Editorial: let me run this up the flagpole and see who shags it
On a personal level, August was a decent month: my mother’s 87th birthday, self and Mrs F’s 17th wedding anniversary, a family holiday to a picturesque Yorkshire market town boasting two breweries.
On a global level: Christ almighty, August was a clusterfuck. Epstein files shenanigans, a manufactured DC crime wave and the National Guard on the streets; Trump in complete meltdown, ranting from roof tops, pandering to Putin and declaring himself the “President of Europe” (Arnold Schwarzenegger of all people coined the more appropriate description: “little white noodle”).
An ever-worsening situation in Gaza: starvation, mass killing of civilians, double-tap strikes on a hospital, taking out aid workers and journalists. Weasel words from Starmer and Lammy. Lies and cant from Netanyahu and a complicit western media.
And here in the UK ::: well, where do I start?
Peaceful protestors, many of them pensioners, cuffed and slung in the back of police vans for questioning the Palestine Action proscription (some even arrested for wearing the spoof “plasticine action” t-shirts featuring children’s TV character Morph) while officers turn a blind eye to protests at asylum seeker hotels where thugs brandish signs inciting arson and murder.
Performers silenced at music festivals for daring to voice support or sympathy for Palestine. An octogenarian hassled by security staff and denied entry to the Royal Albert Hall for wearing a discreet lapel pin in the Palestinian colours. (Why is so much of the state-sanctioned bullying of the pro-Palestine movement aimed at OAPs? Is our government really that despicable in its cowardice? Actually, don’t bother answering that.)
Pundits and shit-stirrers and bad actors pushing a false narrative to promote the mass display of Union Flags and St George Crosses, the latter also painted on roundabouts and pedestrian crossings all over England. It presents a perfect cross-section of the gammon mindset, with particular emphasis on thoughtlessness, lack of understanding and complete obliviousness to irony.
Consider:
* St George was a Syrian immigrant.
* There is a correct way and an incorrect way to display the Union Flag. It is telling that so many supposed patriots don’t know this. (Likewise the difference between a flag and a jack.)
* If you get the colours of the St George Cross the wrong way round, it becomes a Danish flag. Well done, Walsall “patriots”.
* For those who put such store in what is essentially a piece of cloth with some colours on it, to walk or drive over a flag is considered a disrespectful act. Painting a flag on a roundabout or crossing leaves motorists and pedestrians no choice but to walk over it. Bit of an own goal, eh, gammons?
* If you’re happy to daub an asymmetrical attempt at your flag of choice on a pedestrian crossing, don’t bitch when the council decorate one with the LGBTQ+ colours for Pride month.
There is a desperate need in the UK to tone down the rhetoric, replace division with empathy, promote knowledge over bigotry, shitcan the post-Johnson/neo-Trumpian normalisation of political untruth in favour of rigorous accountability, and turf out the current passel of spineless grifters who comprise the political elite – whatever party they belong to and whichever flag or ideology they pretend to espouse.
Neil Fulwood
September 2025