UNLESS YOU’VE been stuck indoors all day — watching the World Cup, perhaps — you’ll have noticed that the flag of St George is flying all over the place. What you may not have realised is that this has little to do with patriotism. The flag wavers are, in fact, supporters of the BNP celebrating their racial pride.

The deputy Comment Editor of The Guardian, Joseph Harker, noticed the flags appearing last month. And guess what also happened last month: the BNP won 28 seats in the local elections. Could it be, he asked (before making clear that the answer is basically yes), that “flag-wavers are in fact supporters of this racist party, glorying in their ‘victory’ and celebrating their racial pride?” Mr Harker’s evidence is overwhelming. He looked at the drivers of the flag-waving vehicles and — blimey — “half of them are in white vans, and the rest are white, male, tattooed, pot-bellied 35 to 55-years-olds: exactly the type I’ve been seeing on TV for the past month complaining about ‘our houses going to the asylum-seekers’, or that ‘we’re losing control of our country’.”

It’s not just Mr Harker who has spotted this. The Independent’s Janet Street-Porter has noticed the same awful “white van men flying the cross of St George”. Good God, they even take pride in their country! And — ugh — they are overweight: “Chubby fellows with paunches.” (Lordy; she must mean me.) Ms Street-Porter has discovered something yet worse: they watch football and drink at the same time. “Why do we consider that slumping in front of a large screen holding a can of beer is an acceptable way to spend our time?”

One might ask why it is considered acceptable to spend time reading the witterings of two such dim-witted oafs. But their assertions do matter, because they typify the liberal Left’s attitude towards its fellow countrymen: scornful disdain. Mr Harker and Ms Street-Porter’s contempt for som many of their countrymen, represent the true cancer in Britain: the self-ordained liberal elite of self-declared cultural and political wisdom. From its place above the lower orders,the liberal elite considers it its duty to bring the Untermenschen to heel.

We must meet those who would politicise flag-waving on their own ground. Resist, comrades, resist: fly the flag with pride.