As I was making my tea this morning, I thought about calling the council to remove the Union Flag from my milk, it sounds ridiculous, but then again, so does half of what passes for sense these days.
Highland Council now has people going round taking flags off lampposts, as if a fluttering bit of cloth were a threat to public order.
Apparently, a Saltire on a street corner is dangerous, yet the same flag that once flew over colonies and battlefields can stare at us from every supermarket shelf without anyone batting an eye.
British colonialism never vanished, it just learned to market itself.
We’re told not to hang a flag outside, but we bring it into our homes every single day, it’s printed on our milk, our butter, our biscuits and our clothes, each one a quiet reminder of who’s meant to be in charge.
We don’t hang it by choice, we buy it by default, that’s how influence works now, not through empire or force, but through everyday habit.
This isn’t patriotism, it’s marketing with a motive, a soft, smiling campaign dressed up as national pride, designed to remind us that the Union still owns the story.
Westminster doesn’t need to wave flags when the supermarkets will do it for them, it’s branding on a national scale, all perfectly legal, perfectly polite, and perfectly effective.
The supermarkets, of course, are happy to play along, they always are, there’s no profit in questioning power.
So they wrap everything in red, white and blue, and call it “British.”
They cash in on nostalgia while pretending it’s unity, selling us the illusion of belonging while the reality feels further away than ever.
So when the council talks about removing “unauthorised flags,” you can’t help but laugh, they’re policing lampposts while ignoring the mass marketing of a political message.
If they truly want to start clearing the flags, they could begin in the dairy aisle, send their taskforce to scrape the butcher’s apron off my milk carton before it offends my breakfast.
Because this isn’t about safety or tidiness or civic order, it’s about control and the quiet power of repetition.
The kind that seeps into a nation until people stop noticing it.
The kind that hides behind slogans like “British values” and “shared identity,” while quietly erasing the symbols that remind us we’re different.
Take the Union flags down, but start where the real message lives.
Strip them from the shelves, not the streets, and when you’re done, let the Scots fly their saltires without apology.
Because that’s the only flag in this story that truly belongs to the people who live here.
