Banner of Shame or Standard of Pride? The Left’s Vexiphobia and the Unmaking of Britain!

 

Of all the peculiar neuroses afflicting modern Britain, perhaps none is more revealing than the Left’s vexiphobia, the irrational fear, disgust, and hostility towards the national flag. Where once the Union Jack or the Cross of St George inspired pride, sacrifice, and unity, today they are treated by our cultural elites as shameful relics, to be hidden away lest they cause offence. This is not merely an aesthetic tic. It is symptomatic of a deeper malaise: a society so alienated from its own past that it fears the very symbols of its continuity.

Consider the absurdities of recent years. The BBC, long regarded as the nation’s broadcaster, was scandalised when Conservative MPs displayed the Union Jack behind them in Zoom interviews; presenters and producers sneered, openly mocking the sight of the flag in domestic rooms, as if patriotism itself were vulgar. Local councils, meanwhile, have at times refused to fly the St George’s Cross during football tournaments on the grounds it might appear “exclusive.” Universities have issued guidance to staff warning that the Union Jack may be “problematic” because of its supposed links to colonialism. Even the Church of England, once the moral custodian of national life, has fallen into this malaise: cathedrals that once resounded with prayers for monarch and country now fret that national symbols might alienate their increasingly politicised congregations.

Such episodes would be comic were they not tragic. They reveal a ruling class paralysed by guilt, unable to embrace the very heritage that gave them their freedoms. The paradox is that the flag still flourishes in the hearts of ordinary Britons. Walk into a pub during the World Cup, or attend a Remembrance service, and you will see the Union Jack and the poppy embraced without irony, without apology. In the working-class terraces, the flag unites where the elites divide. It is only in the corridors of power, in the BBC studios, the university common rooms, the town hall offices, that the symbol of the nation becomes an object of fear.

This class divide is crucial. Vexiphobia is not some organic cultural development; it is an instrument of class warfare. By ridiculing the flag, the Left ridicules the loyalties of ordinary people. To sneer at the Union Jack is to sneer at the factory worker who draped it over the coffin of his son killed in Helmand, or the grandmother who hangs it from her council house on VE Day. In the mouths of the metropolitan elite, cosmopolitan disdain becomes a weapon, one that delegitimises the emotional glue of nationhood itself.

History exposes the absurdity of this shame. The Union Jack was not born of empire but of union: of Scotland and England, later Ireland, forged into one political whole. It flew above the ships that ended the slave trade, above the armies that resisted Napoleon and Hitler, above the hospitals that built the NHS in the rubble of war. Yet the modern Left prefers to see in it only oppression, as though the blood shed in its name was never that of those defending liberty. The Union Jack has become a mirror: to those who hate Britain, it reflects only guilt; to those who love her, it reflects endurance, sovereignty, and sacrifice.

The institutional capture of Britain by vexiphobes is perhaps the gravest danger. Once the flag is banished from public life, once it becomes a private embarrassment rather than a shared emblem, the ground is prepared for further erosions. For if we cannot agree upon the simplest of symbols, who we are, where we come from, what we stand for, then what hope remains for our politics, our culture, or even our borders? The vacuum is quickly filled by imported identities, by transnational slogans, by the ersatz flags of ideological crusades. Thus the rainbow displaces the cross; the EU stars displace the Union Jack; the slogans of “equity” displace the solemnity of remembrance. The erasure is deliberate, and its goal is nothing less than the unmaking of Britain.

Yet the cure to vexiphobia lies not in apologetics, but in defiance. The flag must be flown, unapologetically, proudly, wherever the British people still possess the courage to affirm their nationhood. To do so is not “jingoism,” but self-respect. It is to refuse the lie that patriotism is shameful, to resist the cultural vandalism of elites who despise the soil that bore them. For the flag belongs not to politicians, not to bureaucrats, not to broadcasters, but to the people and through them, to the centuries.

The Left’s vexiphobia is, at root, a fear of memory. It is the terror that if Britain remembers what it once was, it may aspire again to greatness. Better, they think, to smother the flag in shame, to train children to see it as offensive, than to risk awakening a sleeping loyalty that might challenge their ideological order. But the flag endures. It endures in the terraces, in the cenotaphs, in the quiet dignity of streets lined with bunting on royal jubilees. It endures because it is older, deeper, and more resilient than the petty neuroses of academics and activists. And so long as it endures, Britain endures.

The task, then, is simple: raise the flag. Refuse to bow to the sneer. Defy the vexiphobes who mistake their cowardice for enlightenment. In defending the Union Jack, we defend not only a symbol but the very possibility of Britain’s future.