourite soundbites – a liberal elite that is seen as fond of employing Eastern European workmen, or a big business elite that is also perceived to have put English blue collar workers out of work.
This is why The Sun, The Daily Mail and much of the mainstream and social media was so eager to pick up on Thornberry’s tweeted photo, one that didn’t actually say anything derogatory at all.
It merely inferred what a lot of people assume north London liberals think about the white English working class.
When Londoners boasted at the European elections earlier this year that ‘we didn’t vote for nasty UKIP’ this only intensified the resentment among Kent people towards a capital city regarded as increasingly swaggering and snooty.
The antipathy is often strongest among ex-Londoners themselves who have left the city due to rising costs – nearly three quarters of a million Londoners have left their native city this millennium.
In my East Kent town I have neighbours from West Ham (a carpenter), Stockwell (family motor business went under last decade) and Fulham (retired). ‘Whereabouts in London are you from?’ features in nearly every conversation you have with a stranger here.
In Kent, the Cross of St George is now draped on balconies or flown in front gardens as routinely is the Stars and Stripes is in Republican parts of America.
If Ms Thornberry thought that house in Strood noteworthy, she should see Dover on St George’s Day: it puts Loyalist East Belfast to shame for its array of red on white flags.
The division between London – the name of the city itself is now a kind of swear-word in East Kent – and the rest of the country is as much responsible for the rise of UKIP as any EU directive on bendy cucumbers.
Most tellingly, Union Jacks, once flown outside people’s houses in these parts, disappear day by day. That symbol of the establishment continues to be supplanted by the St George’s Cross, that emblem for ordinary English white van men.
Patrick West is a journalist and writer. Follow him on Twitter
25 Responses to “The St George’s Cross has become an emblem of the working class”
cristina light
I’m very sorry to have to be the one breaking the news to you, but you are very, very wrong about this. I invite you to come and live in the village we live in, my husband and I, in order to witness – I refrain at a cost from saying suffer – first hand why the St. George’s flag is flown by people who, when canvassed, declare they are voting BNP or UKIP. How the St. George’s, in many small communities, has become an instrument of oppression and bullying of whoever is not extreme right wing, or the unfortunate “migrants, immigrants, moslems and darkies and outsiders and other scum like that” who happen to move into the village – let’s just say that apart from me, no one falling in the above category lasts very long in the village. Let’s also say, so as to leave no doubts, that the above expression was used during a council meeting in October 2013 where new housing was being discussed by a member of the BNP, and noted down by the parish councillors as a valid suggestion as to whom should be blocked from buying or renting said new housing. This man flies the St. George’s flag outside his house, plasters them in every single window. It is not patriotism; it is not working class identification or expression; it is a very particular, very nasty brand of nationalism we should all be very afraid of, and above all take extremely seriously.
In this case, as with most things in life, there is nothing like a wee bit experience to teach you which side is up. My husband and I have canvassed these villages many, many times over the years, for local and national and European elections. We know the households flying the St. Georges are the ones who declare BNP and UKIP voting intentions, and tell me aggressively (and often threateningly) and to my face to go back to wherever I come from and well out of England because I am not wanted or welcome here.
And that is all. Come and experience it, in the flesh so to speak. Then write a lovely article and tell me it is a class thing, an expression of the never-ending class war. Because if it is, then Labour might as well pack their bags now and forget all about next May – if the St. George’s is a working class thing, then I’m afraid we (Labour and all to their left) have already lost the 2015 election.
David Brede
Perhaps he is shouting?
David Brede
And you support a party who subsidises poor paying businesses.
RobinElizabeth
Two quick comments…
1) Even us left-wing liberal, progressive democrats fly the stars and stripes. Just thought I’d mention it.
2) Your social challenges are indeed difficult here, but you have one thing to be grateful for: they are seemingly out in the open and discussed as an issue to be tackled. Here in the US, the vast majority still pretend that we are a classless society, which, of course, is completely untrue.
John Hedges
As a London-born republican (from Islington!), I don’t have a problem with the St George’s Cross but I do with the Union/Union Jack flag as it represents British imperialism.