The Union Jack: the story of the British flag
Nick Groom Atlantic Books, 396pp, £16.99
ISBN 1843543362
It would be wrong for Britain to embrace American-style patriotism. While the US Stars and Stripes symbolises Enlightenment rationalism, the Union Jack will always be a remnant of empire
Gordon Brown recently issued a rallying cry to the British people to honour the Union Jack. Looking, as so often, to the US as a model, he wondered why we didn't fly a "flag in every garden". Since the mid-1990s, Brown has encouraged the centre left to recapture the language of patriotism from the Tories and from extremists. "The Union Flag is a flag for Britain," he said in January, "not the BNP."
The Union Jack has been much in evidence lately, not only because this year is its 400th anniversary. Emblazoned on the BNP's local-election literature, brandished by royalists celebrating the Queen's 80th birthday, modelled on the catwalk at the Dior Homme spring show and unfurled by the prime-minister-in-waiting - the flag is clearly a contested sign, and one whose meaning is determined by context. Nick Groom sets out to explore this multiplicity. For him, the history of the Union Jack is itself "a miniature history of this archipelago", a "symbolic chart of different lands and different peoples". With some elegant touches, but with something of the spirit of a kings-and-queens primer, his book presents us with this miniature history (although "potted" would do just as well).
The Union Flag was first drawn up in 1606, three years after James VI of Scotland assumed the crown of England to become head of a new state he called "Great Britain". St George's red cross on white and St Andrew's white saltire on blue were super-imposed (imposed in more than one sense, for the Union had many opponents). Intended initially for use at sea, the flag came to be called "Jack" after "jacques", a leather or armoured jerkin adorned with livery colours.
Groom broadens this story out to include numerous expressions of national iconography, and he begins his survey long before King James - in the Iron Age. Before the Roman invasion, the identities of the different tribes of these islands were shown by symbols painted on the body: the word "Britons" comes from the Celtic "pritani", or "people of the designs". The British are today the most tattooed people in Europe, and Groom claims a kind of continuity.
With the Romans came the ensign of the dragon, which was taken up by the invaded population and later associated with Arthur and Wessex. The Normans preferred lions, the emblem worn by the England rugby team on their shirts. St George and his bloody crucifix became established only after the Crusades - in this way, a 3rd-century Palestinian became the patron saint of England; his flag was to be hoisted by both kings and rebels. When you start to look, these heraldic icons are everywhere: on my five-minute walk to get a sandwich at lunchtime, I pass the Old Red Lion pub sign and a stone dragon rearing up to mark the boundary of the City of London.
In the late 17th century, the state recruited Britannia to underwrite the fragile unity of England and Scotland. She was put on to coins in 1665, and in 1682 the royal navy named a man-of-war after her. Kitted out with helmet, trident and shield, she was unmistakably a symbol of economic and military might; revolutionary France's Marianne, in contrast, stood for liberty and reason. While Britannia was bound up with the ruling classes, John Bull was more a man of the people; unfortunately Groom spreads himself so thinly that such distinctions are dealt with in a sentence or two.
Centuries of subjugation preceded the Act of Union that, in 1801, joined Ireland to Britain, after which St Patrick's saltire was duly woven into the Union Flag's design. It couldn't be placed exactly on top of St Andrew's, however, so was narrowed and set lower (the flag was also made asymmetrical so that, if necessary, it could be flown upside down - a sign of distress). The Union Jack had its heyday as the emblem of the Victorian empire, when around the world it summoned up heady notions of conquest and "civilisation". At home, it embellished hankies, toys, biscuit tins and boys' adventure books, and was the subject of numerous music-hall songs and ballads: "The British flag is a brave old flag/Whate'er our foes may say/And when the guns crack, then the Union Jack/Will be nailed to the mast that day." Alfred Austin, poet laureate, wasn't atypical in saluting it as "the flag of England, the empire and the throne".
Groom whizzes through the 20th century, pausing at Oswald Mosley, the Festival of Britain in 1951 and Wembley in 1966, before retreading the familiar ground of the Union Jack as pop-cultural icon: the Who, Sex Pistols, Spice Girls, Cool Britannia, and so on. These reinventions indicate for him that the flag is "highly resonant" but, whether embarked on to champion the nation or to subvert the establishment, they had irony built into them simply because Britain was no longer a global power.
The book ends with Groom getting misty-eyed about the English political temper, and echoing new Labour's demand for the Union Flag to be renewed as a badge of diversity and the UK's complex identity. But there is a major flaw in Gordon Brown's argument that we should embrace a flag- waving, American-style patriotism. The US is a product of Enlightenment rationalism; indeed, the American and French revolutions invented the modern idea of the nation as a popular collectivity (different from a kingdom) - a new kind of political community based on natural rights. Alongside both the Stars and Stripes and the Tricolour is a set of egalitarian principles and a constitution, and when, in America, the government acts shamefully, critics can point to the flag and argue that the principles it represents have been violated (that or watch an episode of The West Wing). The Union Jack's message can never be so simple, or so democratic - precisely because of the long, royalty-centred history that Groom outlines.
Why has new Labour been so fixated on formulating a new patriotism? Partly because, in the early 1990s, it had painful memories of Margaret Thatcher's denigration of the left's internationalism. At Blackpool's Winter Gardens in 1977, the then leader of the opposition mocked Labour's singing of the "Internationale" at its conference - its allegiance to "the Red Flag" - and announced: "The Conservative Party now and always flies the flag of one nation - and that flag is the Union Jack." Observing the political boost she received from the Falklands war - one iconic image from which is the yomping marine with the Union Flag attached to his radio aerial - ambitious Labourites began to take patriotism (too) seriously. Before long, bulldogs were appearing in their election broadcasts.
On another level, Brown believes that patriotism can help to restore a sense of national community eroded by globalisation, religious and cultural difference, and the absence of a legitimate war. In America, Old Glory goes some way towards holding everything together. But the Union Jack will never have that function for the British, not least because much of Scotland holds it in contempt. Brown would do well to leave flag-waving to others. It's no substitute for real politics, and there are different ways to counter the racist lies of the BNP. No attempt to refresh the Union Jack will get rid of its stale odour of aristocracy and empire.
Paul Laity is an editor at the London Review of Books
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