St George and the Own Goal

How the people who loved England's flag most made it impossible to fly

The streets of England, during a World Cup with England in them, used to look a certain way. White and red, mostly. The Cross of St George on houses, on cars, on commercial vans that didn't need a flag to signal their politics but flew one anyway because the tournament had given everyone permission and, more importantly, cover. From corner shops to garden centres, something occurred to the built environment during major tournaments. The country briefly wore its colours.

Walk the same streets this week. The flags are not there.

There is a particular act of political vandalism so complete that its perpetrators have never once noticed they committed it. The people who love England most loudly, most performatively, most aggressively, who have spent recent years attaching the Cross of St George to anything that would accept a cable tie, have achieved something remarkable. They have made it socially uncomfortable for ordinary English people to fly the flag of their own football team during a World Cup. This requires sustained effort, total conviction, and a complete absence of self-examination. On all three counts, the delivery has been faultless.

To understand the full scale of the damage, it helps to know where the flag was before they found it.

The Cross of St George was not, historically, England's football flag. For most of the twentieth century, England fans travelling abroad carried the Union Jack, because that was simply what a British person waved. The shift happened gradually through the 1990s, accelerating at Euro 96, when the tournament on home soil produced something genuinely new: English fans, rather than British ones, wanting a specifically English symbol. The red cross on white filled that gap. It was a football crowd's practical decision, not an ideological one. By the 2002 World Cup, it was everywhere: houses, cars, forecourts, schools. A nation briefly comfortable in its own skin.

The appropriation was slow enough to miss if you weren't watching carefully. The flag that football fans had adopted for entirely uncomplicated reasons proved, over the following decade, irresistible to a different constituency. The Cross of St George began appearing in other contexts, at other gatherings, alongside other slogans. The association accumulated quietly and then all at once. The flag didn't change. Its meaning did.

This is the vandalism. Not dramatic. Not announced. A symbol gets borrowed by people whose relationship with it is considerably more aggressive than yours, and gradually you find you can no longer pick it up without being understood as one of them. The flag that once meant "we're watching the match" acquired other connotations that most people would prefer not to carry to the school gates or the office window.

The people responsible for this were not trying to ruin anything. They were, in their own estimation, celebrating something. Loving it, loudly, in public, with cable ties. The result is the same regardless of the intention. The house with the Cross of St George in the window during a World Cup no longer reads as sporting enthusiasm. It reads as a political statement, and a fairly specific one, and most people would rather not make it involuntarily while hoping for penalties against France.

Inside the stadiums, the flag still does its proper work. Stands of white and red, worn by people who have thought about nothing except football for ninety minutes, retain the uncomplicated meaning the flag was given in the 1990s. The trouble is everything outside, where context is harder to control and the cable-tie brigade have done their patient, oblivious work.

The hopeful footnote, and there is one, is that this ground has been covered before. The St George's cross spent much of the 1970s and 1980s in exactly this kind of trouble, associated with movements that most football fans wanted nothing to do with. Football reclaimed it through the straightforward mechanism of sheer numbers: enough people flying it for uncomplicated reasons, in enough stadiums and enough front windows during enough tournaments, until the balance shifted back. It took time. It took persistence. It took people deciding the flag was worth the effort of reclaiming rather than abandoning to whoever had got there first.

The flag outside your window during a World Cup is not a political statement. It is a declaration that you would quite like to see England beat someone on penalties. These are not the same thing, whatever the cable-tie brigade may have implied by proximity.

Put it up. The flag was there before they found it. It will outlast them too.