The new “briefing room” in 10 Downing Street reportedly cost an eye-watering £2.6m to commission and build. Its technical elements were supplied by a Moscow-based company called Megahertz. But aside from those two details, there is nothing terribly surprising about it: done out in a mixture of very Tory blue and natural(ish) wood, it prosaically replicates the basic visual stylings of the Johnson government, something reflected in the presence of no less than four union jacks.
Is there now any escape from the red, white and blue? Last week, after being gently mocked for the size of his flag by the BBC presenter Charlie Stayt – which caused an achingly predictable social media storm – the local government secretary, Robert Jenrick, insisted that he was using “a symbol of liberty and freedom that binds the whole country together”. Towards the end of 2020, it was reported that ministers had tried to put the flag on packs of the Covid vaccine manufactured by AstraZeneca (which, contrary to the recent impression that is somehow a branch of Her Majesty’s government, is actually an Anglo-Swedish company with a French chief executive). Labour, too, has got the bug, as evidenced by Keir Starmer’s recent appearances in front of his own union jack, and February’s news of internal documents pushing the idea that his party should make as much use of the flag as possible.
Not since the far-off days of Tony Blair and Cool Britannia have we seen so much of the UK’s national emblem. But now the mood is altogether more wearied and embattled. The flag’s current prominence is partly the work of the government’s new “union unit”, and reflects a set of ideas recently labelled “hyper-unionism” – reducible to a last-ditch, often aggressive attempt to shore up the United Kingdom and the idea of a common British identity as the foundations of both continue to crumble.
Much of this, to state the blindingly obvious, has been either triggered or accelerated by Brexit. Notwithstanding the Scottish National party’s present crisis, Scotland’s place in the union is more doubtful than it has ever been. Welsh support for independence has recently reached a record high, and anxieties – or hopes, depending on your perspective – are slowly rising about the future of Northern Ireland. And so the story goes on: with the monarchy in trouble, and serious attention being paid to the horrors of Empire, daily damage to what the flag is supposed to represent has coincided with it being waved around more frantically than ever. The resulting spectacle is strikingly brittle: akin, perhaps, to those late-1980s Soviet military parades where everyone present knew that the affectations of might and glory had long since become delusional.
The UK’s new national mission, the prime minister recently told readers of the Times, is “not to swagger or strike attitudes on the world stage”, but “to use the full spectrum of our abilities … to engage with and help the rest of the world”. But the kind of patriotism voiced by Tory governments always has a strident, belligerent aspect. In that sense, the flag-waving seamlessly blurs into the so-called war on woke, the government’s aggressive defence of “heritage”, and last week’s news from the Home Office about plans for the UK’s post-Brexit treatment of refugees – who, it seems, are not going to be helped or “engaged with” at all.
One of the most self-contradictory aspects of the government’s hyper-unionism is the way it clearly plays to English resentments, raising the flag to declare war on the perfidious Scots, and thereby deepening the UK’s fault lines. And besides, running through both the benign and belligerent versions of Tory patriotism is the hubris crystallised in Dominic Raab’s recent claim that Britain remains a “leading power”. As a result, whenever ministers reach for the flag, they inevitably create a kind of Gogglebox moment, in which the only rational response is to smirk at a spectacle so absurd that it looks downright camp.
Which brings us to the perhaps the most fascinating question of all: what all this national chest-beating might mean to the public. On that score, mass backing in Scotland for independence clearly speaks for itself. So does the 40% support for independence in Wales recorded this month by pollsters, and the first minister Mark Drakeford’s warning that as the government adopts a more and more condescending attitude to the UK’s devolved administrations, “the breakup of the union comes closer every day”. In both countries, union jacks and invocations of the bulldog spirit will surely do the fragile cause of unionism much more harm than good.
And then there is England, where more than 15m of the 17.4m votes that took Britain out of the EU were cast, and the current crisis for the UK thereby originated. In 2019, an infamous YouGov poll asked leave voters if they thought Scotland becoming independent would be a price worth paying for delivering Brexit: 41% said yes, while only 18% said no. Among members of the Conservative party, the respective numbers were 63% and 29%. Ministers might wave the flag and fret about the union, but a lot of their own voters and activists seem to have already made up their minds. Meanwhile, if you are one of the millions of people in England who would like the union to survive, you are surely faced with an inescapable question: if that belief finds an ever-decreasing echo in the other parts of the UK, what then? Will you try to assure people in Scotland and Wales that England may yet reject Toryism and help to elect a Labour-led Westminster government? At this rate, they will have to wait for an awfully long time.
Shall we at last face the facts? Even if the institutions of the United Kingdom creak on unchanged or are somehow saved by a new federalism, as a meaningful political entity the UK is all but over. Independence is partly a state of mind, and for very different reasons, a large number of people in Scotland, Wales and England have got there already. So, aside from its use whenever the Olympics come round, the union jack may be beyond rescue – best left to the kind of opportunists who think they can use it as they please but fail to grasp the downsides.
Certainly, the last few weeks prove that the flag cannot be pushed into the political foreground without sending a whole tangle of mixed messages, many of which will be the reverse of what Boris Johnson and his ministers – and Starmer – intend. Such symbols can look proud and strong, but they can also seem pitiful and melancholic. And in the images of that empty Downing Street set there is that sadness in spades: red, white and blue capturing the fact that in leaving one union of nations, we have tipped our own into a tailspin from which it may never recover.