Hyperventilating vexillology

The latest episode in the ongoing “War of the Flags” came last week, but it was not about St George’s flag this time. It relates to something perhaps more parochial but has provoked a controversy that has drawn in all the many big beasts of the right-wing jungle: should Essex county council fly the Ukrainian flag or not?

Well, as luck would have it, I recently found myself in the gentler county a little further north, in the sleepy Norfolk parish of Holt. Holt is an unremarkable but quaint parish known in the area — and some London dining rooms — for its tasteful antique shops and the delicacies of its fish market. The village square is familiarly bounded by the pub, the fish and chip shop, and of course the Union Jack, flying in the public realm without fuss. 

Further out, we visited some of the county’s — nay, the country’s — most beautiful churches, not least Walsingham. Their ordinariness is half their beauty, and the landscape brought to mind the poetry of Betjeman: the flag of St George hanging above a medieval church, a sight more eloquent than all the patriotic parades of the Continent. I have not, I confess, looked up at a town hall flagpole in years; perhaps that is the point of the entire arrangement. Now, why am I bringing all this up?

In these blessed isles and for most part of British history the flagpole on a public building represented the Crown, perhaps the aristocratic landlord’s coat of arms, the county, occasionally perhaps even the nation as a whole. More often than not its use was practical, and it usually denoted a certain jurisdiction. And the building beneath it belonged to everyone and no one: Tory or Whig, ratepayer or pauper, Anglican or even nonconformist! The flag then was at the same time the emblem of a certain civic neutrality and a focal point of unity and shared allegiance. 

That is how things were. For the past fifteen years or so the flagpole has been re-tasked. One by one, the banners of causes were hoisted above the banners of the parish or the borough. Each catered to different constituencies, and perhaps even some justification. But cumulatively they produced an architecture with a conscience. And once a building has been granted such a conscience, can it easily be denied one? The next administration will simply give it a conscience of a different colour. This is what has happened in Essex. It makes one wonder whether anyone at any point in recent years actually proposed abandoning civic neutrality, or whether it has gone by inadvertence.

Reading about the disagreements of inter alios Kevin Hollinrake, the Tories’ chairman, with Reform’s Professor Orr, I recalled a prescient column from three years ago. Writing in The Spectator, Charles Moore — who himself admitted to proudly flying the Ukrainian colours in his own garden — turned a sceptical eye on the public ones along Whitehall. He approved the sentiment, as any decent person did, but what troubled him was the institutional gesture. Weren’t there better ways for a state to mark its solidarity? Perhaps, as Moore proposed, a single, deliberate act, as when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played at the late Queen’s request during the Changing of the Guard after 9/11.

The grand maître of realpolitik used to say that statesmanship begins where moralism ends, and that the great failures of policy in our age are the result not of a deficit of feeling, but rather of its surplus

Of course, this touches upon foreign policy too. Henry Kissinger might be summoned here as an unlikely witness. The grand maître of realpolitik used to say that statesmanship begins where moralism ends, and that the great failures of policy in our age are the result not of a deficit of feeling, but rather of its surplus. In other words, to declare oneself loudly on the side of the good is not exactly the same as advancing it materially. Kissinger, like all good realists, was suspicious of gestures. And perhaps the institutions that should attract most suspicion are those which have no real instrument to follow their grandiloquent gestures through. Chelmsford of course cannot defend Kyiv, even if it proudly declares its – rightful – solidarity. 

The discomfort sharpens, and Kissinger is vindicated, when one reads stories in the press that several of the councils flying the Ukrainian colours have, at the same time, found themselves moving their pension funds out of British defence companies in solidarity with other causes, weakening the very industry on which the cause they are saluting actually depends.

I do not believe that anyone involved in the recent row is pro-Russia, or anti-Ukraine. I think all sides believe that the defence of Ukraine is an unimpeachable cause, public gestures of support are honourable, and that the underpinning moral instinct is the right one. The institutional question though remains. What is the purpose of public buildings, how they function as symbols of national consensus, and how does one remove the flag of one cause, whilst keeping others, and not sounding a la carte? 

And how have our western allies resolved this conundrum? It will hardly surprise the readers of these august pages that the continental answer has of course been legislation and help from the centre. Italy, for example, has had statutory rules since 1998 about which flags may fly from public buildings, down to the minutiae of their arrangement. France has similar laws, from 2013 and 2019, mandating the tricolour in every classroom. Is this a solution or does it merely formalise the loss of our civic culture, and turn into contested code what was once time a shared habit?

Perhaps the melancholy of all this is that it could have been avoided, like so many other things in recent history. The hardly radical or novel solution might be to return to the old-fashioned view that public buildings fly the flags of the realm: the Crown, the county, the nation. In a sense this is also the most defensible option precisely because it is not selective. 

The flag above the porch of one of those round-towered Norfolk churches says more about who we are, and where we are, and how we got here. It is discreet, elegant, organic. Was that not, once, the whole grammar of our public life?