Personal Blogs

This week social media has been awash with calls to ‘fly our flags’.

 

It’s not St George’s day, it’s not our annual commemoration to remembrance, it’s August - the traditional political silly season - and it appears to be an issue that has been jumped on because ‘we’ are in danger of England being stolen from us.

This round of protest appears to have stemmed from media reports of council workers being ordered to tear down St George’s flags, flying from lampposts whilst leaving semi-official Palestinian flags in place.

This round of protests, dubbed ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ has gathered support, resulted in the painting of the cross of St George on roundabouts, and has, of course, led to comment and support of politicians courting the populist vote.

But, my question is simpler.

Is it English?

Doesn’t all of this protest about the right to fly flags wherever and whenever misunderstand the concept of England and what Englishness is?

Is it the case that a political movement seemingly wedded to recapturing the past ‘glories’ of Empire fundamentally fails to get what it was that made our country so English?

It is a round of protests that has caused me to revisit Sir Roger Scruton’s tribute ‘England:An Elegy’, a thoughtful consideration of what England and being English means.

In his first chapter Sir Roger highlights the work of another author capturing the spirit of England with a list of tableaux, George Orwell:

“The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the too-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pintables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning - all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.”

Each fragment is of an England long since disappeared, and never to return, but can we honestly suggest it is an evocation of an England that would have demanded the right to fly flags whenver we choose?

Was Orwell writing of an England comfortable with mass flag flying, or would he have seen it as a form a patriotism more aligned to 1930’s Germany?

 

For Orwell, was the ritualised flying of flags ‘English’?

In his elegy of England (an elegy being ‘a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead’) Scruton too contemplates what Englishness means.

He reflects that nations are “imagined communities”. They may be defined by a physical border but “seldom if ever do they arise from a common stock or a web of kinship”.

He too, like Orwell, looks to define Englishness not as a flag but as characteristics almost undefinable but, being English, we know what they are when we see and feel them.

Sir Roger comments that we are a nation that for hundreds of years, unlike other nations, did not have laws imposed on us but a common law that we all understood to be just and inherent to our nature, and which judges were able to determine based on precedence. Can you imagine populists espousing an ‘Englishness’ being inextricably linked with what they would now term ‘activist judges’? Of course not.

Scruton writes that Englishness was a sense of belonging, a nation of ‘rituals, uniforms, precedents and offices’, a nation made up of WIs, cricket clubs, trade unions, chapels and public schools.

He writes “The game of cricket was the eloquent symbol of this experience of membership: originally a village institution, which recruited villagers to a common loyalty, it displayed the reticent and understated character of the English ideal: white flannels too clean and pure to suggest physical exertion, long moments of silence and stillness, stifled murmurs of emotion should anything out of the ordinary occur and the occasional burst of subdued applause.”

Taking those characteristics into account can there be anything less English than demanding the right to fly flags?

But isn’t that the most obvious reason why such a demand simply isn’t English?

Scruton writes “England, I was taught, preferred duties to rights, and quiet cooperation to the obstinate demands of idleness.”

England and Englishness is, or was, as much about the duties that we owe to our nation as the rights we demand of it.

And, potentially, that is why Scruton’s book is an elegy, it describes an England that is dead: “it is only at the end of things that we begin to understand them”.

How many of those demanding the right to fly flags understand the duties of what Englishness means?

How many give time to support clubs in their community? How many are volunteer school governors? How many s do the shopping for elderly neighbours up the road? How many are trade unionists?

My guess would be relatively few because whilst at least, in part, our ways of life have changed so too have our values.

How many scoffed at David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, but it was undoubtedly, more English than a right to fly lags from a lamp post ever can be.

The demand to fly flags might be a right, but is it ‘English’?

I don’t think so.

Today saw the final round of voting amongst MPs in the Conservative leadership election, and in something of a shock result yesterday's first placed leader, James Cleverly, slipped into third place and was eliminated from the contest.

The final results were:

- Kemi Badenoch - 42 votes

- James Cleverly 37 votes

- Robert Jenrick - 41 votes

There's already rumours that a vote lending operation from Cleverly to Jenrick went wrong, but we will never know if that is true or not.

But what we do know without doubt is that Badenoch and Jenrick in getting 42 and 41 votes respectively only managed to secure around one third each of the votes of Conservative MPs. That is a similar amount to the proportion earned by Liz Truss in 2022.

And whilst it is significantly more than the 16% of available votes secured by Jeremy Corbyn in the Labour leadership election of 2015 (albeit under a very different process) it does point towards troubled waters ahead for whoever wins the Conservative contest.

For the leadership of any party (or any organisation for that matter) it is vitally important that the boss has the support of the majority of people who work closest with them.

In 2015 Jeremy Corbyn didn't have the support of his fellow Labour MPs, in 2022 Liz Truss fell short of majority support of her colleagues by some way. 

Whatever happens now to Kemi Badenoch or Rob Jenrick they will be starting their stint of leadership knowing that two thirds of their closest colleagues didn't support them, and in the very near future they are likely to be more than happy to let journalists know that was the case.

Inevitably there are choppy waters ahead in the Conservative Party leadership - probably long before the next General Election.

With the final parliamentary rounds of the Conservative leadership election getting under way this week it was interesting to listen to Beth Rigby's Electoral Dysfunction podcast reflecting on last week's Tory party conference.

Former Labour MP Harriet Harman suggested that this interminably long recruitment process had become something of a beauty contest and that it was important that the remaining candidates go away to think about what it is they stand for.

Of course, Ms Harman is right, ideology is important for any candidate. Where do they stand on the economy? On immigration? Where are they on the political spectrum?

But ideology isn't the beginning and end.

How you look and how you communicate is just as important when it comes to being entrusted by the public with political power. You may have the best set of principles in the world (or to counter that, truely hateful ones) but you will never gain office if you do not communicate them in a way that resonates with a sizeable portion of the electorate.

Take this year's general election as an example. Few people would understand the intricacies of Sir Keir Starmer's personal ideology but in the years that preceded him entering office - and the short campaign itself - he communicated an approach of dignity and service (albeit, arguably, that approach may have crumbled fairly quickly).

There is much that can be said in another post about governments losing power, rather than oppositions winning it, but broadly in July enough of the electorate saw Sir Keir as a decent, competent pair of hands.

It can be argued that this year's Labour manifesto was the thinnest in history in terms of policy platform, it wasn't an epic ideological tome - what you may expect from a party that has been out of power for a decade and a half - but rather a document that in four or five years time cannot be held by Labour's opponents as some sort of 'sausage to fortune' scenario. (See what I did there?)

The Times last week reported on comments made by Baroness Morgan of Cotes that the next Labour leader must appeal to people from "Cheltenham High Street to Loughborough Market". She said when it comes to finding the best leadership candidate she has a "Sunday lunch test... If the new leader turned up in your house for Sunday lunch could you ask them to open a bottle of wine and serve the guest and chat to people?"

I've always followed a similar rule when voting for leadership candidates- and yes, I do have a vote in the Conservative contest. Would I be happy to have a pint at the pub with them?

Invariably most successful Prime Ministers have always passed those tests whether it was Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair or David Cameron. Your backgrounds may differ but you wouldn't be stuck for conversation - it's the chat not the alcohol that is important, you see? 

Even those most divisive of politicians Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson or Dennis Skinner pass the test. You may disagree with them, but they have a depth more than just ideology.

So my advice for the next Conservative leader (or any politician) is yes, understand your ideology but remember it counts for nothing if your potential voters cannot empathise with you.

In the real world of politics what you look like and what you sound like are ust as important as your views on Adam Smith.