The new Nike version of the St George’s Cross, revealed earlier this month, looks very nice. I’m sure everyone is agreed on that. It’s neat and stylish. Definitely nicer than a traditional St George’s Cross, an image that dates from the middle ages and betrays the design limitations of the era. Stripping away the connotations of the standard England flag, both positive and negative, and comparing it with the Nike one with complete aesthetic objectivity – and I’m convinced I’m capable of that and you’ll get an earful if you tell me otherwise so don’t bother – the Nike one clearly looks more pleasant.
Nevertheless I was surprised to hear from Keir Starmer that it was being lined up actually to replace the England flag. It’s quite a bold move to change an ancient national symbol and it feels risky to cede the copyright for that sort of thing to an American sportswear giant. You can take being business-friendly too far and, as the Labour leader said himself: “it doesn’t need to change”. Quite. The old one will do.
Listening to Starmer, it appeared that the decision to scrap the old flag had all but gone through. He seemed to be making a desperate last-ditch appeal: “I think they should just reconsider this and change it back.” He had chosen his platform wisely. He was speaking on the Sun’s TV channel (which is obviously basically a website) on its “brilliant new politics show” (the Sun) called Never Mind the Ballots, a jolly pun that subliminally diminishes the concept of democracy. Appealing for a reversion to the England flag’s scarlet and white made perfect sense in a studio covered in the Sun’s own ketchupy-napkin-style branding.
It seems Keir panicked too soon – phew! There was no plan to replace the England flag; this was all just about a shirt. Nike is making the new England football shirts, which look overwhelmingly as you’d expect: white shirts with an England football badge on them. But the company has put a new little take on the cross of St George in purple, blue and red on the back of the collars, presumably as part of its strategy somehow to justify charging £125 each for them, a price tag that comes perilously close to working as a punchline. It’s always awkward when the sales assistants keep getting laughs. But there is no suggestion that Nike wanted to change the actual flag and, rarely for a newspaper, I’m using the phrase “there is no suggestion” to mean there really is no suggestion rather than: “This is what everybody thinks but the lawyers won’t let us say it.”
So it was all a storm in a teacup. Except it wasn’t over, because it turned out to be a perfect storm in a teacup. Starmer had touched a nerve. Before his Sun interview, the England flag alteration had already been hysterically condemned online for being unpatriotic (because it changed a patriotic symbol, I suppose) and woke (I don’t know why they thought it was woke). Labour has also often been slagged off for being unpatriotic and woke, usually by the Tories. So Starmer’s tentative and vacillating strategists must have caught a whiff of the terrifying scent of opportunity: this was the perfect subject for their boss to speak out on. Because he’s not unpatriotic and woke! He’s patriotic and unwoke! So everyone who likes Lee Anderson can vote Labour instead, just like when Lee Anderson was a member of the Labour party! Keir wants to have his country back too!
Starmer was also free to lightly criticise the voracious multinational company that makes the shirts for their hilarious price tag. Being rude about corporations is much surer ground for Labour than the Tories and possibly the reason why Rishi Sunak hadn’t yet got round to condemning the stylish little collar badges himself. He soon put that right, declaring: “When it comes to our national flags, we shouldn’t mess with them because they’re a source of pride, identity, who we are, and they’re perfect as they are.”
Did he also not realise that it was just a design on a shirt rather than the actual flag that was under discussion? Or does he believe that you can’t have designs on shirts that resemble flags unless they are flags? That national imagery is so sacred, it should be faithfully reproduced in its entirety or there should be no visual similarity whatsoever?
At this point, people at Nike must have been wishing they hadn’t mentioned that the little red, blue and purple pattern on the shirt collars had anything to do with a flag at all. The England flag isn’t even usually on the shirts; as Gareth Southgate pointed out when forced to comment on the furore: “The most important thing that has to be on an England shirt are the Three Lions,” and they’re there as normal. People might have thought the thing on the collar was just a nice little bit of stitching, rather than a violation of the wonderful unifying concept of national pride.
It’s all so confected and superficial. Obviously both party leaders knew the flag wasn’t changing – that they were only discussing a tiny motif on an overpriced top. But their instinct was to amplify, not play down what had happened, to run with the online outrage and inflame it. I’m not sure that counts as leadership.
At least Starmer mentioned that the shirts were too expensive, but he showed no appetite for addressing the most justified source of outrage: the fact that the FA routinely conspires with corporations to exploit fans’ enthusiasm and pockets by relentlessly redesigning the national team’s strip. The whole strip is what shouldn’t be changed. It doesn’t need to – other uniforms don’t, or not with anything like the same frequency.
A little badge based on the England flag is neither here nor there. The flag remains but, more insidiously, so does a situation in which profit, not patriotism, is what governs football. People think they’re cross because the design shows contempt for England and its footballing tradition. It doesn’t. That contempt has been evident for decades. It’s intrinsic to how football is run.
