Flying The Flag

By all means fly Saint George's Flag.

But not during the World Cup.

It is now 20 years since the Italia 90 tournament not only exposed the transformation of football into the underclass performing like monkeys for the people who think that they are in the middle when they are not, but also, long before devolution, began the trend of waiving Saint George's Flag rather than the Union Flag at such events. Over the intervening decades, what has that recovered English banner, previously confined to ecclesiastical use, come to represent? What sort of place has England become?

England has become the sort of place that patronisingly pretends to admire barely literate, drunken, drug-addled, prostitute-frequenting wife-beaters and gang rapists because they confirm every prejudice about a certain social class. As do the WAGs, who are now the real point of English football, and the supreme example of how our popular culture has mostly been turned into what homosexual men think that heterosexual women should like. There really is nothing camper than football: the figure usually held up as our greatest living footballer is noted for wearing a skirt in public and for wearing his domineering wife's knickers in private.

England has become the sort of place where drunkenly displaying a forgotten flag, in association with an activity of no interest to half of men and eighty per cent of women, is regarded as a suitable and sufficient expression of "greatness" despite the fact that the English now run almost nothing even in England, and nothing at all anywhere else. That "greatness" is deemed to include a vicious hatred of the Germans based on "One World Cup" as if it were of equal importance to "Two World Wars", and increasingly also of the Scots.

I repeat that this predates devolution by as good as a decade. Indeed, it contributed as significantly as anything else to the creation of a climate in which the slow-motion dismemberment of the United Kingdom was possible. The use of the Union Flag would in fact make more sense today than in, say, 1966, since the reappearance or contrivance of various new European states, the explosion of American interest in football, and the rise within the game of many enormously populous African and Asian countries, make it practically certain that only England will ever again qualify for any of these competitions, if any part of these Islands manages to do so in future.

The hostility to the Germans does not, because it cannot, translate into any practically meaningful opposition to the erosion of our sovereignty, democracy and identity by the European Union, which of course erodes everyone else's as well, including the Germans'. Am I alone in having noticed how the frequent addition of black in general, and of a spikily Gothic black lion in particular, makes the red and white flag look hilariously German?

England last won any international football tournament 44 years ago, at home. She may play host to the most popular football league in the world, but playing host is pretty much all that she does to the foreign talent on which it is very heavily dependent. Again in the vein of what England has become, that league's richer clubs are foreign-owned and are notoriously bad employers of ground staff, catering staff, and so on. England has become a country in which the workers are treated abysmally even by "the sport of the working man", which, if it really did have any working-class audience, would receive the same level of media attention as darts.

Indicate your repudiation of the whole thing. By all means fly Saint George's Flag. But not during the World Cup.