Flagged For Offence

“Quite frankly, I wipe my arse on the Union Jack daily,” declares notorious left-wing journalist Nick Swarm on the latest episode of his podcast, ‘Out of Left Field’. “I just thought that I’d put that out there in the hope that it will be read by some right wing, Daily Mail reading rabid tosspot, who will then have an apoplectic fit, collapsing, foaming at the mouth and clutching their chest as they turn blue and expire on their living room floor!” The journalist, who gained notoriety for suggesting that the Last Night of the Proms be used as an opportunity to gas Brexiteers and Little Englanders, claims that causing this sort of offence, by attacking and ridiculing nationalist symbols, is a key strategy for fighting back against the extreme right wing elites that have taken control of the UK. “Of course, I don’t really wipe my arse with the Union Jack, (and, yes, I do know that it is correctly called the Union Flag – a ‘Jack’ is what it is flown from on a ship), – the material they make them from is far too rough, for one thing – but I figured that if so many of them could get so upset by a mild joke about the size of a cabinet minister’s flag by a BBC presenter, then the idea of using it like toilet paper would surely prove fatally upsetting to them,” he contends, making reference to the recent furore kicked up by right-wingers over BBC Breakfast presenter Charlie Stayt’s jocular remark to cabinet minister Robert Jenrick that the Union Flag in his officer was too small compared to those of his colleagues. “Mind you, it’s one thing having a flag in a government office, but half of these bastards are doing these TV interviews from their houses, which are apparently festooned with Union Jacks and pictures of the Queen! I mean, that’s just not normal home décor, is it?”

Along with many other commentators, Swarm has long pointed out that, despite the right’s penchant for calling anyone on the left who has an opinion about something a ‘snowflake’, it is they who seem to be over-sensitive, over-reacting to any little thing that upsets them. For the right, even the most modest criticism of the establishment becomes a heinous personal slight. “This is their Kryptonite, their Achilles Heel, the chink in their armour – their over-sensitivity,” he opines. “It will be, quite literally, the death of them- don’t forget that the majority of these bile-spewing right-wingers are red-faced, over weight gammons with sky-high blood pressure and heart problems. They are walking heart attacks just waiting for a trigger – like the sight of someone abusing their sacred flag!” According to Swarm, attacking the right-wing establishment directly is pointless. “Right now they have all the power and have no scruples about using it to suppress political dissent.,” he points out. “So, instead, we’ve got to start ‘thinning the herd’ of these Brexiteering fascist enablers who sustain them in power and what better way than by turning their own self-righteousness against them?”

Consequently, Swarm is calling for a campaign to create sufficient moral outrage in the right-wing press that it will send the stress levels of their readers to potentially lethal levels. “We just need to get them upset enough,” he muses. “What is needed is a concerted campaign on social media of people abusing the Union Flag – burning it, wanking off into it, using it to wipe down sweaty and panting prostitutes, (a sight many Tory MPs must surely be familiar with).” He suggests that this might, perhaps, be followed up by videos of people drawing moustaches on pictures of HM The Queen. “That should really get them riled up, eh? Or better yet – doctored pictures of The Queen showing her as black,” he chuckles. “If that doesn’t have them turning purple and suffering strokes, I don’t know what will!” Swarm’s proposals have, naturally, provoked a ferocious response from some right wing politicians. “This is just the sort of puerile student-type nonsense I’d expect from these bed-wetting leftie bastards,” bellowed a red-faced Mark Porker, Tory back bencher and prominent member of the European Research Group, during a BBC interview from his house, where he posed, wearing a plastic union jack bowler, in front life size wax works of the Queen and Winston Churchill. “They just can’t take the fact that we’ve won all the arguments so all they can do is be disrespectful and pathetically mock the things that have made this country great!”

Swarm has dismissed such complaints. “Oh come on! When it comes to being disrespectful, I’ll bet that bastard Porker even wears Union Jack underpants,” he snorts derisorily. “Imagine that – his fat arse and, worse, his cock and balls, are pressed against the Union Jack all day! How disrespectful is that?” The journalist believes that this subversion of patriotic symbols – the flag, the Queen, Churchill – by the right is the keystone of their attempt to cover up the failure of Brexit by creating a new mythology of a rampant Britain restored to its rightful place as an Imperial power. “By creating this myth, then identifying themselves with it through their constant use of these symbols, they are clearly trying to create a new national mind-set whereby to disagree with them or question them, is to be unpatriotic and disloyal,” he says. “By lionising the likes of Churchill and idolising his statues and memorials, they seek to rewrite history as a continuous Tory victory!”

Swarm argues that this faux, over-exaggerated ‘patriotism’ on the part of the right, whereby no criticism of flag, Royal Family, Empire or Winston Churchill will be tolerated, really is not just politically dangerous. but a threat to the very basis of a free society “Anyone deemed ‘unpatriotic’ by dint of questioning or criticising any of the aforementioned, runs the risk of being ‘cancelled’. That’s right, the much vaunted ‘cancel culture’ is actually being enacted by the right, not the left,” he declares. “Of course, because they are in power, it means that they can actually shut down debates and discussions of these things in academic institutions and other public forums. Which makes it all the more important that we seize this window of opportunity to kill some of the bastards off by grossly offending them, before they cancel us.”