Britain is a nation of liberal-minded citizens, the vast majority of whom believe that everyone should be treated equally, irrespective of sexual orientation. So flying the Pride flag is surely just a sign of support for these minority groups, right?

Wrong, according to the actor Laurence Fox. This week, Fox posted a video online in which he burned Pride-themed bunting in his back garden. At the end of the video, he described the flag as a ‘celebration of the mutilation of children’.

As you’d expect, it sparked outrage. Setting fire to a symbol that has long been associated with equality for gay people strikes many as reactionary and grotesque. What’s more, Fox’s words won’t make any sense to most people.

That is because many are not aware of the insidious shift that has taken place in what the Pride flag actually represents today.

The truth is that a sinister movement has hijacked Pride for its own nakedly political ends. The best way to understand how this has happened is to trace the evolution of the flag since it was designed by the American artist Gilbert Baker in 1978.

Baker’s flag was a simple rainbow. It had eight stripes, later whittled down to six. This is the flag with which we all became familiar. It symbolised joy and hope and equal rights for gay people, and was flown in Pride parades and atop gay bars, restaurants and coffee shops.

But that flag is rarely seen these days, especially in Britain and America. The shift began in 2017, when the ‘Office of LGBT Affairs’ in Philadelphia added black and brown stripes to include racial minorities.

This was a bizarre modification. After all, the point of the rainbow was that it represented everybody, regardless of race: there was no white stripe, after all.

But the floodgates had been opened. Activists decided that unless they were specifically included on the flag, then they were not welcome.

And so more changes soon came. A pink, blue and white chevron representing trans people was added in 2018 by the activist Daniel Quasar. This became known as the ‘Progress Pride’ flag.

It’s a long article and it goes into so much of what we discuss here. It’s the kind of article that you could send to anyone that asks why the pride flag changed or why the fuss the over “trans kids”. Well worth reading and bookmarking.