The unbearable annoyingness of Pride

I see the flag-shaggers are out in force. No, not working-class people who hang the Union flag from their living-room window as an expression of pride in their nation. I’m talking about the Pride flag. That omnipresent rainbow eyesore. A virtue-signal made cloth. The flag no one can escape. Yep, it’s Pride Month, which means that everywhere you go for the next four weeks – the bank, the supermarket, Maccy D’s – you’ll have this flag waved in your face to remind you not to be such a horrible, homophobic piece of shit. Happy Pride Month!

God, Pride has become annoying. It’s so gratingly ubiquitous. I haven’t seen this much smug flag-waving since 100,000 Guardian readers wrapped in the EU colours, tears streaking their blue-painted faces, descended on Whitehall to demand the cancellation of stupid northern people’s votes. And yet the people who cry ‘flag-shagger!’ every time Keir Starmer stands stiffly next to the Union flag, or when Robert Jenrick goes on TV with a backdrop of showy British memorabilia, are curiously silent about the adorning of every building in the land with the bloody Pride flag.

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The most virtuous signallers don’t only wave the Pride flag – they wear it. Remember Justin Trudeau’s Pride socks? The New York Times gushed over his ‘socks diplomacy’. Channel 4’s Jon Snow has worn Pride socks and a Pride tie and possibly Pride underwear for all we know. This is the man who made a big deal of refusing to wear a poppy and complaining about ‘a rather unpleasant breed of poppy fascism’. And yet he happily bows to the political, corporate and even military pressure to cover oneself in rainbows – head to toe in his case – every June.

Pride flag-shagging is now virtually mandatory. If you fail to wave the flag you’ll be looked upon as suspect. You might even be cancelled. For the second year running Ockbrook and Borrowash Parish Council in Derbyshire has voted against flying the Pride flag and people are going mental. ‘Anger as Pride Month flag snubbed by Derbyshire council again’, said an actual BBC News headline. One Borrowash resident said the absence of a Pride flag would mean that some people would not ‘feel safe to come to the village’. There you have it. The Pride flag is a statement of virtue and civilisation. Fail to fly it and you risk being considered prejudiced, hateful, unsafe.

What is this all about? Every now and then radical leftists will venture mild criticisms of Pride’s increasingly cosy relationship with capitalism and even with Empire. These corporations and military machines are ‘pink-washing’, they claim, the idea being that they use the rainbow flag to distract attention from their normal immoral antics. This is only a tiny part of the story. The bigger truth about Pride and its annual orgy of flag-shagging is that it confirms the almost unstoppable ascendancy of identity politics, and that the ruling classes of the West are perfectly at ease with this politics. They love it, in fact.