There may be big divisions between the three main political parties in the UK, but in the last week or so, they were all united on a single issue. The cost of living? The NHS? The Middle East? None of the above. It was the design of the England flag on the official football kit for the Euros that united the leaders of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. . You might think there are more pressing issues for politicians to get cross about right now, but Nike’s decision to change the colours of the flag on a barely visible part of the England kit sparked the kind of faux outrage that this country’s media increasingly seems to specialise in. And in an election year, none of the Party leaders was going to miss the chance to join in.
Point out that the colour has been altered in previous years, point to the ‘fresh’ multicoloured design for the 2012 Olympics or call it a tribute to the 1966 World Cup winners’ shirts all you like. The people who call other people snowflakes and ‘perpetually offended’ are once again furious. The colours are not to be messed with; leave our flag alone, they rant. We have somehow arrived at a point where you are labelled a snowflake for challenging racism, misogyny or homophobia, but getting angry over the colour of a tiny logo on a football kit is just normal behaviour.
And there may be more to come. It’s Easter next week, so surely time for the annual tabloid crusade to find chocolate eggs that don’t have the word ‘Easter’ on them. Ignore the fact that these have been around for decades: it’s an affront to our ‘Christian’ values that companies are daring to call chocolate eggs ‘chocolate eggs’.
This is a Christian country, the offended whinge. Well, at the the last census, 46% of people in England and Wales identified as Christian. 37% said they had no religion, 6% identified as Muslim, and 2% identified as Hindu. Around 2% identified as being Buddhist, Sikh, Jewish or of another religion. So while we retain a bizarre link between the Church of England and the state (in spite of CofE churchgoers making up 1.7% of the population), I don’t think the claim that the UK is Christian quite stands up to scrutiny. And even if it did, can you remind me of the role that Easter eggs played in the resurrection of Christ? Would the Last Supper not have happened without chocolate?
The UK has always been a melting pot, a country of people who came here from elsewhere, each with their own versions of our island history. A Yorkshire miner would tell a very different story about the UK to a landowning aristocrat – and that has always been the case. Trying to claim your own prejudices are right on the basis of some strange notion of tradition just makes you sound weird and insecure.
So who are the real snowflakes? Is standing up to bigoted and boorish behaviour really as flakey as getting annoyed about football kits and chocolate eggs? Are you ‘perpetually offended’ if you challenge offensive attitudes? Or is this whole confected ‘culture war’ nonsense just a reheated version of ‘PC gone mad’, for the people who seem way more easily offended than anyone else?
Rory writes 