Flags, Lies and Scapegoats

A Quest for the Preferential Option

I’m struggling to work. I’m distracted by flags. On the one hand, it’s ridiculous. I’m not being distracted or disturbed by violent protests outside my place of residence. I’m not being distracted or disturbed by wondering whether my relatives are alive, in another part of the world. Flags, by contrast, are so frivolous; such a meaningless distraction in the midst of much more serious struggles - and yet they have come to represent something so much more.

Of course, when you drive past some flags hanging out of windows, or attached to lamp-posts, they don’t have an intrinsic message more than simply ‘this is a particular country’ or at least, that someone has an affinity with that country. They don’t intrinsically, just by their appearance, tell you much at all about the values associated with them - and yet, because they are part of a particular campaign, funded by particular organisations on the far-right, and encouraged by Reform UK, the motivations are loaded with very specific values: racism and xenophobia.

To be more specific, the messaging is about setting up a division between ‘us’ (or a very specific version of an ‘us’) and ‘them’ (essentially immigrants, or even more specifically, asylum-seekers). It’s a division rooted in a narrative of rivalry: a supposed competition over resources and space, fuelled by a narrative of scarcity (there’s not enough resources for everyone and ‘we’ should come first) - but more than that, it’s an assertion of an identity, and a narrow, ethno-nationalist identity.

Somehow these simple pieces of coloured cloth, made in another country, have come to bear all of this weight. Their message is ‘This is our place, not yours’.

But there are counter-protests - people and organisations doing various things to the painted walls and roundabouts, to mix up the messaging, to overlay a kinder narrative about love and peace - because ‘England’ or ‘Britain’ is not only one set of values. It is a mix. And the flag ought not to be controlled by one wing, and it ought to bear the weight of mixed messages. But of course, it doesn’t really: and there are many parts of the world that knew too well what the flag meant for them - military occupation and colonialism.

So it’s striking when people say on Facebook that ‘people have died for this flag’ (as though it is the flag itself which is to be defended at all costs, not any particular set of freedoms or values) - and yet they’re right - millions of people died because of national flags, not least the British flag/s, and most of those millions weren’t British.

Flags aren’t just about pride; they’re about fear, even terror. But even the pride is complex: especially when some are proud about precisely the things that others are ashamed of. And of course, it’s possible to be proud and ashamed of your country at the same time: proud for its moments and traditions of welcome, generosity, and determination to pursue a more just world, but ashamed of its exceptionalism, its supposed claim to be superior, its imperialism and its failure to grapple with its postcolonial melancholy, and its deeply entrenched inequalities (which are a key part of these other narratives).

Like America, Britain too is deeply divided. Racism and classism haunt our narratives and communities. Some dare to find a better way, reaching out to those housed precariously in unfit hotels and to the protestors outside, with a vision that this can be a place for everyone. And I too want to find a better way - because scapegoating only serves one group of people in the end: the elite who float through life untouched by these struggles. That’s why over 90% of Reform UK’s money comes from wealthy donors, because they’re not touched by it all, but in fact they benefit from poor people fighting with poor immigrants - it distracts us from the real inequities of society.

Immigrants and asylum-seekers are not to blame for society’s ills. Neither are the British poor to blame. But these different groups are caught in a web of distraction, so that we don’t call out the real culprits who never have to worry whether there is enough government resourcing for their communities or needs - and in fact, who want government to leave them alone.

But if I refer to theology briefly, a traditional principle of liberation theologies doesn’t quite work - the idea of the ‘preferential option for the poor’, which means that particular attention should be given to the needs, voice and agency of the poor. The problem is that this can be easily claimed and misused, many of the flag-bearers coming from poorer backgrounds and asserting that their voice should be heard - and while it should be heard, so too should the experiences and stories of asylum-seekers, those being terrorised, but does this just leave us with a tit-for-tat?

I find another angle helpful: the solidarity of the shaken. The idea that different sorts of people, in different sorts of ways, can each be ‘shaken’ out of the lies, half-truths, myths and narratives that condition us and limit us, that people can be ‘shaken open to each other’, especially to the cries of the other, those who are othered, those who are scapegoated and demonised; to be shaken is to stop speaking and be made aware of something that had not previously been recognised; a reality becomes more fully understood, empathy grows, relationship deepens, solidarity becomes possible.

What, then, might a preferential option of the shaken look like - including asylum-seekers shaken by the horrific realities from which they are fleeing, and shaken by the divided welcome they experience; and those who come to understand their situations more fully; and those who want to understand (but also show some resistance) to those being unwelcoming? The dynamics between the different groups are not equal; the far-right stirring up the flag-bearers are standing on foundations of racist history, with much to be shaken out of - but British society bears these traits more generally too, so we all need to be shaken. Which is painful and awkward, but it beckons us.

I am distracted by flags, the lies, the scapegoating, and I’m disturbed and angry, and I want a better Britain, and a government willing to speak upo for its possibility, but this requires me also to find solidarity with all sorts of people who help to shake me open to uncomfortable truths, inequities and inequalities, historic legacies and alternative futures and how we might get there together.