St. George Usurps Union Jack as Flag of Choice in a More English Britain

For a son of Pakistani immigrants growing up here in the 1970s, the Union Jack inspired fear.

Aggy Akhtar would cross the street to avoid the kind of people who wore their love of the British flag as an aggressive accessory. It was the favored symbol of violent, racist thugs.

“If you saw someone with short hair and the usual uniform--which was a Union Jack vest--you’d cross the road,” Akhtar said.

The East London businessman is now 36 and a millionaire whose latest venture is selling millions of flags to mark soccer’s World Cup, Wimbledon, the summer cricket season and the approaching Commonwealth Games.

And the flag that people are buying is not the Union Jack, familiar to most Americans as the red-white-and-blue symbol of Britain. Instead, buyers prefer the banner of England, the St. George’s flag, a simple red cross on a white background.

Akhtar has sold 2.8 million flags since October, 90% of them St. George’s crosses. Many were sales associated with the World Cup--in which the St. George’s flag is officially identified with England’s soccer team because there is no unified British team. But even after England’s defeat, the flag kept on flying.

The rise of the flag of St. George has prompted introspection, going beyond the question of whether the flag was a fad, popular because it was painted on many a soccer fan’s face, to the bigger question of what being English is all about.

To optimists, it’s a sign that the English are slowly resolving an identity crisis that sprang up a few years ago when Scotland and Wales got their own parliaments, which raised troubling questions such as, “Am I more British? Or am I more English?”

To pessimists, it’s a harbinger of the breakup of Britain. Most analysts, however, don’t see English nationalism as likely to shatter the union. They see it the other way around: English nationalism is a response to the patriotism, strong national identity and steps toward self-rule in Scotland and Wales.

Others see the red-and-white flag as a kind of antidote to racism, an embrace of English multiculturalism. Although soccer hooligans and racist thugs have grabbed the St. George’s cross as a symbol too, the World Cup saw it flying from pubs, houses, vans and taxis. That it has continued flying since is a sign that the populace has taken it back.

“If the flag was something hijacked by the far right, now it’s definitely in the hands of the right people,” Akhtar said.

Columnists have attributed the flag-waving--even, surprisingly, by standard-bearers of the left--as a sign of resurgent patriotism in a land usually reticent about expressions of nationalist sentiment.

“The English have come slowly, shyly to their national identity,” conservative columnist Tony Parsons wrote in the Mirror newspaper recently. “It looks as if the English are finally allowed to start loving themselves. The sting has been drawn out of the flag of St. George. All the old connotations, that a red cross on a white background meant a mind-set that was white, racist, boozy, xenophobic, exclusive, have gone out the window.”

Parsons noted his initial surprise to see during a recent tour of the United States that “in that part of the world, they fly their flag, even outside the most modest homes. Once, that seemed ridiculous to me. But not now.

“Why shouldn’t you love the country you live in? Why should you not be proud of it? That simple red-and-white flag stands for passion, dignity, humor, tolerance, stoicism, courage and more.”

Billy Bragg, the English singer-songwriter with a leftist agenda, marked Queen Elizabeth II’s jubilee this year with a single called “Take Down the Union Jack,” which, though stolidly ignored by mainstream stations, made it to No. 22. (Sample lyric: “Britain isn’t cool you know, it’s really not that great.... It’s just an economic union that’s passed its sell-by date.”)

His new album, “England, Half English,” has a St. George’s flag on the cover. Bragg, who recently published an essay on the BBC Web site on a new sense of English identity, said he was astonished by the number of St. George’s flags flying at a summer rock concert at Glastonbury, not usually considered a bastion of patriotism.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before, never,” Bragg said in an interview with The Times.

He argues that the popularity of the St. George’s flag is “not just a 2002 phenomenon.” Behind it, he says, is something more thoughtful, a reassessment of what it is to be English, a more inclusive multicultural identity, where national heroes are people such as soccer star Rio Ferdinand and England’s cricket captain, Nasser Hussein.

“I think the Union Jack has connotations to do with Britain’s past,” Bragg said. “I think of British culture as being rather monocultural and that monoculture as centering around the monarchy, the flag and the British empire. The English flag doesn’t really have those imperial connotations.”

In a recent paper for the London-based think tank the Institute for Public Policy Research, author Mark Perryman linked soccer and the rise of English patriotism.

Soccer, Perryman and Bragg argue, is the kind of place where the English do all kinds of things they’d never ordinarily think of doing--scream and shout, hug the bloke sitting nearby, show pride in being English. In soccer, the St. George’s flag is the natural symbol because Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own teams and flags in international competitions, except for the Olympics.

Perryman is convinced that the move toward Britain’s breakup is inexorable.

“I feel that each time people put a St. George’s cross on their car aerial or put it on a badge or wear it as a T-shirt or paint it on their sons’ and daughters’ faces, they are beginning to be aware that England actually is a nation. You can go into any bookshop now and see book after book about Englishness,” he said in an interview.

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A History of Racism

Akhtar, the entrepreneur, was born in London in the ‘60s when the Union Jack was all the rage, plastered over Mini Minors and miniskirts. But there was an uglier side to the patriotism.

He was only 2 when Conservative politician Enoch Powell made an infamous speech warning that “rivers of blood” would flow if immigration wasn’t halted. But Akhtar remembers the reverberations, which continued for years.

His father, a lawyer who spoke nine languages, was shunned by clients. “I’m old enough to remember how difficult it was for Dad to get work in those days because people thought it would be detrimental to their case to have a brown face representing them,” he said. “So he was really nothing more than a glorified clerk.”

Now, many see the St. George’s flag as a show of support for multiculturalism.

“If you see a man in a car next to you, how do you know what he’s feeling or thinking?” Akhtar asked. “If you see he has a flag, you think, ‘Good on you, you’re one of us.’ ”

For Bragg, England’s soccer and cricket teams symbolize a new vision of England because they are multicultural, while soccer matches are places where people can comfortably express their pride at being English.

“In the football team and the cricket team, Englishness and multiculturalism come together. The cricket team is captained by a guy called Nasser Hussein, whose family are Indian Muslims,” he said. “Rio Ferdinand, who’s a product of mixed-race marriage, is the new Bobby Moore--our football captain in 1966 and a real iconic English figure. Those things, I think, are really significant.

“We see ourselves mirrored in that team. When you look at the football team and you look at the royal family, which of those best represents our country?”

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Redefining Englishness

That some on the left are now embracing English nationalism seems to signal a growing sense of ease about being an English patriot, not just at the soccer stadium but also elsewhere in life.

“There are lots of commentators, particularly on the liberal left, who automatically assume that assertion of Englishness means an assertion of far-right conservatism, Europhobia, racism, a celebration of our imperial past. I refuse to accept that,” Perryman said. “If we’re going to assume that Englishness must always mean racism, xenophobia and Europhobia, violence, imperial domination and so on, then we might as well give up on our national identity.”

In the Scotsman newspaper recently, columnist George Kerevan described the surge of English nationalism as partly an inevitable response to Scottish and Welsh devolution and partly a security blanket after Sept. 11.

But he contended that to be successful, a nationalist movement needs a substantial cause to rally around--something that English nationalism lacks.

“Why this surge of Englishness now? This summer’s street parties and flag-waving are not really about Elizabeth Windsor or David Beckham,” Kerevan argued, referring to the queen and the English soccer captain. “They are a quiet sign the English are fed up with politicians again and want something done.

“Nationalism is about forging an inclusive common citizenship. To do this, a successful nationalism needs a unifying myth. And here lies the great contradiction of Englishness and with the difficulty the ordinary English folk have in effecting political change. England lacks a viable ‘people’ myth. The English remain subjects, not citizens.”

Proponents of a new vision of English patriotism such as Bragg and Perryman acknowledge that the lack of a political coat hanger--and an attendant set of political demands--poses the threat that the idea might lose momentum and fade away, leaving the English as insecure as ever about their national identity.

“There’s no political movement around wanting an English parliament, so that is problematic: What do you hang it on?” Perryman asked.

But Bragg insisted that “if Englishness resides anywhere, it resides in a sense of communal experiences that we have, growing up together in this space, watching the same TV programs, putting up with the same weather. What that engenders is a sense of belonging.”