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For Fans, It's Time to Let It Fly
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"My car would be pelted with eggs if I drove around Glasgow with the St. George's flag fluttering from my car," said Maggie Shiels, a radio personality from the Scottish city. "You'd be hung, drawn and quartered."
Roger Eatwell, a professor of European politics at the University of Bath, said there are several reasons why people were for so long uncomfortable with the flag.
Since the 1970s, the Union Flag and the St. George's flag have become closely associated with extreme nationalist parties, he said. Those political parties have long festooned their podiums, vehicles and brochures with flag imagery and many people feared that displaying the flag would associate them with racist views. Some businesses banned the flags from company cars and offices, lest they offend.
But recently there has been a move "to recapture the flag" and bring it back into the mainstream, Eatwell said.
"We are taking it back from the far right," said Joe Darroll, 37, who has two St. George's flags flying from his delivery van in east London. "Common sense has finally taken over."
Darren Moore, whose Supporter Flags and Promotions Ltd. company has enjoyed a quadrupling in business in recent weeks, said the surge in flag sales signals an end to English people being "brow-beaten into not flying the flag by the politically correct brigade."
On Wednesday, Prime Minister Tony Blair sent reporters scurrying to file articles when he announced he'll fly the English flag over 10 Downing Street on days when England plays in the World Cup. Normally Downing Street and other government buildings fly no flag; on 18 days a year, mainly royal family birthdays, they hoist the Union Flag.
Perhaps the terrorist attacks last summer have also played into rising patriotism. After suicide bombers killed 52 commuters on the London public transit system, someone hung a St. George's flag outside a blown-up subway station and wrote in the white space around the red cross: "Bombed But Not Beaten."
But mostly, the flag wavers are just diehard English soccer fans. They dismiss as killjoys those upset about their ascendancy, including the horse owners in bucolic Hampshire who recently complained to police that the flapping banners on cars are startling their animals.
