James Monteith
What should we make of the eruption of patriotic flags across the country? For the right media, it is a long overdue display of patriotic pride. Other European countries fly the flag, some outside every other house – Denmark, Austria and Switzerland come to mind. So why shouldn’t we? For the left media, it is an exercise masterminded by the ‘far right’, for whom flying the flag sends the message ‘Immigrants go home!’ But even Keir Starmer is not foolish enough to criminalise flying the flag – which has led to the ludicrous spectacle of Labour and Liberal led councils removing the flags on the spurious grounds that they might fall on people’s heads, only to find them replaced within hours.
Well, of course, we should fly our flag with pride. But in a nation that has traditionally eschewed open displays of patriotism as unnecessary, even vulgar, except on special occasions like the Last Night of the Proms, flag flying has never been the norm … except, and significantly, in working class areas where the indigenous population feels its identity is threatened by immigration. It is therefore disingenuous to pretend that this is about patriotic pride. The people’s patriotism has not suddenly skyrocketed. The flags are going up because the people have had enough.
They have had enough of mass immigration and all that has followed from it: a cheap labour economy that has left millions of our own people on the scrapheap, the colonisation of large areas of our cities and towns by people who often do not share our values, the collapse of the housing market as the population booms, untold pressure on public services, and the break-down of law and order. They have had enough of the systematic denigration and dismantling of their national culture under the banners of multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion, anti-racism, systemic racism, decolonization, critical race theory, and the rest of it. They have had enough of being branded racist and discriminated against because they carry the disease of ‘whiteness’. They have had enough of welcoming people to this country who have no intention of integrating into its culture, customs and values. And they have had enough of being silenced through ‘hate crime’ legislation, which indiscriminately brands them racists, bigots and ‘Islamophobes’ if they dare question fashionable liberal orthodoxies, and which could land them in jail for a tweet. They are not just foreigners in their own country; they have been banished from it.
The anger has been brewing for decades. You only need talk to people on the street, in their homes, above all in the pubs, to get the measure of it. Some of the stuff on social media is hair raising, which no doubt is why government wants to censure it. Yet the most striking feature of the comments evoked by migrant hotel protests and the flag raising movement is the recurrent use of the term patriot. The protestors are patriots who are defending their country and their nation – essentially – from invasion.
The current migrant crisis, then, is the thin end of the wedge. Allied with the systematic cover up of the mass rape of white girls by largely Pakistani ‘grooming’ gangs in towns across England, shocking disparities in the propensity of foreign nationals from countries practising medieval versions of Islam to commit sex crimes, the housing of single male migrants from these countries in hotels at public expense while homeless veterans are left on the streets, and flagrant two-tier policing, as exemplified by the incarceration of Lucy Connolly, a political prisoner plain and simple – all this has been more than enough to tip them over the edge.
The liberal left is entitled to its ideological belief that Britain must be transformed into a diverse, inclusive, multicultural paradise through mass immigration and the erasing of the host culture – Western, white, colonialist, oppressive etc. Never mind that the white British are fleeing the vibrant, diverse, multicultural cities to live with their kith and kin in the towns and villages, where they feel safe and at home in real communities. Never mind that bourgeois Guardian-reading liberals themselves prefer to live in exclusive, homogenous enclaves and boutique suburban villages, enjoying the convenience of cheap migrant labour (housed elsewhere, of course) and multiculture in the form of exotic restaurants, while preaching vibrant diversity for the rest of us. Reality should never stand in the way of moral righteousness. But by branding those who do not share their vision as racists, fascists, Islamophobes and ‘far right’ (the term now features in every other sentence written in the Guardian), and policing their honestly expressed sentiments under ‘hate crime’ legislation, they disqualify the greater proportion of the indigenous population from the democratic process. The outcome can only be civil unrest and the feeding of real extremism and racism. For if ‘whiteness’ is cast as a disease, with whites the historic oppressors and blacks the ‘historic victims’, where are the white British – many of whom languish at the bottom of the social and economic pile – expected to turn?
The Crosses of St George and Union Flags going up all over England symbolise much more than ‘We love our country’. It is a popular uprising. And its message is ‘We want our country back!’
