Well this isn't right... Where's the Union Jack!?!? @BritAthletics
(this is the kit for worlds) pic.twitter.com/RAVoi6yRex
— Greg Rutherford (@GregJRutherford) August 13, 2015
The trouble with the United Kingdom’s flag, when you come to think about it, is that it is really quite ugly. I have every sympathy for the designers who removed it from the British athletics team’s vests for the imminent World Athletics Championships in Beijing. Olympic long jump champion Greg Rutherford has complained that “it isn’t a British kit any more” because it hasn’t got the union flag, but the decision makes sense aesthetically. The new vest is an elegant flowing dance of red, white and blue – the flag’s colours, remember – and has Great Britain written on it in big letters. It just doesn’t have that jagged, explosive, aggressive flag.So, your problem with the Union Flag is an aesthetic one, right ?
I don’t mean the union flag is aggressive because it embodies an imperial arrogance or a coercive union that keeps Scotland in its place. No, it just looks as if it does.Nothing to do with divisive politics then...Go on, do say...
Look at it, if you can bear to. With its cluttered burst of both right-angled and diagonal radiating lines, the British flag is heavy and overbearing, forceful and strident. On a battlefield it would make sense. Sure, this virulent standard served to rally regiments at the Battle of Waterloo. But today? At sporting events? It looks crap. Instead of suggesting unity, its sharp-angled divisions imply fragmentation. In fact, the relentless dynamism of its design evokes the shock and shatter of a cannon ball smashing into a French ship at the Battle of Trafalgar.Who wants a dynamic flag, with any sense of urgency or purpose, huh ? And those 'sharp-angled divisions' sure as hell put me in mind of a 'cannon ball smashing into a French ship at the Battle of Trafalgar'...wait, you meant that as a...bad thing...right ? So, anyway, go on with your aesthetic critique...
This was fine when Britain ruled the waves but its military hysteria makes no sense nowadays. To see how visually repellent* the union flag really is you just have to contrast it with a truly great national flag, that of the United States. The American flag is beautiful, as the artist Jasper Johns saw very clearly when he made one out of collage and waxy paint. The stars and bars** are soothing and reassuring to look at. Those layers of repeated lines have a quality of minimalist art, although they date from long before such art was invented. Perhaps America’s flag has had a hidden influence on all its art movements, not only on Johns. The bars hang there in harmony and peace, and the stars float majestically in their blue ether.You.Have.Got.To.Be.Shitting.ME.!!! The American flag, scraped hastily together out of scraps of its own forebear ? That stripey-assed Waldo-esque remnant of centuries past ? I'll acknowledge that there are in fact worse flags...by far...but, as a symbol of the supposed leader of the free world, the US flag is a joke. I could take your argument seriously if you acknowledged just about any other iconic flag but that one...
...The same goes for the French tricolour, another of the world’s most attractive flags. Its simple rectangles of colour are bold but beautiful. No wonder it has been imitated by so many other nations in varying colours.Erm, yes. Yes, indeed.
You don’t see many other countries imitating the British flag.Wha...wha...what ? Never mind how many flags explicitly incorporate the Union Flag directly, such as a certain US state, or are otherwise symbolically based upon elements of the Union Flag, such as the flag of the United States itself, or use similar motifs such as Jamaica. Just WTF are you talking about ?
The flags of the United States and France are the results of 18th-century revolutions that gave their creators a sense of starting afresh. No ghosts of the past or compromised histories influenced the design of these revolutionary standards. On the contrary, they needed to be totally new, to symbolise new constitutions, new beginnings.Bull-fucking-shit !
...Perhaps Rutherford’s objection to the British flag’s disappearance from the national British athletics team’s kit reflects an anxiety about insidious anti-union propaganda, as if in the age of SNP triumph it is becoming politically incorrect to sport unifying British symbols too proudly. But I would argue it the other way around. Perhaps the union flag itself is a psychological boost to nationalists who want to break up Britain. Its sheer pompous ugliness unconsciously damages the image of the union.Fuck you !
So here is an idea to save the United Kingdom as a political, emotional and cultural entity. Let’s invent a new flag. Let’s visually forget the history of internal compromise and external violence this flag so unattractively embodies. A new flag for a new Britain might help us love our – whole – nation again.Like you give a flying fucking shit about the union...I just shat all over the evil emperialist entity that is the English, and would much rather see the damn thing dissolved, but yeah, let's fantasise about a new 'Union Flag' that we could all celebrate after we finally killed the beast... Not that we need bother given said arsehole's fondness for the flag of the United States of America:
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| US Flag with 51st star for additional state, such as Puerto Rico |
Far be it from me to suggest the central paradox of leftism, but the recent election campaign seemed to highlight it better than ever. If you believe so passionately in the redistribution of wealth, shouldn’t you also believe in the creation of some wealth to redistribute? But Labour knows that would defeat its fundamental object of building a client state that would obediently vote for it. If you have policies that encourage wealth creation, you encourage job creation, and a rise in real earnings. Then you don’t need a massive welfare state, and you end up with a clientele too small to be politically effective. Simples, as the meerkat says.
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Even the Tory party believes in redistribution of wealth – if it didn’t it would be unable to fund the NHS, state schools, care services and welfare provision that a civilised society requires....Erm, there's honest ideological purity, and then there's just blatant lying.
...And you only raise the money to fund those services by having successful businesses that pay taxes and put millions of people in work.
It is time to become aggressive about this point, even though the election is won, because it is fundamental to the difference between conservatism and socialism; and it is not appreciated enough by a public for whom the narcotic spell of the welfare state has yet to be thoroughly broken. Again, it is simple. You don’t tax a loss. You only tax a profit. If you want to raise revenue, business has to be profitable. If you want to cut public spending, business has to be profitable too, because when it is making money it adds people to its payroll.
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Mr Osborne should raise the 40 per cent tax threshold considerably this year, and every year of this parliament. Currently 4.6m people pay 40p in the pound, and the present threshold is £41,900. HM Revenue and Customs forecast that even if the threshold reached £50,000 by 2020 an additional 900,000 people would be paying it. This is a brake on aspiration and enterprise. It is also a brake on incentive and therefore on productivity, and low productivity is the most poisonous problem in our economy today. He should also abolish the 45p rate, which raises hardly any extra revenue but gives enormous amounts of work to accountants, and take as many low-paid people out of taxation as possible, to encourage their aspiration.
Some public spending is always necessary. But it is not a good in itself. The state has fundamental responsibilities, but providing employment for the masses is not one of them.
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Indeed, I can’t see what is wrong with making the whole country a tax haven: for I have yet to visit a tax haven where the people are mired in poverty. If Mr Osborne makes that his aim for July 8, he won’t go far wrong.
Not shrill you say. Just a cold-hearted bitch, huh ? And...' "c" word'...hilarious !Last Thursday’s debate will have little impact in England. Scotland is another matter. Nicola Sturgeon’s performance has made it inevitable that there will be a constitutional crisis in North Britain and that we will be arguing about Scottish independence for the foreseeable future. Even the French ambassador’s (disputed) account of her apparent attempts to manipulate the balance of power at Westminster will not damage her.La Sturgeon was effective: clear, confident, combative without being shrill. One could add a fourth “c” word: cold. It is less a question of a splinter of ice in her heart, as a few scraps of heart tissue clinging to an icicle. She has all the human warmth of a tricoteuse waiting for a tumbril. But that was not so apparent during the debate. There is an irony. If she had given such a display as a Labour politician, she would now be the strong favourite to succeed Ed Miliband. As it is, she has expunged any prospect of a Labour recovery in Scotland....
The Scottish public mood is extraordinary. Over the past few months, millions of Scots have been baying at the moon. The most bizarre fantasies have not only circulated; otherwise sane people have given them credence. There are supposed to be massively valuable oilfields whose existence the English are concealing. Though that is about as plausible as Enoch Powell belonging to a satanic cult, it is now part of everyday discourse.
The Nat rumour machine also claims that there are large new oilfields to the west of Shetland. But there are three problems with that. First, oil companies have been prospecting in that area, without success. Second, if oil was found, it would be in rough seas. At anything like current oil prices, extraction would not be economic. Third, if Scotland were to secede, Shetland might try to opt out. Those are easy points to make. Scottish friends of mine have been doing so on the doorstep – and getting nowhere.
How can this be happening? The Scottish Enlightenment represented the triumph of rationalism, always in a calm and restrained fashion. Its philosophers and economists believed in using reason to improve the human condition, not to reshape human nature. They virtually invented free enterprise; they elevated Scotland to the intellectual leadership of Europe. In a splendid setting, the Castle on one side, the sea on the other, their contemporaries laid out the New Town. Calm, rational and beautiful buildings: it is the Enlightenment as architecture.While it would be absurd to claim that every Scot has read Adam Smith, there were grounds for believing that Enlightenment values had influenced the Scottish character...
Scots came to think of themselves as shrewd, canny, hard-headed. They persuaded much of the world to accept them at that valuation: a nation of Dickson McCunns. Where is the canniness now?It was undermined by three historical developments. First came the end of the British Empire. Not only was it often a job-creation scheme for Scots....
Wait, so Globalisation is a thing that...just happened ? Spontaneously, out of thin air ? An act of God ? Something in which the political classes had no hand at all ?Once a Royal Duke lowered the final Union Flag, it was easier for malcontents to claim that Scotland was England’s last colony. (Those sentiments are expressed in characteristic language during the film Trainspotting, much the most depressing portrait of Scotland ever written or broadcast.)There followed the inevitable decline of heavy industry. Two generations ago, most Scots lived within 50 miles of a steelworks, a shipyard, a coalfield – or all three. A lot of Scots regarded that as part of their economic birthright. This came to a rapid end. But it is unfortunate that Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the final phase....It was not her fault that globalisation had changed the terms of trade.
Indeed, on any sensible audit of the Thatcher years, Scotland should regard her as a benefactor.
Silicon glen, financial services, oil and gas: Thatcherism created the conditions in which the new industries could flourish. But no credit came her way. Her voice did not help; it set many Scottish teeth on edge. That was a childish reaction: there was a lot of childishness about, encouraged by both Labour and Nationalist politicians. It suited them to pour abuse on her and her party, to turn Toryism into political toxic waste.
So there was a quarter of a century of demonisation, which drove economic common sense out of Scottish public debate.
And still trolling...By the end, many young Scots had come to believe that Scots’ values were superior. Scotland stood for social solidarity, and indeed socialism. It stood for the public sector, not for private enterprise. Mrs Thatcher and her English capitalist friends hated the Scottish ethos, which is why they had set out to destroy the Scottish economy. This brainwashing explains why Nicola Sturgeon will have earned huge applause in Scotland for attacking Ed Miliband from the Left. Scottish Labour helped to sow the dragons’ teeth, never expecting that the dragons would turn on them. They ken the noo.
Not since the Thirties has a once great nation been in the grip of so many delusions. This is malign thraldom, and it is not clear how it can be ended. Nicola Sturgeon and her party are on the side of Trainspotting Scotland, not Enlightenment Scotland. Yet there is no sign of Scotland coming to its senses.