Can the Left Make Peace With a National Flag?

For many years, the English flag was an ambivalent symbol—the flag of the Crusaders who raided medieval Jerusalem, the flag of imperial conquest, and a flag appropriated by the white nationalists of the English Defence League. The cross of Saint George, red on a white background, was also the flag of a bunch of losers. The English men’s soccer team hasn’t won a major title since the 1966 World Cup.

Here in Europe, as in the United States, debates about flags are useful proxies for other cultural anxieties. Flags force us into a confrontation with our country’s history as a source of pride, or shame, or both. They create an us, whose composition can be inclusive or exclusive. And, quite honestly, they can stop the left from winning elections. Being uncomfortable with a national flag is often interpreted (or misinterpreted) as a sign that you don’t love the country it represents. The Scottish saltire and the Welsh red dragon have been thoroughly reclaimed by the nationalist parties of those countries, and even the Union Jack, which blends the flags of Britain’s constituent nations, was rehabilitated in the 1990s by New Labour. But until recently, the English flag languished behind them, unloved and unwaved.

[Read: Raising the American flag made in China]

The flag of Saint George is central to the plot of Dear England, a new play that has just opened at London’s National Theatre. The drama begins with a historical moment of personal and national humiliation. It is the semifinal of the 1996 European championships, England versus Germany, a match that resulted in a 1–1 draw and a penalty shoot-out. The first five players from both teams have all scored, meaning the rules change to “sudden death.” If a player misses his penalty, and his opposing number scores, the first team is out of the competition.

In this cauldron of pressure, a 25-year-old named Gareth Southgate steps up to the penalty spot—and kicks a slow ball directly at the goalkeeper, who blocks it.

For an audience in London, Dear England doesn’t need to show what came next. Almost the whole country knows, including those who aren’t sports fans or hadn’t even been born at the time. England’s goalkeeper, David Seaman, wearing one of the worst shirts ever designed—he looks like a children’s-party entertainer—can’t get a glove to the German team’s next penalty kick. That makes it 6–5 Germany, which goes on to the final and ultimately wins the trophy. Gareth Southgate, meanwhile, goes home with the weight of an entire country’s disappointment upon him. That winter, he makes a pizza ad where the joke is that he has to wear a paper bag on his head in public.

For a while, failure seemed to be history’s verdict on Southgate. “Every single day now, when I walk down the street, it is always mentioned to me,” he told a podcast in 2012. “When you have played for 20 years and that is the first thing people think about you, it is a bit of a downer.” But in 2016, he got the chance to become the temporary manager of the English men’s football team, after the incumbent was caught in a newspaper sting operation over his financial dealings. Since then, Southgate has been an unexpected success in the “impossible job,” taking England to the brink of victory—while nurturing a generation of players who are unafraid to speak out on child poverty and fans’ racism.

Southgate has turned England’s football players from tabloid punch lines into role models, and insisted that no single man should ever bear a team’s defeat alone, as he once did. During a period when Britain has been bitterly divided by Brexit, he’s created a team that belongs as much to a young Black girl in Brixton, South London, as it does to an older white man in Boston, Lincolnshire. He has encouraged a broadly secular, majority-white country to cheer for a young man of Nigerian heritage whose Instagram bio reads, “God’s child.” Southgate once hired a psychologist to encourage his young male players to talk about their fears and feelings, and has made them link arms during penalty shoot-outs. He has become so personally popular that England’s fans have awarded him a chant: “Southgate you’re the one / You still turn me on / Football’s coming home again.”

Okay, okay, after six years of Southgate’s management, England still hasn’t won anything. But the team has played with grace and lost with honor. This has given the country hope.

[Ben Rhodes: This is no time for passive patriotism]

Southgate understands that the power of sport is the power of story—the redemption arc, the last-minute comeback, the underdog triumph, the grudge paid back. He understands that soccer gives people values around which everyone can coalesce, regardless of their political beliefs: hard work, sacrifice, humility, courage. James Graham, the playwright behind Dear England, understands that too. Much of his work for the past decade has been focused on the country’s shifting identity, whether among former mining communities in the BBC drama Sherwood or within the emerging Thatcherite working class depicted in the hit play Ink. Graham is now the closest thing England has to a national playwright. You can probably imagine the demographics of an audience at a subsidized theater performance in London—whiter, richer, and more liberal than the country overall. Yet by the end of Dear England, the crowd was on its feet, shouting along to the unofficial anthem of the Southgate era, Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline.” (Well, except for the former BBC journalist sitting next to me, who fled after the first half, perhaps finding it all a little too populist.)

Early on in Dear England, a senior football official accuses the Southgate character (played with eerie accuracy by Joseph Fiennes) of picking a team captain, Harry Kane, who is just like him. Kane is a decent guy—a father of three, with another on the way, married to his childhood sweetheart—but he is no one’s idea of an orator. All of his charisma is located in his feet. Graham’s script turns Kane, England’s most prolific goal scorer ever, into an avatar of stoic, unassuming English masculinity, a man for whom finding the right words is less important than leading by example. (The contrast with the hyper-loquacious but unprincipled former Prime Minister Boris Johnson is briefly drawn.) In one scene, Kane is shown wearing a rainbow captain’s armband at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to support LGBTQ rights, only to be forced to remove it by officials who don’t want to upset the more conservative countries in the tournament. In another, Kane leads the England team in taking a knee to protest racism—a white man from North London genuflecting in solidarity with his Black and mixed-race teammates.

The real-life Southgate has been manager through a period when the national team has become much less white, a trend that prompts anxiety among those who worry that immigration and multiculturalism are transforming England into a country they don’t recognize. (In the 1991 census, five years before Southgate missed his penalty, England and Wales were 94.1 percent white. That figure is now 81.7 percent.) Dear England’s soundtrack reflects this, shifting from the white Brit-pop of the 1990s to Stormzy’s 2019 hit “Crown.” That song is a doubly resonant choice. The lyrics—“heavy is the head that wears the crown”—certainly apply to managing the national football team. Stormzy, like Southgate, has also raised questions about what patriotism means today. When the rapper became the first Black British solo artist to headline the Glastonbury music festival, he wore a monochrome stab-proof vest adorned with the Union Jack. It was both a riff on the traditional John Bull caricature of Englishness and a rejoinder to the National Front’s racist slogan “Ain’t no black in the Union Jack.”

Southgate’s great achievement off the pitch has been to elevate national pride above racial divisions and to blend concepts dear to the right and the left into a new-model patriotism. His own beliefs, like those of many successful politicians, defy neat, stereotypical categorization. In June 2021, he wrote the open letter from which Graham’s play gets its title. “Dear England,” it began. “It has been an extremely difficult year.” Southgate referenced his grandfather’s service in the Second World War to explain why playing for England had been such an honor: “The idea of representing ‘Queen and country’ has always been important to me.” (He is a patron of Help for Heroes, a charity for veterans.) Having made this appeal to the right, though, Southgate moved into the tricky terrain of race, traditionally associated with the left: “Why would you choose to insult somebody for something as ridiculous as the colour of their skin? Why? Unfortunately for those people that engage in that kind of behaviour, I have some bad news. You’re on the losing side.” The letter’s final image was of a young England fan watching the team, filling out a wall chart, looking up to the players, and feeling proud of the country they represent. The letter was, by quite some distance, more powerful and deeply felt than any speech I heard a politician give during the same turbulent period.

Inevitably, though, some commentators think that Southgate’s version of patriotism—respecting tradition without being blind to the sins of the past—is taking inclusion too far. Ahead of the last World Cup, the former footballer turned COVID contrarian Matt Le Tissier appeared on a talk show hosted by Nigel Farage, a leading Brexiteer, to complain that “woke Mr. Southgate” needed to instill a more “positive” attitude in the team. When the English forward Marcus Rashford, who was raised by a single mother, used his life story to campaign for free school meals during vacations, he faced similar jibes about “sticking to football.” Raheem Sterling, the English player whose criticisms of racism have been most uncompromising, has come in for particular heat. In 2018, his decision to get a tattoo of a rifle on his right calf led to demands, amplified in tabloids and social media, that he be dropped from the squad. The next day, Sterling revealed that the tattoo commemorated his late father, shot dead in Jamaica when he was 2, and his own promise never to pick up a gun. “I shoot with my right foot so it has a deeper meaning,” he added.

Southgate has always supported Sterling in his decision to speak out rather than suffer in silence. In December 2021, they gave a joint interview in which Southgate described criticizing another Black player for getting a yellow card for bad behavior, before realizing that he had faced racist chants throughout the game. Southgate also revealed his fear that reporting the chants against Black players was pointless because the football authorities would do nothing. “At the very least, this had to be a team where we were united on how we saw it,” he added.

Like the incident with the rainbow armband, this careful answer reveals the difficult terrain Southgate must navigate. He faces backlash from unreconstructed racists, who take loud and ostentatious offense at rich young Black men criticizing their country, even when those criticisms are couched in a desire for England to be better. But he must also steer his lads through the world of the image-conscious, money-obsessed, and sometimes openly corrupt football authorities, which—much like American sports leagues—tend to regard racism and other bigotries as PR problems rather than social-justice issues. (Perhaps if homophobic abuse had prompted a wave of popular outrage equivalent in scale to the George Floyd protests, the soccer authorities would rethink their stance on rainbow armbands. But with virtually no openly gay footballers, that seems a distant prospect.)

The scene that everyone will talk about in Dear England—after warm reviews, I expect it to transfer to a commercial theater, and probably become a television drama—shows Southgate in a meeting with his team, unfurling England’s flag and asking players to define what it means. They express unease with its legacy from the Crusades, and its associations with racism, before he clarifies his request. The team needs to say what the flag means to them. He asks them to talk about the places they grew up—Milton Keynes, a town best known as a temple to the traffic circle; Washington (the one in northeast England, not the United States); Walthamstow in North London; Wythenshawe near Manchester. Some of these are “shit places,” one player observes. Yes, replies another, “but they’re our shit places.”

This is about as perfect a distillation of English patriotism as you could hope to encounter. But the play’s real heart comes earlier, when Southgate first meets his coaching staff and players, and bluntly informs them that they are unlikely to win their next tournament. Why does England, a team that last won a World Cup more than half a century ago, still arrive at competitions expecting to dominate them effortlessly? he wonders. And why does it harbor a sense of wounded entitlement when it fails?

[Read: Britain’s distasteful soccer sellout]

In a drama that could easily have fallen into overripe metaphors for the state of the nation, the actors do not imbue these lines with unnecessary portentousness. But those questions do reflect the central challenge of Englishness in the 21st century. Is England always doomed to feel diminished by the end of its empire and by its relegation from the top rank of world powers? Or can the country rebuild itself, with hard work and humility, into something new? The question also applies to masculinity, the secondary theme of Dear England. “At home, I’m below the kids and the dogs in the pecking order but publicly I am the England men’s football team manager,” wrote Southgate in his famous letter. Both there and in the play, he talks about being a father figure to the players, some of whom have never known their own fathers.

Does change always have to feel like loss? Not if you write a new story instead of mourning the old one, argues Dear England. It’s a message that could also apply to the United States: How about a story where you can take a knee and fly the flag, and do both with equal pride?