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Gordon Brown speaks.

THIS PIECE IS a bit of a chore because I’ve spent the afternoon laughing at Gordon Brown’s much-vaunted Labour leadership election speech and reading the numerous tweets it spawned, and now I have to be serious.

Not that the Labour leadership debate isn’t serious, but it has been providing, as we know, marvellous entertainment. I won’t say any more than I already have about Mr Corbyn, since, for the moment at least, he’s been ousted from the top place as the People’s Comedian by Gordon, whose relentless pacing back and forth betokened either a restless mind or one fuelled by energy-enhancing substances of the kind favoured by students in the final hours before handing in their dissertations.

gbrowngdnIts substance was predictable as well, with a roll-call of powerful and influential people that Gordon either knew personally or admired: Nye Bevan, Jennie Lee, Michael Foot, Nelson Mandela. Oh, you didn’t know that Gordon knew Nelson Mandela? He did, you know, and very well. And Michael Foot knew George Bernard Shaw, and he knew Lloyd George, just like my father. Not to forget Neil Kinnock, although most of us have.

It’s a sad day when a major political party has to rely on the intervention of an election-phobic and election-losing shambles like Gordon Brown to deliver it from falling into the clutches of a naive social-jam-and-justice-tomorrow socialist like Corbyn. Sad for those on that side of the fence, that is. Not for the rest of us.

Maintaining a more serious demeanour, however, I note that the Guardian continues to outpeak itself with relentless consistency. What caught my attention this week was an article which criticised the Union Jack for being “ugly and divisive”. This follows complaints by athletes about to attend the World Athletics Championships that Britain’s flag has been omitted from their kit. To Jonathan Jones, the author of the article, the flag looks “really quite ugly”, it’s “heavy and overbearing, forceful and strident”. And why’s that? Oh, because it would “only make sense on a battlefield”.

You can see the gist here, can’t you? Britain and its past are blood-stained and shameful and the Union Jack reflects that jagged fragmentational divisiveness. Bad flag.

How much more attractive, he says, are the flags of revolutionary nations such as the USA and France. Yes, he thinks “the American flag is beautiful”! Good grief, his native country must be really awful for him to praise the Arch-Satan of capitalist oppression like that.

tricoThen he really falls into the rabbit hole: “The same goes for the French tricolour, another of the world’s most attractive flags.” No, it isn’t, man, don’t be stupid. It’s another one of those samey flags whose country you probably can’t identify even when they’re not upside down.

The American flag is distinctive even if you don’t know how many stripes it should have, or stars. That’s because the US is distinctive and exceptional (and not France). The union jack is distinctive because there’s no other flag like it. That’s because Britain is distinctive and exceptional (and not France). That’s the way it should be.

But the Jones’ way is the progressive way — let’s eradicate the past because it offends us, and start anew. He’s an oikophobic clone straight out of Orwell’s “England, Your England”:

So here is an idea to save the United Kingdom as a political, emotional and cultural entity. Let’s invent a new flag. Let’s visually forget the history of internal compromise and external violence this flag so unattractively embodies. A new flag for a new Britain might help us love our – whole – nation again.

unicornjackSorry, but I don’t get the feeling that you really “love” Britain, Jonathan, otherwise you wouldn’t be whingeing about the Union Jack. I think your best bet would be to get together with Comrade Corbyn and design a new flag for the People’s Republic of Jam and Social Justice and then see what the people really thought of it. I’d put money on what I think their response would be.

Michael Blackburn.

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