The national awakening on September 13th represents a very strange statement being made by significant elements of the British people. Frustrated, and eventually driven to fury by the refusal of the governing classes to honour promises made to gain their vote, hundreds of thousands of flags of the four nations of the UK will suddenly make an appearance.

Flags for other countries are a cause of little comment. I was in Lithuania recently, and they were everywhere. Even our former colony across the pond will seek out every opportunity, or none, to raise the standard, proudly and unashamedly proclaiming its nationhood. Not so the British. For them there has to be a good reason, one which even unfriendly nations would seem churlish not to acknowledge. Ours are brought out sparingly, even judiciously, one might say. The reticent Brits are never anxious to over-egg their presence, even if their own flag once held sway across a quarter of the planet.

So what has caused this sudden about-turn? It was the bone-headed action of a local authority in cutting down British flags, put up to counter the appearance of a rash of foreign flags of a proscribed terrorist organisation, while leaving the proscribed flags in situ. It was the straw that finally broke a very patient camel’s back. To add insult to injury, the flags of the home country were unceremoniously binned like so much rubbish.

But the London Freedom Festival protest on September 13th, in reality, is about very much more than that bone-headed council. It is about long years of what amounts to abuse of the electorate: lies and bad faith, venal behaviour and pandering to the wishes of foreign states, many of which wish us harm, while all the time ignoring the wishes of the people who trusted them with their vote. No better example of the latter is the Chagos Islands fiasco. We end up giving something we own to someone who never owned it, and then paying that someone billions to lease it back. Tell me that I must have that wrong; but I haven’t. At the very same time we put our national security in peril, as well as that of our closest ally, by handing over the archipelago to a minnow of a state busily cosying up to the biggest threat the democratic world faces in the 21st century: expansionist and militarising China.

Also among the grievances are the years that a small minority of our people have preached to the rest of us of the wickedness of our ways. I speak of the fanatics of the woke brigade, the holier-than-thou bigots, the people who have allowed the tyranny of Stonewall to infect government, the law, academia, big business, the Town Halls – in fact, every agency which is in a position to make our lives a misery. Not only is their bigotry destroying lives, careers, marriages, you name it, but they are busy imprisoning people for voicing their opinions. Today, spontaneous talk is disallowed, since it must first run through the filter of: will it offend someone?

These same sanctimonious know-it-alls even have the gall to tell our young people that they should be ashamed of what their forefathers did around the world, and that a part of their hard-earned income should be handed over by way of restitution. The established church has even made a start on this absurdity by earmarking the first tranche of £100m. Where once our young people were encouraged to laud and seek to emulate the stupendous achievements of those who went before, these contemptible denigrators peddle an altogether different narrative and seek to instil a deep sense of guilt.

But what goes round comes round, and a reckoning is in the making. These young people who are now to be given the vote at 16 by this pork-barrel government are not, it seems, of a mind to vote for what they see as a band of losers. They do not buy into the prophets-of-doom narrative and the Britain-haters. Deep in their bones they know what a massive contribution their ancestors have made to the happiness of humankind. For the truth is their countrymen and women have made the modern world we know today, winning more Nobel prizes per capita than any other nation.

If we go to work in factories, it is because they showed us how to do it. If we trade across the broad expanses of the world, it is because they sought out markets for the products of those factories. If a rules-based order protects those products, it is because they put that order in place. If capital can be raised to produce and grow those products, it is because they became both bankers and insurers par excellence. And when all the toils of making an honest living are done, and it is time to play, who gave the world football? Who gave it golf? Who gave it cricket?

And when China calls its own recent summit of ‘friendly’ countries, was it a multiplicity of national costumes that we saw? No, not a bit of it! It was the English suit, even on our sworn enemies. Finally, when the Great Hall of the People echoed to the voices of hundreds of delegates from far-flung lands, was it Mandarin Chinese we were hearing? No, it was our own sceptred tongue.

So, bearing all these things in mind, and so much more that there isn’t space nor reader’s time for, does it not make utter fools of those who seek to belittle us? And the ones who should be truly ashamed of themselves are those who come from within our own ranks.