I don't believe this news coincides with the increased publicity over BNP leader Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time last week, but yesterday the department store Selfridges announced that sales of its products featuring union flags – including a Lulu Guinness clutch bag and Jonathan Aston tights – had risen by 50%. Elsewhere at the posher end of the high street, the union flag is flourishing and finding its way into the decor of middle-class homes. Textiles designer Jan Constantine has banners and cushions; ceramicist Emma Bridgewater, best known for twee polka-dot teapots, has beflagged just about every kitchen accessory going; Bradleys, an independent tannery, has a range of flag-decorated gardening accessories; and it is a familiar motif at Boden and Jack Wills, the clothing brand beloved of pink-cheeked public schoolboys.
Perhaps this is all an attempt to reclaim the flag from royalists and racists. And those who string up union flag bunting above the butler sink consider surely themselves to be very different to those who drape flags from their windows. Yet it still comes with tricky questions.
Trapped between those layers of red, white and blue are the whispers of imperialism and bloodshed, National Front marches and BNP "literature", aristocracy and privilege. Punk, Britpop and citizenship ceremonies may have gone some way to rehabilitate it, and there are few things more heart-swelling than the images of, say, Amir Khan or Kelly Holmes draped in the flag in their moments of glory, but the flag still hasn't shaken its cultural echoes. For many, it is too cringeworthy to consider.
Professor Nick Groom, author of The Union Jack: The Biography, disagrees. "I'm delighted," he says. "If we abandon it and say it's tainted then we will leave it to the far right to appropriate it. With its revival, it begins to saturate itself into the national consciousness in a more positive and shared community way."
