Walking round the estate on our state-sanctioned Boris-hour today, I am reminded why @UKLabour desperately need to get over their aversion to Englishness and its expression of identity. So many English Flags. #StGeorgesDay

Labour are happy to have Welsh Labour and Scottish Labour but refuse to call anything English Labour. They are fine with Scottish and Welsh nationalism, but not anything tarred with the word English. They are happy with devolved parliaments for everywhere but England.

And I get it. the NF and the far-right tarnished the flag. Nobody wants to be associated with them.
But the majority of working class people, who are not far-right, recognise themselves to be English and want to be proud of their nation, just like others are permitted to be

It seems @UKLabour have made the same mistake as Christian Fundamentalists. They have seen some people who have taken something good (or neutral) and run amok. Rather than reclaim it, they have shunned it and kept themselves as far away as possible to be unsullied by association

In so doing, and in happily advocating for other nationalists and nations, they send the implicit message that it is acceptable to be anything other than English (especially white English). This has the unhappy product of allowing the far-right to fill the void.

Areas like mine - that have a history of UKIP groundswell and BNP councillors - are simply responding to a party that holds them in contempt for simply being what they are and then moving to a group that tells them they can be proud. This is not political rocket science.

And not being a flag-waver, I get it. I squirm, because I have been conditioned to squirm, on sight of the George Cross. I need to get over that. But I see how the narrative and the implications send the message that expressions of Englishness are not acceptable

This tells people in my area, who are proud to be English and from where they are from, that they are not acceptable.
@UKLabour holds such people in contempt and then deigns to expect them to turn out and vote for them.

We need a recovery of the notion of Englishness. Not an NF-tainted, flag-waving nationalism.
But a clear and unashamed message that being English is perfectly good too. That the English are allowed an identity, representation, a parliament, recognition that others rightly enjoy