Whereas in your country the national flag gets a good innings all year round, in the United Kingdom we are pathetically squeamish about ours, be it the Union Flag, which symbolizes England, Scotland and Northern Ireland (Wales has its own beautiful dragon ensign), or — even worse — the flag of England, a simple red cross on a white background alleged to date back to Richard the Lionheart.

The Union flag is made “acceptable” for a few weeks every four years by the Olympics — but you’d better get it down PDQ after the closing ceremony, lest you be marked out as a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal. Remember the days when a pop star could wear a Union Jack dress? She’d be canceled on the spot now.

The English flag is “allowed” during football matches — but the morning after the event it must be shunned like an unvaccinated viper playing kiss-chase. This has dramatically changed recently; every day there are a proliferation of national flags in the street, some Union flags but more England flags, flying from motorway bridges and spray-painted on roads, thousands of them on lampposts, going on for miles.

It’s thought to have started in mid-July after a 12-year-old schoolgirl was prevented from making a speech about what being British meant to her while wearing a Union flag dress — just like Ginger Spice did — at her school’s “Culture Celebration Day” to which pupils were invited to wear their national dress. The school has since offered “unreserved apologies” to the child, but too late.

As the story spread on social media, a crowd-funder raised thousands of pounds to be spent on national flags, to be hoisted up in public places as part of a popular and peaceful protest movement calling itself “Operation Raise The Colours.”

The left-wing ruling class have reacted risibly, as though a gang of ruffians has urinated en masse on their antimacassars.

These are the anti-patriotism mob once fingered so mercilessly by George Orwell: “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality … almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box.”

They’d better get used to it, though. This is part of a political sea-change that started with the fall of the Red Wall to the Tories in support of Brexit; now every time some over-paid know-all sneers at the flag, another Labour vote dies.

The British — the English in particular — are not a demonstrative people.

Yet there’s a feeling that our placidity has been somewhat taken advantage of by the ruling elite in recent decades. The results of uncontrolled immigration, both legal and illegal, since the late 1990s (between 1997 and 2010 it quadrupled, bringing in more than two million people to our small island) brought the ruling class the warm glow of internationalism and brought the bourgeoisie cheap labor.

It brought the indigenous working class — of all backgrounds — little but misery, culminating in the horror of the Muslim rape gangs, the sexual abuse of working-class white and a smaller number of Sikh children not investigated by the police in the name of “community harmony.”

The flag thing is particularly poignant. Although the left calls those of us who like our own banners “flag-shaggers,” they love to see a pennant blowing in the wind; the emblems of everything from Pride to Palestine can ceaselessly be seen on civic buildings. A Muslim citizen may well be offended by the former; a Jew may be understandably unsettled by the latter.

In any event, we’ve all had to put up with them and rub along, in the British way; it seems a bit rich to suddenly make an exception for the actual national flag. Either flags are good or they’re bad, but one can’t say that one flag is a wholesome celebration of solidarity and the other is a health and safety hazard. 

If I were the Labour government, I’d make sure that the flags were allowed to stay right where they are. There is a mood in the country I’ve never known before; a kind of racial memory that reaches back before “Musn’t grumble” and the Stiff Upper Lip became emblematic of Englishness, harking back to England as a wild nation of civil wars, revolutions, rulers accused of treason, and kings executed.

The working-class people of England — from which I come — have had their noses ground in guilt for the sins of an empire from which they themselves haven’t profited for many decades now, and there is a feeling that we have come to the end of our collective tether, “a rope or chain with which an animal is tied to restrict its movement.”

So let the people put out more flags, Sir Keir — lest the alternative be far less salubrious for you and your gang of thieves and liars currently doing their best to make this nation feel uniquely unworthy of a seat at the Culture Celebration table.