Draped in Decency

Being a mere six hundred and seventy-seven million in debt, a Labour council has decided to increase the merriment of its taxpayers by dispensing grants of £500 for "community groups and parish councils" to put up flagpoles and fly the union jack and the cross of St George. The gesture is all the more sensitive in the wake of recent attempts by local patriots to burn asylum seekers alive in the name of those very same rags of rah-rah; and the excuse that the idea is to reclaim their symbolism for the nice people might sound less threadbare from a party whose leadership hadn't spent the last year and a half protesting that they are too deporting more wogs. One resident whose mosque was daubed for St George opined that the council "has no idea what it’s doing" - which, given the leadership's Island of Strangers rhetoric, seems more than a little uncharitable.