Why I cannot march for a flag (yet)

Freedom is something you do, not something you ask for — and not a symbol at all

Over the past five years I have attended dozens of rallies and protests. Sometimes there have been hundreds of thousands of people, and I am just one among many documenting our era. Other times there have been only a handful of us, and I alone have recorded events for posterity. You may have noticed I often dig into my photo albums for article header images. There are many thousands to choose from. Only once have I been assaulted by a counter-demonstrator. On no occasion have I seen the police commit any obvious wrongdoing, though there have been fraught moments.

There is a major rally in London today, nominally in favour of free speech. Online I see many familiar names and faces. Oceans of people draped in the Cross of St George 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 or the more recognised Union Jack 🇬🇧 are certainly photogenic and provocative. Part of me, like a trainspotter, wants to “collect” every major historic event for my personal archive, ticking them off like locomotives. Yet I am not there — by choice, not laziness. This is not to denigrate the intentions of those who do attend. It is simply my intuition telling me to stay away. There is a real difference between walking the streets in the post-lockdown era and marching under and for symbols.

By way of background — and I have never written this publicly before — I once joined the Labour Party when Jeremy Corbyn ran for leader. Not because I had any affinity with the party, but because he was the one man who consistently voted against illegal wars. In that moment I felt a moral duty to support the cause of peace, not politics. I later let my membership lapse once “amoral business as usual” resumed and he was smeared out of office. (I doubt we have seen the last of him as a statesman.) For the record, I have never voted for a right-of-centre party. Not that it matters: I am no longer on the electoral roll, since I do not consent to how we are governed at a systemic level.

Rallies with flags as totems are inevitably associated with “right-wing” causes, whether fairly or not. I am “conservative” in wanting to see humanity and the planet conserved, not destroyed. I am “nationalist” only in recognising that weaponised migration is a form of genetic and cultural genocide. Otherwise, I am “liberal” in tolerating all kinds of mixing and misbehaviour, so long as it does not victimise others. My experience of the freedom movement is that it draws in everyone from hippies to heiresses. Nobody is untouched by medical malfeasance, divisive propaganda, or predatory levies. Earlier rallies offered messages that were direct and personal, not mass-produced.

A complicating factor is that I have a Scottish 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 surname (and paternal ancestry), alongside mostly Welsh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 immediate progenitors. To pick one flag is to deselect the others. I have lived in Scotland, and as a child often visited the family farm in Pembrokeshire, Wales. Flags act as a focus for commonality, yet in the process they dilute me. If the tribe of Ephraim did indeed end up in the Isles of the Britons, then that is who I am — and the shape of my toes says I am neither Roman nor Greek. I do not trust anyone enough to hand over my DNA to discover how much Celt, Viking, or Norman is in me (though the state has likely done this involuntarily to us all). A flag feels akin to the “personage” crime: lowering my living status to signage.

To wrap oneself in the national flag and equate it with free speech is to confuse semiotics with semantics. “British” (as an identity, not a geography) and the “United Kingdom” (a pure legal fiction) are disconnected from the true national identities of the English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish. The British state and courts have spent centuries turning travel, shelter, and even work into licensed privileges, hollowing out any notion of constitutional limits on power. Without truth and repentance, the flag cannot be separated from debt slavery at home and war-for-profit abroad. Too often it contradicts freedom rather than denotes it. It isn’t a morally neutral symbol.

I do not know the deeper history of the English flag, the Templars, or the forgotten wars. To adorn myself with a quasi-political brand whose hidden meaning I do not understand feels wrong. It is not that I dislike my country of birth or my English countrymen — quite the opposite. The problem is that nothing is as it appears, and pledges of allegiance, even indirect, have consequences. My fealty is to Logos — truth, coherence, morality — not to any manmade construct. If I do not know what a flag really means, at its deepest level, why would I march alongside those who never ask the question? It feels too much like football fandom, revelling in the team colours.

Those in London are being described as “patriots.” There is some honesty in that, yet it gives me pause. Many people see society’s ills but are unwilling to sacrifice personally to remedy them. Are those marching declining to pay charges for inalienable rights? Accepting the pain of recognising that nobody truly “owns” their home or car, but rents them from the state? Confronting judges who ignore their oaths to enforce usury? Lawful resistance to tyranny is costly and hard — I know this from experience. I have many friends who have taken a principled stand against corruption, but they are not generally the ones marching in London. Patriotism is standing up for timeless principles, even when unpopular.

I have never taken an oath in my life, and the Bible counsels us against it: let your “yes” be yes, and your “no” be no. It is why I am unlikely ever to become a citizen of another country; I could not submit to the ritual words required. The “Take the Oath” push in America a few years ago disquieted me — though I am not American and did not grow up with pledges as daily school life. My American friends love Old Glory 🇺🇸, and understandably so. Yet even here there is controversy: is it a flag of war, with the peacetime version suppressed? I cannot be sure. What I do know is that the world is ruled by symbols, and once you align with them, you are ruled by the world — not a higher kingdom. Unthinking idolisation of flags is worrying to me.

Today’s rally is tightly associated with public personalities, some alive, some dead. This contrasts with earlier events I attended, where speakers might have been well known but the focus was not on them. I will not name anyone; what matters is that none are my personal contacts. The world is full of psyops, controlled opposition, and misbegotten personal quests. I am conscious that my own work carries a measure of notoriety, with far more exposure still to come. That makes me careful where I go and what I associate my name with. It is why I generally decline podcasts or public speaking invitations, and stick to my solo “sabre-toothed typist” role.

As someone who has lived through censorship and character assassination, free speech is a subject very close to me. I have paid the price for saying things the powerful did not want said. Many of my former “progressive” friends turned out to be cowards and hypocrites, defending only speech they approved of. My lesson is simple: you never wait for permission to exercise an inalienable right. You act anyway and bear the consequences with fortitude. If I march for free speech, I am framing it as conditional on the State’s approval. Yet the truth is the truth whether or not it is suppressed, or the speaker punished for saying it. Truth is not in the “marchable” category.

I can imagine a day when I might want to parade in public with flags abounding. But the spirit would have to be different: not confrontational, but celebratory. A day when the police, present for public safety, are applauded for bravery rather than condemned for tyranny. A day when we collectively mourn the losses we have yet to face — the abused children, the pharma-poisoned, and the victims of war. A day when those at the pinnacle of society are seen to love and protect the people, not exploit them as chattel. That will be a time when peace rules, and flags help to locate us in a post-conflict world.

There is nothing wrong with flags. Only that I cannot march for one.

Not yet.