The Coronation weekend is over but as I drive around the villages around Wrexham and Chester I am struck by how much of the celebratory bunting and flags stay up. Even here on the Welsh side of the border, the red white and blue of the United Kingdom cannot be dodged. My Indian born parents-in-law, old enough to have been born under British Rule, still fly their Union Flags as do so many others. But for years flying such flags was expressly frowned upon by the liberal establishment that runs the media, academia and most of the political class.
They insisted that our country’s flag had been captured by folks like the National Front and therefore, with convoluted logic, flying the flag was almost an admission that you were a knuckle dragging, racist, skinhead. Of course that was nonsense. There are very few real fascists in Britain but loads of patriots and outside of the metropolitan big cities and affluent South Eastern university towns folks still dared to fly the flag.
Oddly the liberal elite did not brand French, Greek and other Europeans racist for proudly flying their flags although, as it happens, the French and Greeks have consistently voted in material numbers for very racist and nasty folks such as Daddy Le Pen or the frightful chaps at Golden Dawn. It was only in Britain that it was deemed, by the elite, unacceptable to fly your own country’s flag. Such is the loathing of ones own country that, as Orwell noted seventy years ago, is part of the DNA of the British Left.
But last weekend nobody dared deny the right of the silent majority to fly the flag. And with it having been deemed acceptable, at last, it seems as if some folks are rather enjoying keeping up the red, white and blue and annoying those shallow and illogical folks who dominate academia and the media.
The Mrs, a proud Englishwoman, might just have put up a flag for the Coronation was away for the weekend. I wore an Ireland shirt and did not, although most houses on our road were decked out with flags. But I am rather enjoying this rather prolonged fuck you to the liberal elite and it is almost tempting to run up a Union Flag for the Mrs to annoy any university lecturer or Guardian reader (other than the Mrs on both counts) who might wander up to the hovel.