Scribblings III: Star Wars, flags, skateboarding, free speech and not blaming smoking

Worse than smoking!

We begin with the weird as Grandad encounters reports of the Star Wars obsessive - this my friends is in a space beyond geekdom or nerdism:

daoku began watching star wars at different playback rates in order to do this but again it only lasted a while.
He then purchased the exact cinema seats that were there in 1977 and placed them in his living room.He purchased 40 shop floor dummies, dressed them in 1970's clothes, placed them on the seats and watched star wars until the small hours.

That is just the tiniest of flavours...

It is good to know that, when you need one, you can find someone who has fine details of flag history and etiquette at his fingertip. James Higham is one such:

The ship is right, the three masts are right and the artist may well have been right in 1776 on the flags, though it seems not.

And, as anyone who has been to Parkhead will tell you, getting the flags (and songs right) is important!

Meanwhile Raedwald, from his eyrie in the Alps, comments on risk (and skateboarding):

Some years ago, skateboarders old enough to buy cheap airfares would gather informally in small groups, take postbuses to the high places and board down the mostly empty mountain roads. Much fun. In the UK, the official reaction would be one of horror; the bansturbationists would emerge in force, the Chief Constable would appear on TV, MPs would demand new laws to ban boarders and local councils would deploy wardens to patrol all the steep roads with powers to seize boards. After all, the UK is a nation where it is now forbidden to roll a round cheese down a grass hill because of 'elf-n-safety.

Here's a couple of those skateboarders.

Among all this frivolity there is seriousness. And nothing is more serious that protecting free speech. The Churchmouse reminds us that there appears to be something of an inconsistency in attacks on speech:

Despite recently supporting a European Commission code promising to take down online hate speech within 24-hours of posting, Facebook has failed remove a group titled “I Want to F**king Kill Donald Trump” to the ire of his supporters.

The group was created on May 14 with a post reading “Donald Trumps Hair Looks Like A Bleached Mop – Gordon Ramsey 2016.” The most recent post is, “What Is Your Weapon Of Choice?” Asking what weapon people would use to kill Trump if given the chance.

Me, I liked Facebook and Twitter better when they defended free speech rather than allowing government and the progressive mob to beat them into submission.

Finally - for this week - Leg iron asked where it all went wrong:

As a smoker, I’m feeling neglected. All the things we used to cause have moved on. We were the Grim Reapers who brought death and decay everywhere we went. Every disease, every illness was our doing. I was having fun with that.

As our intrepid freethinker observes - the fussbuckets are now obsessed with food.

There's still hope - as this outcry reminds us.

....

Vexatious vexillology

The Snail. Its coat of arms shows the contrada’s colors – red, yellow and turquoise, with a snail on a white shield. Underneath, there’s a tile motif in red and yellow. It’s allied with the Porcupine, the Panther and the Forest, while its enemy is the Tortoise – their rivalry is probably the most ancient and deep rooted! 

Flags are a source of great debate dispute and disagreement. We proudly wave them, bury dead soldiers draped in them, and engage in complicated occult examination of what they symbolise. For some people another's flag is a source of offence - the "Butcher's Apron", a bloodied rag or a statement of oppression. People burn them, states pass laws preventing this and supreme courts spend hours discussing whether this is allowed or whether flag-burning is an act of free expression. In Northern Ireland a whole industry grew up around the matter of flags (and associated parades).

Flags embody a history, they are not merely a decorative banner available for successful athletes to drape round their shoulders as they do their lap of honour. And the colours or style of the flag isn't the issue but rather the importance of the banner to the place and the moment. It's true that flags grew up as a feudal statement, they were waved by kings, dukes and barons to signal their presence (and self-importance):

It is generally accepted that the banner and the pennon were both derived from the gonfanon, the war cloth, which was originally a flag fixed laterally to the staff. The gonfanon was in origin a lance flag, but already in the Bayeaux Tapestry some are larger and more ornate than others. It was natural for size to be indicative of the rank of the bearer. Hence in the 13th Century, after the development of that system of personal devices which we term armoury or heraldry, the larger flag, the banner, was the privilege of the barons and greater knights while other knights carried pennons, The significant point about the banner and the pennon is that they were personal flags: they identified not a military unit, but the baron or the knight as an individuals.

Some of these associations still remain - not just the pomp of heraldry or the cherishing of coats of arms but in the way footballers kiss the badge on their shirt to demonstrate their allegiance to the team (and in the importance of those symbols of the team - badges, banners, songs and slogans - to the fans).

So just as the flag was a means of identifying friends and allies, it was equally a way to see the enemy - armies weren't uniformed so the flags, colours and pennons were the essential identifier. As feudalism matured and the modern state began to emerge, the flags were adopted by those cities as symbols of their independent identity. With the birth of revolutionary governments - born as secular states from violent uprising - the importance of the flag became more pronounced. Citizens of the United State salute the flag - not as an act of worship but as a celebration of liberty. But this sanctification of the flag makes it an easy target for those who wish to oppose the USA.

In recent times we've seen various eruptions of anger, offence and self-righteous bleating around different flags - most notably the persistence of the flag (or one of the flags to be precise) of the Confederate States. But the acme of vexatious vexillology remains Northern Ireland birthplace of the 1954 Flags and Emblems Display Act and where the agreement dragged by John Major and Tony Blair from the bigots in Sinn Fein and the DUP included a reference to those flags and symbols. The Agreement recognised the:

“...sensitivity of the use of symbols and emblems for public purposes, and the need in particular in creating new institutions to ensure that such symbols and emblems are used in a manner which promotes mutual respect rather than division”

So the debate about flags became a core debate in Ulster politics featuring such things as the Flags (Northern Ireland) Order 2000 and statements like this:

“While it is legitimate for organizations and individuals to seek to celebrate cultural or sporting events in the public space, this needs to be time limited. If left on public display after a reasonable time, they cease to be an expression of celebration and can become a threatening attempt to mark territory”

All this reminds us that - however attached we are to that flag we love - these things are divisive. Sometimes this is deliberate and planned such as the recent 'online petition' from Scottish Nationalists over the union flag appearing on driving licences but often it is genuine. In my city of Bradford we have a flags policy that came about because of disputes about requests to fly flags to mark some event, anniversary or other occasion. Even then, there's the possibility of dispute as we discovered during the recent Israeli operations in Gaza - the Council flew the Palestinian flag (in the square not from City Hall) but refused a request to fly the Israeli flag. And across the year we have a cycle of flags flown - from the Pakistan flag on that nation's independence day through to the Welsh dragon on St David's Day.

All this takes us to the latest flag-related matter - or rather an absence of flag matter:

Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford says not having a union jack on Great Britain's World Championships kit is a "terrible choice".

The Briton, 28, tweeted a picture of his vest for the championships in Beijing, showing a British Athletics logo instead of the union jack flag.

Scot Eilish McColgan replied by saying "it looks like you're representing British Athletics instead of GB".

Rutherford agreed with the steeplechase star and said the change was "stupid".

Coming at a time of rampant Scottish nationalism (despite the majority of Scots voting to stay in the union) some will see the exclusion of the Union Flag as an act of cowardice while other will see the corporate nature of international professional sport as being at fault. Indeed the response from British athletics shows this (and that they miss the point entirely):

‘We discussed it with a number of people and athletes who thought it was a good idea. Remember England football have the three lions, England rugby the red rose, everyone has a distinctive logo except us. It’s not about rejecting the Union Jack — that’s why it’s still on the shorts and socks. And of course red, white and blue are still on the kit too.’

Referencing England rugby and England football is, to be kind, not exactly helpful to the debate! The point the athletes are making is that the flag symbolises what they are competing for at the world championships - when they set out as athletes their daydream will have been to run, throw or jump for their country.

It won't come as a surprise however that others have leapt into this discussion, taking issue with Greg Rutherford over the kit (and the flag):

Look at it, if you can bear to. With its cluttered burst of both right-angled and diagonal radiating lines, the British flag is heavy and overbearing, forceful and strident. On a battlefield it would make sense. Sure, this virulent standard served to rally regiments at the Battle of Waterloo. But today? At sporting events? It looks crap. Instead of suggesting unity, its sharp-angled divisions imply fragmentation. In fact, the relentless dynamism of its design evokes the shock and shatter of a cannon ball smashing into a French ship at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Discussing the aesthetics of the Union Flag is a fine matter (and yes there are some better looking flags) but that completely misses the point - our association and attraction to that flag isn't about its looks but about what it means to us. It is the symbol of our place, our nation. It is the banner under which millions of our ancestors fought and it is a representation of what we stand for as a nation and of our history. It is true that some are vexed by its presence but that remains, in part at least, the purpose of the flag - it symbolises a successful, free and united nation. And some people - whether quasi-republicans like the author of that last quote or chip-balancing Scots separatists - simply don't like this fact.

The quote at the top is from a tourist guide to Siena and is one of that city's contrade. What is reflects is that the use of symbols to mark a place is ancient and not a bad thing. The bad thing is when people want to take down those symbols because they've decided they are offended by them. For a long time - thankfully no longer - England's Cross of St George was banished as a racist symbol only to be seen waved by the violent and extreme. While there are still people who don't understand how we've recovered England's flag (and we've sport to thank for that), it is welcome that we can now fly it with pride and enthusiasm.

When flags and symbols are pushed aside - or worse still banned or abandoned - we succumb to those who see the flag as a problem or worse see the contest of symbols as a matter of little victories against the enemy. Those athletes heading to Beijing will be representing the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland - it's welcome that they are proud of this fact and that they want to display the symbol of that pride, the Union Flag.

...

We have Mr Potter's "discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class" - and the left don't like it!

There was a time when the mass of the population – you can call this the ‘working class’ if you like – looked like the crowd at one of those football games from the 1930s. Packed shoulder to shoulder, dressed the same, thin, pinched and unhealthy. Back in those days and through into the 1950s, those ordinary people stayed in the narrow confines of their regular lives – most worked in manual jobs, skilled or unskilled, and their pleasures were limited by the narrowness of their income. Football (as today’s fans keeps telling us) was cheap and the men topped this up with thin beer and stodgy food.

And during this time those men were uncomplaining – we had few if any riots, public drunkenness was rare and levels of crime were low. But looking at those men and women in old photographs, we see that their lives were hard and, by today’s standards, short. Most working class men didn’t live long past retirement age and there were plenty of premature deaths from disease, illness and injury. Despite this hard life, most ordinary men were accepting of their lot. Yes they voted Labour, electing one of their own sort into parliament, but that Labour Party – for all the radicalism of the Attlee government – didn’t want to change the structure of the economy other than to replace private ownership with state ownership.

Then something happened. The success of the economy plus the effectiveness of union campaigns saw wages rise. Those ordinary men – and increasingly the women too – began to cast off the cheap drab and to make a cultural contribution. Some of this – the music of the early sixties, for example – is overplayed as working class culture. The big bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were management not workers but, along with other changes, this music gave the ordinary population a justification to party. And from that time in the sixties right through to the millennium that’s just what we did – we went on a great binge.

We drank more alcohol trying out new drinks like wines and lagers, we ate out more as we embraced the burger, the pizza and lumps of chicken daubed in a secret mix of spices and breadcrumbs. And while we did this, the elite – those who had run everything and liked the old supine working class – grumbled about taste and the bad choices of other people (by which they meant those workers eating burgers and drinking lager). This was the change cursed by Mr. Potter, the scheming old banker in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life” when he said:

A discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class.

We still see echoes of this when – just as that old rentier Potter did – left wing writers like Michael Rosen rail against debt. Borrowing money is fine for the likes of us, say folks like Rosen, but the ordinary people should be stopped from taking on debt because it’s bad for them:

Debt - one of the features of modern capitalism is the level of personal debt - whether through mortgages or loans. To my mind, this is the system's police force. Once we have debt, we have a legal system to terrify us with threats of non-payment. At any given moment in which we might feel that we have to (or want to) challenge the system, there is a voice in our head which says, 'But will this endanger my chances of paying my debts - my mortgage payments and my loan payments…?' This used to be a 'middle class' anxiety and was thought to only affect (or create) the attachment of the middle classes to the system.

The working class must be thrifty, must live within its means and mustn’t take on the trappings of their betters let alone put anything at risk in aspiring for a better future.

So we binged. And while we binged we all carrying on getting richer and piling up wealth. The wealth once held by landlords – state and private - and wealthy capitalists began to spread through society. We bought houses and saved money in pension schemes while enjoying cars, foreign holidays, meals out and central heating. Our lives were immeasurably better that the lives of those men shuffling to work a ten-hour shift and those women spending  80 hours a week feeding him and stopping the house filling up with soot.

From out of this change – this great binge – came a real working class culture. Not the make-believe one idolised by wealthy writers, that sort of Mike Leigh homage to a crap life so typical of how those who have present the culture of those who haven’t. And bits of that culture came as something of a shock to the left – they discovered that the working class is patriotic and that it will display that patriotism with enthusiasm. 

After years of sneering at the idea of loving one’s country, the left couldn’t somehow understand how ‘their people’ still sang the songs and flew the flags, celebrating Britain and, worst of all, England. These left wing folk still struggle – I listened to a Guardian journalist on the radio talking about singing by England fans. This man wanted us to stop singing ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘The Great Escape’ because he was uncomfortable with ‘what they symbolised’.

The cultural elite don’t like this – not just because of the nationalism but because, like draping your house in flags, it all seems just a bit tacky. When we visit my parents at Christmas, we have a little drive round to look at the Christmas decorations – not the state-sponsored and approved ones on the high street but the fantastic displays of kitsch plastic reindeer, flashing lights, gnomes and Santa people put on their homes. North Kent is great for this sort of display and the Isle of Sheppey – as a sort of distillation of everything North Kent – is best. But that cultural elite doesn’t like this sort of display and reserves sort of its best sneering to describe brash Christmas decoration:

“And what can I see from my office in Carnaby Street? I can see a giant, pneumatic, puce-coloured reindeer with white spots suspended from tension wires in space.”

This is from Stephen Bayley described as “…one of Britain's best known cultural commentators.” For which you can read arrogant snob. It is a short step from this to a very wealthy Islington MP tweeting, slightly sneeringly, a photograph of a house draped in England flags. A tweet that got that MP into trouble (although, for the record, her resigning was one of the dafter – if admirable – decisions in recent UK politics). It has though brought out the worst is the left as they set about defending Emily Thornberry:

“I thought that hanging flags with a red cross on a white background out of you house windows was telling the world that you aspired to be a right-wing thug who hated everything from abroad (except lager and curry) and wished that a bunch of ex-National Front neo-Nazis ran the government of Little England.”

This, as much as Ed Miliband’s laboured efforts to look cool and trendy, is Labour’s problem. The people who run the Labour Party – at every level – simply don’t relate to the bloke who flies a big England flag on his house or indeed to that man's neighbour who, as we speak, is putting up Christmas lights, an inflatable snowman and a great big sleigh. The same is true for my party but we’ve an excuse – for much of our recent history, we simply haven’t tried to represent the ordinary worker. I think this needs to change because it’s absolutely plain that the left with its patronising, snobbish and judgemental attitude to people who fly the flag, eat burgers, give their kids a bar of chocolate and like X-Factor has nothing to offer those people. Right now the void – a voice for people with kitsch Christmas displays, great big England flags, white vans, tattoos – is being filled by UKIP, a bunch of people who think the modern world is crap and wish to return to some mythical Elysian past.

This view is the very opposite of aspiration, of the thing that George Bailey offered the ordinary folk of Bedford Falls. Rather than offer people opportunity, choice and a better tomorrow – the things that allowed us to change from a supine, shuffling working class to a brash, in-your-face flag-waving populace – what people are being sold is a comfort blanket, a message of ‘hold onto this and it will all be fine’. Instead of a world of new exciting things to do, see and play with we’re promised safety, security and the oversight of our behaviour by our betters. I don’t think this is what people want and I’m absolutely sure that, whatever people do want, it isn’t snobbish, patronising judgement of their lives, choices and pleasures.

....

Fly the flag!

In excellent news, you'll no longer need planning permission to fly this flag - or indeed any other flag. Excellent news from Mr Pickles:

In a speech to the Flag Institute, the Communities and Local Government Secretary is today announcing his intention to launch a consultation to allow a wider variety of important and historic flags to be flown by people keen to celebrate their local and national heritage and culture.


The last Government changed planning rules to allow the European Union flag to be flown without permission. The coalition Government will make it easier for communities wanting to celebrate the contribution of our armed forces by easing rules on flying local regimental flags. Other local flags, and projects like environmental awards, could also all be freed up from existing bureaucratic restrictions.

Getting those banners flying!