Horse abuse and the far-right

Is it patriotic to celebrate St George's Day by smashing a horse in the face with an umbrella?

People often ask why the English aren’t so proud of the St George’s flag, and the question was answered once again today in London.

A bunch of far-right agitators, neo-fascist groups, and football hooligans descended on Richmond Terrace in Whitehall to supposedly celebrate St George’s Day, but the event soon turned to chaos as attendees attacked the police to try and force their way out of the agreed event area.

During their attempts to break the police lines one of them was caught on film whacking a police horse in the face with an umbrella.

As you can probably guess I’m no huge fan of the unbelievably corrupt and bigotry-infested Metropolitan Police, so it takes pretty atrocious behaviour for me to take their side in events.

However, anyone who thinks it’s a good idea to smack a horse in the face isn’t just a dangerous idiot, they’re also the kind of vermin who think it’s acceptable to hurt an animal just because of who the animal belongs to.

Had any of the millions of peaceful protesters on Palestine solidarity marches done anything like attack a police horse, we all know that it would have been smeared all over capitalist media and the BBC for days on end, but read the online comments beneath the horse attack video and you’d get a very different impression.

The replies are absolutely full of "patriots" condemning the police; praising the thuggery; and resorting to the tried and tested fascist propaganda tactic of crying victimhood.

If Black Lives Matter or Palestine Solidarity protesters tried to violently force their way out of the agreed protest area, who could be stupid enough to believe a racism-infested mob like the Met wouldn’t resort to violence?

And who is thick enough to believe that being white, or draping themselves in the national flag gives people the right to attack the police, and smack horses in the face?

Worryingly there are a whole load of people in Britain who can look at a bunch of extreme-right thugs attacking police, and whacking a horse in the face, and conclude that the good guys are the violent thugs because they’re draped in St George’s flags.

This is why the extreme-right colonisation of England’s national flag is so insidious.

There’s nothing wrong with liking your own country’s flag in general, or being proud of where you come from (I’m much more proud to be a Yorkshireman than an Englishman, but the principle is the same). However if this pride overlaps into liking and justifying anything that’s got your country’s flag on it, were moving into incredibly dangerous territory.

If people can conclude that the ones with the national flags are the good guys, despite having just watched a video of them attacking police and battering a horse in the face, just imagine what other horrible stuff they would justify if it was merely draped in the national flag.

Like many other countries, England has a dark history to contend with, but it has great things too (I’m particularly proud that England was the birthplace of passenger rail and think the country should make much more of it), but unfortunately England has allowed a bunch of extreme-right thugs to colonise the national flag like few other countries have.

Is it any wonder that a significant proportion of the population now view the flag with a degree of scepticism, when we don’t just have regular occurrences of extreme-right thugs draping themselves in it, but mass outpourings of support for their thuggery from cognitively-challenged people who apparently can’t see past their love of the flag to such an extent that they’ll publicly praise and glorify thuggery and horse abuse?

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