Under Ukip, St George's flag makers will be the new brain surgeons

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/2015/apr/23/ukip-st-georges-day-bank-holiday-flags

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Is Ukip’s philosophy ever more than one facetious question away from implosion? At the party’s St George’s Day press conference on Thursday morning, representatives swiftly found themselves attempting to establish whether St George – a third-century Palestinian – would have been barred from the UK under the party’s points-based migration system.

Its economic spokesman Patrick O’Flynn mused: “I really don’t know how to answer that question. I guess dragon-slaying is a definite skill … but whether it’s one that’s in short supply for the British economy, I will leave to our migration commission to decide.”

With that, we moved on to a debate that will allow completists to swell their collection of the Stupidest Lies of the Election, which should already contain gems such as the idea that “we never talk about immigration in this country”. Ooh, we don’t dare to, do we? And yet, we do. Immigration is the Great Spoken of this election campaign. It dominates the debates, it drives the front pages and it decorates the mugs.

To that absolute whopper you may care to add the one Ukip was floating this morning, which is that people don’t dare fly the St George flag. Yes, you never see it, do you? I expect the establishment flies it within the Westminster bubble, but outside it – at football matches, on vans, on houses – it is totally absent from national life. You are more likely to see Nigel Farage sharing needles with a foreign unicorn than you are that long-forgotten standard.

Except, you aren’t. In fact, without getting all Institute for Fiscal Studies on Ukip’s arse, I’ve done a PowerPoint presentation of my investigation into the party’s claim that people are frightened to fly St George’s flags, and it is just 76 slides of the word “bollocks”.

That said, I cannot see the IFS giving anything but a giant thumbs-aloft to Ukip’s economic thinking in general. Asked whether its manifesto pledge to make St George’s Day a bank holiday would lose UK Plc money, O’Flynn answered in the negative, deploying the old swings-and-roundabouts principle. He said: “Flag makers will get a boost to productivity.”

Good news for the workers of Guangdong province, certainly. I’m kidding – this is all copper-bottomed, gold-plated economics. The party’s vision of our past-effect future is all exactly as detailed in Adam Smith’s lesser known work, the Wealth of Nationalism, which looks forward to the day when the trade in polyester flags and Ukip tie pins will be the primary driver of economic growth.

In fact, there has never been a better time to buy into Ukip’s 2020 strategy, so-called after the moment in five years when the party expects to inherit the earth. Under a points-based migration system, flag makers are then going to be needed in their droves. In fact, if I were growing up in the wartorn ruins of one of the countries our rolling catastrophe of a foreign policy has helped turn into a hellhole over the past decade or so, I’d be getting big into the flag-making game about now. Face it: it will be the golden ticket. Those specialising in St George’s flags will be the brain surgeons and tech innovators of the new economy, while actual brain surgeons and tech innovators will be herded into unsanitary camps and derided for their failure to acquire early 21st-century earth’s most marketable skill: the ability to machine sew a red cross on to a white background leaving enough space for someone to misspell the words “NO SURRENDER”.

However, as we wait for that glorious day, let’s while away the hours listening to Ukip’s culture spokesman, Peter Whittle, who shared a platform with O’Flynn this morning and advanced policies that sounded as though they were dreamed up by some Rotarian dullard shortly after falling off his attic ladder. For instance: all history will be taught only chronologically, because “values … emerge through learning these things in chronological order”.

Mainly, though, it is hard to go to one of these events and not conclude that the party which dares to say what ordinary people are thinking does not really dare to even say what it is thinking. To watch Ukip bigwigs at work during this election is to watch them transparently self-censoring at every turn. Whittle was at great pains to say that the party wants the St George’s bank holiday to be “a much-needed, popular – and completely inclusive – day to come together and celebrate – if they want to – our values … in inclusive unity …”

Oh do man up, Peter. You’re sounding like some ghastly little inclusion officer from one of the occupied local councils. But Peter daren’t man up, it seems. Given the event’s focus on history, I asked him when in English history he would like to have been born, if he could not have been born now.

He replied stiffly: “It’s the best time to be alive right now. “I can’t think of another time.”

But if you had to. “I don’t feel any sense of nostalgia.”

Just pick a time. “I would want to be alive now.”

So there you have it. No one talks about immigration, except they do. No one flies the St George flag, except they do. And there has never been a better time to be alive, despite the fact that our country has been lost so totally that it is now something we have to “take back” from foreigners.