Smiler Plays Capture The Flag

It seems that, having spent the last sixty years systematically dismantling Britishness, the left have decided flag-waving and patriotism isn't just for conservatives:

Britain should have a day to celebrate its national identity, Gordon Brown has proposed in a speech portraying Labour as a modern patriotic party.
The chancellor used his first major speech of 2006 to urge Labour supporters to "embrace the Union flag".
In an address to the Fabian Society in London, he said it is important the flag is recaptured from the far right.

Well, breaking out the flags and celebrating Britishness is always a good thing. Indeed, there's a strong argument that this is exactly what our country needs in order to return to the path of greatness -- Witness the bolstering of patriotism in the U.S. under Reagan.

But. It's difficult not to feel that Gordon Brown is, literally, the last person on earth we'd want to trust with the task of bringing this patriotic revival about. After all, whether they're handing back the rebate or signing up to the Human Rights Act, Smiler's party have never shown much concern for British sovereignty in the past. So bluffer's tip, Gordon: selling others on the joys of loving their country works better if you don't belong to a party that's spent the past eight years giving chunks of it away to France.

Then, of course, there's the left. See, it's all very well for Brown to whine about 'recapturing the flag from the far right', but from where the majority of us were standing, this wouldn't have ever been necessary if leftists hadn't spent decades howling about fascism every time a Union Jack was unfurled. See, the only reason the likes of the BNP [for the benefit of non-British readers, that's our largest far-right party] have ended up as the sole custodians of patriotic fervour in Britain is the left's sustained campaign to slur every genuine patriot in the country with the tag of 'racist'. The reason the far-right are still holding onto the flag is because they're the only people who don't object to the label.

This, then, is the real flaw in Smiler's plan -- If he's serious about doing some flag-waving, it isn't the far-right headbangers in the BNP who're going to cause him problems, but people like Anne Owers:

Prison staff have been told to stop wearing Cross of St George tiepins because they could be "misinterpreted'' as a racist symbol.
Anne Owers, the Chief Inspector of Prisons, was "concerned'' to see a number of officers at Wakefield jail in Yorkshire wearing the tiepins, apparently in support of a cancer charity.
"There was clear scope for misinterpretation,'' she says in a report on the prison published today. "Prison Service orders made clear that unauthorised badges and pins should not be worn.'' As one of her recommendations, she adds: "Staff should not wear unauthorised pins.''

Considering the vast amount of power Nu Labour have transferred into the hands of idiots like Owers, Gordon Brown's difficulty won't be how to wrest our flag from the BNP, but persuading his own army of socialist drones to let him start waving it once he's done so