AMID ALL THE pessimism concerning the alienation of young Muslims from mainstream society, it’s cheering to report that a significant number of cars driven by Bengali youths in the East End of London are flying England flags. Some display two, and the clapped-out Ford that almost knocked me off my bike and into the Whitechapel Road on Monday sported four. This development gives me no end of pleasure. I pedal happily on my way, heart rate returning to normal, reflecting that if I am to be mown down in my prime, it’s good to know that the 18-year-old maniac doing the mowing is well on his way to becoming a fellow patriot.

Perhaps it helps that Bangladesh is not represented in Germany, yet meanwhile, a friend reports a car flying the diagonal stripe of Trinidad & Tobago from one window and the Cross of St George from the other, which sounds like an admirably British fudge. But would it be enough to satisfy Norman Tebbit? And, when the crunch came and the two teams actually met last Thursday, which result did the driver favour? The draw, presumably.

Incidentally, despite having drawn near-universal opprobrium when first proposed in 1990, the Tebbit test is enjoying considerable longevity, isn’t it? And indeed, although I know it wasn’t quite what the saturnine baron of Chingford had in mind, I find that if you remove any value-judgment as to the country supported, the test, or versions of it, becomes a sociologically instructive measure of an immigrant community’s degree of integration. Or lack of it, in the case of Gordon Brown.

My own family car flies two England flags, one for each child. As well as being, to their father’s disappointment, both natural royalists and natural conservatives, my children are also incorrigible jingos. Rather in the manner of some Komsomol members I once met in Moscow in the bad old days, the children solemnly tot up the number of England emblems they see as they travel around, conferring with each other to make sure a sufficient degree of nationalist enthusiasm is being shown by vans (emphatically, yes), Volvos (absolutely not) and civic buildings (varies).

This week they made it 153 flags on the ten-minute journey home from school. Now, notwithstanding Hackney’s population being very tightly packed in, this riot of red and white has surprised me, given the searing pace of the borough’s gentrification over the past year. One local café has recently started selling something called a “workers’ breakfast”, and people ready, willing and able to pay eight quid for a fry-up tend not to have much to do with overt displays of patriotism. Quite the reverse, they usually prefer to parade pictures of homicidal Argentinians on their chests. Perhaps the influx of the Che Guevara-fancying classes has made the indigents more inclined to flaunt their traditional attachments.

Certainly, in terms of flags residential as opposed to flags vehicular, the smaller and grottier the property, the more likely it is to sport a standard. My children have noticed this. They have also commented on how few of their friends at school fly flags on their cars. (It’s true, each morning at the gates, the same convoy of Range Rovers, Jeep Cherokees and massive great Mercs, all bare of patriotic regalia.) Thus has this World Cup introduced two youngsters to the paradox that the more your family has prospered in this country, the less likely you are to display any warmth towards it.

One well-heeled woman, trying and failing to square what to her was the contradiction of our being middle-class metropolitan types and yet simultaneously happy to wrap ourselves in the flag, asked my wife if our car was “an ironic statement”. Someone else confided to me that a part of him was always willing England’s opposition to score, and surely I felt the same? “Er, no, actually,” I said,“I always want England to win 10-0.” He looked perplexed and giggled nervously, choosing to assume I was joking.

It’s peculiar, isn’t it, that in England, unlike any other country I know of, the gain of a little education, a little upward mobility, so often seems to entail the loss of the simple human desire to take pride in place? Peculiar, and sad. Going back to that young Bengali boy racer with his four flags: as he grows up and climbs up, slows down and settles down, I hope such a recoil from the straightforward love of country he feels now is one aspect of Englishness he fails to adopt.

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