Rows Over Nike’s New England Kit and a Chip Shop Mural Reveal the Woke War on Our National Flags

In the London Borough of Greenwich there is, famously, a fish and chip shop named Jack the Chipper, which certain pious locals have attempted to boycott due to its serial killer-referencing name supposedly encouraging extreme acts of sexually motivated violence towards women. As I recall it being said by Andrew Doyle on GB News back at the time this particular story broke, at least the shop wasn’t called Harold Chipman.

Thankfully, even in our increasingly censorious 2024 Britain, there is still no specific law against calling a food outlet after a murderer or sex offender: you could set up an eatery named Pizza Sutcliffe, Jimmy Saveloy or Fred West’s Salmon and no-one could legally touch you. Dare paint a Union Jack flag on the outside of your bistro without specific authorisation to do so from the Gauleiters of the local council, however, and matters can be rather different.

A Chip On Their Shoulder

Another Greenwich fast-food joint, Golden Chippy, was revealed last week to have annoyed authorities after complaints were made about a harmless mural painted on the side of the building, depicting a cartoon fish in waistcoat, bowler hat and bow-tie, brandishing a large Union Jack flag and standing proudly beside the slogan “A Great British Meal”. Owner Chris Kanzi told reporters he had been contacted by Greenwich Council and told to remove the highly disturbing image ASAP “because we didn’t have planning permission”.

The way this was reported in the media implied the true reason for Greenwich Council’s order was really that, being typical Lefty pen-pushers (52 of 55 councillors there are Labour), they just inherently disliked the British flag itself. Mr. Kanzi, who was actually born in Cyprus, pledged to contest the decision, saying he was “probably a lot more British than a lot of the people” who had snitched on his patriotic mural to the district Stasi. The Daily Mail sent a reporter out to gauge the reaction of passing residents, one of whom summed up many readers’ likely initial reaction perfectly: “It’s just the typical woke council. If that was a Palestinian flag, would they have such strong objections? I doubt it.”

Greenwich Council themselves demurred, arguing it was not the content of Mr. Kanzi’s mural per se that was the problem, it was purely the fact it had been painted “without any permission, in a conservation area, close to a World Heritage Site”. According to one council spokescommissar: “Any suggestions this is [being done] because of the Union Flag are disingenuous and untrue.”

Maybe so. Like typical public sector drones, the councillors could just have been blindly obeying written regulations with scant regard for common sense here, rather than acting out of any specific anti-British spite. And yet, the reason why so many people immediately jumped to alternative conclusions is obvious: the ‘official’ line of many of our captured institutions these days is one of automatic, knee-jerk flag-bashing. As a microcosm of a nation, a flag acts as an excellent symbolic proxy to trash in its stead.

Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack

Another recent row about flags came with controversy about the redesign of the traditionally red and white Cross of St. George on the new England football team shirts along colour lines which appeared to be coded nods towards various eyesore gay and transgender flags. Even the normally reliably woke national team manager Gareth ‘Barthes’ Southgate criticised the move on sophisticated ontological and semiotic grounds, saying that, unless the St. George’s Cross is actually coloured like the St. George’s Cross, then it isn’t actually the St. George’s Cross at all; otherwise you might as well redesign the Red Cross logo to be a Pink Triangle.

Whether this redesign was really meant to be sincere queer propaganda or not (it could have just been an attempt to garner free publicity upon the manufacturer Nike’s behalf – in which case, job done – though Nike’s earlier plan for a rainbow kit does suggest deliberate intention), it led to various disapproving-yet-empty statements from frontline politicians like Rishi Sunak: “When it comes to our national flags, we shouldn’t mess with them because they’re a source of pride, identity, [and] who we are, and they’re perfect as they are.” Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer joined in, adding that: “Fans should always come first, and it’s clear that this is not what fans want. Our national heritage – including St. George’s Cross – brings us together. Toying with it is pointless and unnecessary.” Sensible words. Problem is, as Prime Minister and Culture Secretary, presumably Sunak and Frazer have the power to pass this message on not merely to the FA – which is, after all, not actually a Government-funded public body – but also to the Arts Council England, which is. 

Perhaps the best example of how our main national flag is now set for complete deconstruction comes in the work of Gil Mualem-Doron, a British-Israeli who is described in online puff-pieces as “an artist, researcher and community facilitator” based, inevitably, in Brighton, where he has founded something unbearable-sounding called the Socially Engaged Art Salon. Apparently, Dualem-Moron’s “artistic activities… include small acts, such as walking, eating, demonstrating, burning, guiding, conversing, collecting garbage and donating blood.” But apparently not, you will note, sculpting, drawing or painting any actual pictures.

Mulaem-Doron’s chief meisterwerk is the New Union Flag, a long-running travelling art installation, part-funded by the Arts Council England and other such bodies (i.e., actually funded by you, whether you like it or not), that he openly describes as being an “agitprop”, and which looks like this:

Sorry, I mean it actually looks like this:

Now celebrating its 10th unnecessary year in existence, the New Union Flag is billed as nothing less than “a proposal for an alternative flag for the U.K.”; there is an online petition to get it adopted as such, pushing the traditional Union Jack away into the perpetual oblivion of our nation’s irredeemably racist past. What does the big tie-dye mess-blanket show?

To me, it looks like a headache-inducing cheap bedsheet quilt-cover fit to be purchased only by Diane Abbott. To a contemporary writer of art-world blurbs, though, it in fact comprises “traditional textile designs of former colonised communities and of various ethnic and national groups” now living in the U.K., together with “numerous small boats made from jiffy cloths representing past and present migration to and from Britain”.

In other words, it is a celebratory patchwork emblem of these islands’ current mass colonisation by outsiders, which Mualem-Doron has been encouraged and funded to take into schools, galleries, “community gatherings”, “pro-refugee and LGBT+ rallies” and, naturally, Sadiq Khan’s City Hall in London, as part of a programme of no doubt highly valuable, money-well-spent “DIY Diversity Workshops”.

Disunion Jack

Mualem-Doron has long had a whole Facebook page soliciting signatures for a petition to get the Union Jack replaced by the New Union Flag:

Many public responses to this request divide neatly into two distinct kinds: negative and extremely negative. In the latter camp, we have posts like the following:

You may think Mr. Mualem-Doron might be upset to receive such openly abusive replies – but not necessarily, as he explained in a 2018 interview (from which all subsequent quotes are also taken):

For a start, coming from a marginal position [as being of Arab-Jewish, Israeli-European heritage himself], I reclaim a place from which I have been excluded – this ‘place’ is the Union Jack. In the act of modifying the flag, I am not assigning minorities into a designated, and as such, marginal site, but deconstructing a hegemonic site. The New Union Flag isn’t aiming at ‘giving a voice’ or designating a space for ‘the other’, minorities, migrants, refugees – a place where they can preform their identity. The flag aims to subvert a hegemonic institution, and I would like to see it, in the words of [French philosopher] Jacques Rancière, as an object of dissensus.

This flag is to be one of “dissensus”, not “consensus”, then. Rather than bringing all the country’s inhabitants together as one under a “hegemonic” flag of shared values (impossible, actually, as we self-evidently don’t all possess such things any longer, thanks in great part to all those vibrantly uninvited young gentlemen currently pouring in across our borders in giant origami jiffy-boats), this new flag explicitly aims to dissolve any coherent sense of shared nationhood away in the supposedly ‘beneficial’ acid-bath that is multiculturalism. That Mualem-Doron thereby seeks to replace the old hegemon of Britishness with a new hegemon of enforced deracinated transnational fungibility of entire peoples and cultures is something that is apparently lost upon him.

He Don’t Know Jack Shit

One particular installation of the artist’s flag was ostensibly designed to foster dialogue between patriots and anti-patriots. The traditional Union Jack and the New Union Flag hung side by side like curtains, with nationalists naturally heading towards the former, and internationalists towards the latter. To engage in conversation, Mualem-Doron explained, each party had to “put down their flags – they will need to draw the curtain to the side and open a space of communication. By doing so, the art objects that are the two flags are wiped out. It is both a symbolic act and a performance that I hope will generate a tangible effect – people face each other – face to face, and talk”.

How very heartening. But, if people like you hadn’t artificially separated the people of this country into two separate, diametrically opposed camps of mutual loathing via stupid Lefty stunts like these for no good discernible reason, then would they ever have become quite so divided in the first place? In practice, when either party pulls apart their flag-curtain, they might nowadays be more likely just to punch one another as to talk – but not to Mualem-Doron, who instead prefers to speak of his flag as being “a space in which contrasting views and antagonistic relations can be exposed and negotiated”. Well, so is a race riot.

A state of ‘harmony’ and ‘understanding’ between the two camps appears actually to be defined by Gil Mualem-Doron in an unspoken manner simply as having his opponents give in and just agree with him and everything he’s saying. He describes the intended outcome of his flag-accompanying, travelling DIY Diversity Workshops thus: “What these workshops attempted to do in the past is to reveal, even to people who are very nationalistic and insular, that they themselves relish the diversity that globalisation, the European Union or even just open mindedness and curiosity brings to their daily life.”

But what if such “nationalistic and insular” participants stubbornly refuse to have it “revealed” to them by his art that, in fact, they actually “relish” being forced to live in an ethnically and culturally incoherent country they no longer even recognise anymore, just because hordes of random Left-wing governing class-types like the artist happen to enjoy things being arranged in this way for their own personal benefit? Oddly enough, he doesn’t say. Evidently, such a thing cannot even be considered a possibility. And so, dissensus passes away quietly forever into a state of universal social consensus after all… but only on the surface. Besides his flags, the artist also clearly aspires to manufacture a matching range of carpets and rugs – for the innumerable future civilisational problems being stored up for us all to be politely swept under, at least for now.

In order to foster inter-community dialogue ever further, exhibition-goers can also take selfies of themselves standing in front of the New Union Flag, then fill in blank caption-spaces on their phones, the resultant images becoming later downloadable for printing from a special website. The incredibly unifying such image chosen to illustrate this concept in Mualem-Doron’s interview write-up was one of two interracial male homosexuals ostentatiously kissing one another on the gob, beside the wholly emollient slogan: “UKIP terrifies me more than this.” I feel the precise reverse, myself.

One of the two lovers equally open-mindedly filled in his photographic caption-profile thus:

Name: Ilan

Nationality: Beyond Borders

Residence: London

Aspiration: To smash capitalist, hetero-normative, patriarchal, racist system!

What a wonderful example of tolerant, bridge-building rhetoric. This is what such ‘unifying’ projects are actually all about: dissolving all known traditional norms and standards of human living and then replacing them with a new, inverted, utterly alien set of standards and norms instead, and then falsely relabelling it all as ‘tolerance’. As goes the flag, so goes the nation.

Stop Treating Us All Like Doormats

Gil Mualem-Doron said his New Union Flag grew from an earlier agitprop artwork of his, named ‘Homeland’:

In the latter, I cut out the phrase ‘Homeland’ from a door mat, that, when laid back on the ground, collects, on the floor, the soil of the people (in this case migrants, refugees, strangers) who walk on it. To put aside the complexities of that work (which was originally related to the Palestinian plight), what this carpet aims to do is to give a platform where the strangers who come ‘home’ change this home (the floor) by leaving a trace from their (home)land.

Could a greater artistic symbol of ‘Colonisation in Reverse’ ever be conceived? As a part-Israeli sympathiser with “the Palestinian plight”, you’d think Gil would be dead against settler-colonialism: instead, he appears to be actively endorsing it.

If a Left-wing artist of his ilk ever created a doormat with the word ‘Palestine’ cut out from it, then invited Jews and Westerners to come along, stand upon it wearing dirty shoes, and leave traces of mud and dog-shit all over the thing, I think the intended political interpretation would be quite clear – stop oppressing the (literally) downtrodden natives, imperialist scum. When you do this same thing to a doormat – or a fake Union Jack – representing Britain, however, the political narrative suddenly becomes the precise reverse: then we are meant to embrace such mud and dog-shit as being good for us.

Amongst those professional quislings who now rule us, anti-patriotism is the new replacement-patriotism, and emblems like the New Union Flag are this new value-system’s replacement anti-flags. To test this theory out, someone should paint a mural of the hideous thing on the side of a Greenwich curry-house and see if the local council dare do anything about this particular unauthorised scribble like they did with the actual Union Jack daubed on the side of Chris Kanzi’s Golden Chippy.

If ‘daring’ Establishment pseudo-rebel Banksy ever feels like engaging in a genuinely subversive act of public graffiti one day, maybe he could have a go?

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.