St George: Have Flagshaggers taken ‘progressive patriotism’ off the agenda?
23rd April is St George’s Day.
He is the patron saint of England, although he was certainly not English. Traditionally it was a day of parades (think dragon effigies etc) and celebration, in short a festival.
In 2021 St George is associated with patriotism and flag waving although awkwardly the English St George’s flag forms only part of the Union Jack.
While Culture Minister Oliver Dowden has ordered public buildings (in England anyway) to fly the Union Jack at all times(probably upside down in most cases) numbers of Tory MPs now appear virtually festooned with flags. One twerp even asked why the BBC’s annual report didn’t have union jacks in it. Keir Starmer followed suit, although its not entirely clear if he is still with what are known collectively as the flagshaggers.
As an international socialist my flag stays red of course but that doesn’t mean the long running debate about whether patriotism can be progressive should be ignored.
E P Thompson for example wrote quite specifically the Making of the English Working Class and saw himself as English. He likened himself to the Great Bustard a bird extinct in England that was unable to fly and hence depart for Europe.
This was in the context of the debates in the New Left Review in the first half of the 1960s. Thompson was critical of those like Perry Anderson who were critical of what they saw as a tradition of English empiricism and preferred the perspectives of European Marxism.
Thompson was hardly unaware of how far Britain was tied up with imperialism and racism arguing with Anderson that the left had had ‘so bloody much to oppose’ that time for theory was limited.
Ironically Thompson was influenced positively by Gramsci and negatively by Althusser.
Thompson saw progressive English and British traditions forming a part of a federal socialist Europe, very different from the centralised neo-liberal EU.
On St George’s Day the argument for this particular kind of internationalism can be made but not, given the current penchant for flag shagging with a union jack or St George’s flag anywhere in sight I think.
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