“At the far end of the food counter a group of men were pledging allegiance to the flag, with trays balanced in one hand, in order to be allowed to take seats at the table. A group that had arrived earlier was singing The Star-Spangled Banner in order that they might use the salt and pepper and ketchup there.”
Welcome to our own Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade, another real-time demonstration of the fact every satirical absurdity described in Catch-22 has become, yeah, pretty much totally plausible. The nation is now fully hostage to bad actors and phoney rage. And as ever football must act as a key amplifier of all this, a public echo chamber for the anxieties of what we must, out of a sense of duty, still call the real world.
It took eight minutes for the crowd at Wembley on Thursday night to demonstrate that they have finally moved on from chanting Keir Starmer is a wanker. Instead they chanted Gary Neville is a wanker. Two days earlier Joey Barton, who exists in the public consciousness solely because of football, published a video to his 2.7 million X followers in which he said he would punch a disabled person in a wheelchair if they suggested a union flag should not be flown over a building site.
To be fair, this does seem an unlikely scenario. Perhaps there could be an interim stage where the two of them try to have a chat about it first. But no. Joey would rather cut straight to the real business of violently vetting disabled people for patriotism, out there furiously overturning wheelchairs like Indiana Jones weaving through the souk looking for Marion inside a laundry basket. Sometimes, you just get the heroes you need.
Here are two pretty sound ideas. First, if anyone ever asks you to take a flag seriously, they’re immediately to be distrusted. A flag is just some colours. A flag has no inherent fixed meaning. Flags are group-think, a suspension of independent thought. The civil rights movement wasn’t defined by a flag. The fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t have a flag. The peace movement didn’t have a flag, just flowers, hair and chauvinistic sex.
And second, there are few things more un-English than brandishing the flag like a weapon. For this reason alone I am proud of Gary Neville for speaking up this week about flags, for trying to make the point that it is un-patriotically un-English to go around insisting on English patriotism.
Neville is of course an easy target for accusations of luxury hypocrisy. He can be a doofus and a chop, the hammer of Qatar who will also work for the state broadcaster at Qatar’s propaganda World Cup, a Lineker-level degree of cognitive dissonance.
And yes, in his speech Neville rambled widely, exposing the contradictions of pretty much every fixed position you may choose to take right now. He should also have condemned acts of Islamic terrorism, something people on the left often seem unable to do. He shouldn’t have focused solely on “angry white middle-aged men” in the wake of double murder at a synagogue.
It is also a ducking of what he seemed to want to say. Which was to talk specifically about Nigel Farage, who does need to be challenged openly, who is a deeply cynical threat to the public discourse, a campy and theatrical nihilist posing as a Real Person, who uses fear and division to manipulate people into voting for him.
But I am still proud of Neville for speaking up. It is good that a sportsperson is addressing this, an actual issue in his home town, and doing so with genuine feeling, unafraid of the violent reaction that will follow. This is his parish. He is an angry middle-aged white man, and has spent a lot of time around flags. For all his easily gotcha-contradictions Neville feels it, is well intentioned and is worth a million Farages.
And while it is easy to say Stick To Sport VAR-boy, the reality is this has everything to do with sport, a place that has been aggressively flag-draped and militarised, where even a radio interview in midweek with the deeply mild Chris Woakes ended with the phrase “Thank you for your service” as though Woakes has been out there killing the Taliban for the last 10 years.
Above all the reaction to Neville’s video message proved he was on to something. Before long a Traitor Scum banner had appeared outside Old Trafford. On the internet Neville was pilloried over old video clips of him not singing God Save the Queen, a genuine moment of salt and pepper flag-pledge madness.
The Daily Telegraph has had a permanent hate-erection for the last four days, and can only be a small step away from giving away Gary Neville wicker dolls for your children to burn with its weekend editions. Rumour has it four leader writers have already been hospitalised by rage.
Most tellingly the same paper published a response from Farage that suggested Neville should be fired by his private sector employer for not wanting to fly a flag, an idea so absurd, so unpatriotic, so wilfully ignorant, it seems impossible nobody inside this mighty engine of English free speech didn’t feel uneasy about projecting it as a serious political message.
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It is worth looking at what Neville actually said. He said the messaging is getting dangerous. He said Brexit has had a terrible effect (see: the steel industry). He said we shouldn’t be pulled right and left. He said we must stop promoting abusive hate speech. He said he had ordered one of his building sites to take down a union flag because they had never previously flown one, and, like, it’s also just a building site.
The best thing he said was that “the union flag being used in a negative fashion is not right” something that is, intentionally or not, very George Orwell in its understanding of patriotism. Orwell gets marched around the place in headlock all the time these days, dragged randomly into every debate. But he knew about symbols and flags and about Englishness and its values.
In The Lion and the Unicorn, a love letter in support of the war against German fascism, he writes that a lack of reflexive flag-wagging is a key ingredient of English resilience and character. He speaks with pride and affection of the fact “the working man’s heart does not leap when he sees a union jack”, that “the patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious”, and that England is above all a compromise, “a strange mixture of reality and illusion, democracy and privilege, humbug and decency”.
Neville is groping for something similar, the fact the best kind of freedom is the freedom not to give two hoots about a square of fabric, or browbeating notions of patriotism. Pointedly, Orwell also preaches vigilance, the need to let your heritage grow and change, that England “has to be true to herself”, and that “she is not being true to herself while the refugees who have come to our shores are penned up in concentration camps”.
Famously Orwell also hated sport because of its weaponising of nationalism, its glorification of physical victory, and has been proved right in this now more than ever before. England football didn’t traditionally have flags in it right through to the 1980s, when they would occasionally appear daubed with National Front slogans. Right now the last two hosts of the men’s World Cup, and also the next one, are involved in a bloody conflict of some kind. Orwell was half right. Sport is now war plus the shooting.
There are two last things worth saying. Neville may be correct in his sense of a more nuanced idea of traditional English patriotism. But he is also out of time. The hive mind, shout-politics, algorithm life have trampled over lots of things. The idea that the best kind of Englishness can stay separate from this seems out of date. Britain itself is more than ever like a strange, small, damp archipelago marooned at the jumping-off point between the continents.
On the other hand, it doesn’t mean this is fixed either. In Catch-22, The Great Loyalty Oath Crusade comes to an end when the largely silent Major de Coverley walks into the mess hall, scowls at the absurdity of flag-hugging and anthem-singing, and says three words: “Give Everybody Eat.” At which point the whole thing evaporates in its own absurdity. Someone has to say something, and keep saying it, however garbled or easily shot down. Neville may not be our George Orwell. But he is, for all his contradictions, a very English type of patriot.
