This is an "interesting" take on what's been happening in my neck of the woods :
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwnwx19ke1o
Background : last Wednesday night, the flag wankers targeted the centre of Moseley, a cosmopolitan, multi-cultural suburb of the city of Birmingham that some cliche-hobbled local journalists like to call "Bohemian" . They were well organised and well-equipped, using a van with a "cherry-picker" platform to hang a union flag and a cross of St George flag on about 30 lamp-posts throughout Moseley "village" centre. It was clearly an act of provocation, aimed at fostering division and confrontation.
On Saturday morning, a counter-demonstration of sorts was organised in the centre of Moseley village, promoted as "Moseley is for Everyone" and with the declared intention of taking down the flags. In the event, they only managed to remove the flags from about six lamp-posts out of about 40 that had been flagged - they were difficult to reach as the wankers had fixed them at the tops of lamp-posts about 30 ft high and it was pissing down with rain - but about 50 people had turned up, there was a sound system playing bhangra music and reggae, and flags-of-all-nations bunting, and it was all jolly good fun.
Mind you, the woman who "organised" the Saturday morning thing, Carol Williams, is a member of the SWP who stood in the recent council by-election in the ward as an independent, but was in fact a
de facto "Your Party" candidate, and who intends to stand again in May. Unusual, since the SWP doesn't believe in standing in elections. They were never going to get all the flags down, and our own Labour councillor in a neighbouring ward (the Moseley ward is currently represented by two Lib Dems) got the council and the police to agree to get the flags down properly - though it hasn't happened just yet).
Further interesting background : Mr Khan, the owner of the "Cafephilia" coffee shop mentioned in the report, has had a
massive Palestinian flag flying on the roof of his coffee shop building for several months, though the report neglects to mention this. This might well have been a factor in provoking the flag wankers into targeting Moseley. But that is okay, because it is on private property. The bottom line on what the flag wankers are doing is that, regardless of any spurious arguments about spontaneous outbreaks of national pride, hanging stuff from any item of public infrastructure without permission is just illegal.
As you might imagine, social media activity about these shenanigans always has several morons trying to pretend it's just about simply being proud of your country and ignoring both the illegality of the activity and the racist motivation behind it. I'm trying to avoid it.
Hopefully the remaining flags will be removed this week.
"The opportunity to serve our country: that is all we ask.” John Smith, May 11, 1994.
- By Youngian