It is Britain's utter disgrace that wearing the Union Flag has become the ultimate taboo

Telegraph

19-07-2025

It was a small and sorry tale that went big. On Friday July 11, as the sun shone down in Warwickshire, Courtney Wright, a Year 7 pupil at the village school in Bilton, Rugby, ought to have had a lovely day. It was the school's 'culture day', and so Courtney donned a cute sequinned Union Flag number and a hat to match. It had shades of the famous dress worn by Geri Halliwell of the Spice Girls in 1997, back when Britannia was briefly considered 'cool'.
But a few hours later, Courtney's day had turned into an Orwellian nightmare. She found herself sitting outside the school waiting for her father to collect her, having been castigated and expelled. Her crime was wearing British garb, and with it, the suggestion that on a day of cultural celebration for the school 'community' in Warwickshire she was somehow … what? Asserting white supremacy? Racist nationalism? Expressing disgust for the 'diverse' members of the school? This sweet 12-year-old girl was treated as if she'd come dressed as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, or a skinhead from the National Front.
Never for a moment dropping the imbecilic woke jargon that led them into this perverse position in the first place, the school issued a sort of bureaucratic apology, which reminded me of the Labour party's apologies for repeated outbreaks of anti-Semitism. Clearly missing the point, it droned that it was 'learning from this experience and ensuring that every student feels recognised and supported when expressing pride in their heritage'.
One felt a queasy guffaw rise in the throat as the statement went on. 'As a school, we are reviewing our policies and strengthening staff training to ensure our practices reflect our values of inclusion, respect and understanding for all.'
No, you buffoons. This isn't about 'reviewing policies' or 'values of inclusion'. It's about a culture that is so embarrassed and actually hostile to itself that it can't even countenance its own flag worn in sequins and good spirit by a 12-year-old girl.
It's about the disastrous policies that have led to a moment in which terrorists are painstakingly afforded all the protections of British and European human rights, and pro-Palestine obsessives can drape themselves in keffiyehs and Palestinian flags, but a girl is humiliated, ostracised and sent home by teachers for celebrating, in the most light-hearted of ways, her British heritage.
It's about the catastrophic melange of bad ideas leading to the blind worship of 'multiculturalism'. Careful observers have always known that this term was a mess; it has killed off any understanding of the importance of having a flexible but dominant home culture. One that is critically engaged with its history and heritage, but also insistent upon the Western values that are the fruits of that history and heritage. One that could not only handle, but enjoy, a dress like the one Courtney wore.
We all know that Bilton School's aims are not for a moment about actual diversity, whether it is conscious of this fact or not. They are about brainwashing. And what happened to Courtney Wright is a microcosm of what has been happening, at greater intensity, in Britain's wider culture for years. Indeed, Bilton School's notion of 'heritage' as something that's first and foremost 'inclusive', and thus worth celebrating so long as it's not British, will feel very familiar to many. For example, the students at university or pupils at school who, for years, have dared not say anything about the British empire lest they end up conveying something other than scathing hostility.
Britain faces a massive crisis of identity, and the events in Rugby have shone a direct light on it. The anti-Britishness of Britain is leading directly to policies, like those of the police and the security services, that harm British children. The grooming gangs weren't stopped, in part, because of a fear of Islamophobia. The security services didn't chase up a lead that might have stopped Salman Abedi from bombing the Manchester Arena; there is no reason to think this blind-eye-turning wasn't, at least in part, caused by the same fear.
At the 20th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings in London, the great and the good hung their heads in respect of the victims, but few named what caused the carnage: Islamist terror. Fear of inflaming 'community tensions' – the same reason Jews were told not to hang 'missing' posters of the hostages taken by Hamas on October 7 – no doubt explain that reticence.
I'm as averse to chest-thumping jingoism as the next cosmopolitan, rootless Jew whose patriotic grandparents had to flee their nations – their national loyalty counting for less than zero. Nationalism has long been associated with violence, racism, anti-Semitism and loutishness, to say nothing of Nazism, the most terrifying empire the world has ever seen. But Britain isn't plagued with Nazism, or the murderous racism of the Ku Klux Klan. Not even close. We are, in fact, dealing with a country on its knees, suffering from a lethal lack of confidence.
As ever, Europe both experiences and responds to such tensions in volatile technicolour. In Germany, the far-Right, nationalist, anti-immigrant AfD has closer links, for obvious reasons, to the dangerous rhetoric of Germany's recent past. Indeed, celebrating 'Germannness' is, in my view, something that should only be done with the utmost caveating for quite some time to come.
At any rate, the AfD's Thuringia chapter is considered its most extreme Right-wing and is on German state watch lists. Its leader, Björn Höcke, has many views ranging from dubious to repellent. He has said that 'the big problem is that one presents Hitler as absolutely evil', wants less Holocaust education and a return to the 'natural gender order', whatever that is.
But in his book, Never Twice in the Same River, Höcke, a former school teacher, stumbles on a kernel of truth. He tells how one summer, students at the school started wearing T-shirts with the names of countries printed on them, including 'Turkey', 'Russia' and 'Italy', but of course not Germany.
And then a girl showed up wearing a 'Germany' shirt. 'The Turkish and African boys were beside themselves,' writes Höcke. 'These otherwise divided Turks and Africans spontaneously agreed in their aggressive rejection of 'Germanness'.' Höcke then turned up in a 'Germany' shirt the next day, and he was elated when some students followed suit.
The point is not that poor old Germany deserves to forget the Holocaust and rehabilitate Hitler; that would be monstrous. It's that societies founder without a clear sense of where they've been, where they are and where they are going. Germany and the rest of Europe do not need to embrace far-Right politics to do this.
No, they have only, at least in the first place, to refuse to let worries about offending minorities, or being seen to do so, get in the way of asserting the rule of law. And for the rest of us, the job is to assert the customs and values of the land without fear. Without that clarity of mission and identity, we will continue to see travesties from the small to the cosmic.
Thankfully, Britain is not Germany. We have a history without the atrocities of the Nazi era. Our cultural inheritance is so rich, and has so many brilliancies alongside the less good things, that we have a feast of opportunity to work on, if only we were able.
Seeing things this way would not only be more interesting and educative for children, it would also save lives.