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This English Defence League Member Awkwardly Failing to Burn an EU Flag Tells Us a Lot About England in 2015

The EU flag would not burn because of EU rules about fire retardation.

CAN'T START A FIRE / CAN'T START A FIRE WITHOUT A SPARK

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

We all do silly things from time to time, don't we? I say: let he who has never joined a Bolton-based Islamophobic group and tried but ultimately failed to set fire to an EU flag cast the first stone. Because you can't, can you? You can't cast any stones, because we've all at one stage joined a Bolton-based English Defence League splinter group and failed to set fire to a flag.

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In case you have no time in your short and finite life to watch a three-minute video—or you're at work, whatever—here's what happens: some bloke from the far-right group the North West Infidels (NWI), in a balaclava and some gloves (safety and racist anonymity first, lads), says a sort of semi-focused anti-EU screed ("The European Union is corrupt to the core," he says. "It's here to take away our nationality, our identity, our free speech, and our sovereignty") and then, to make a point, tries to set fire to the EU flag. Five times.

The reason the flag does not burn is due to EU-approved sanctions about fire retardation, making the flag non-flammable, the same way it's quite hard to set fire to a sofa. In short, what the EU has done here—from afar—what the EU has done here is absolutely 'megged the NWI. They have hit the NWI exactly where it hurts—nobody who isn't racist has ever tried to set a flag on fire, have they? Setting a flag on fire is a very "I am a racist" thing to do—and they have done them with continental élan. The EU is Zola and the NWI is Julian Dicks. They've done them, twice over. The NWI is on the floor looking up dazed at the sky and saying "Who hit me?" They are in pieces.

Which is a shame for our hero, because he definitely bought the flag specifically for use in this video. Look at the neat folds—just out of shot is the cellophane packaging, probably bearing a short message about how hard it is to set this item on fire. You cannot easily buy an EU flag in Bolton. You cannot easily buy an EU flag anywhere, is the thing, because unless you were going to set fire to it or have a model EU at a secondary school, there is literally no need for anyone to have a small EU flag in their possession. You have to go on Amazon and buy one, really, and even then—unless you have Prime—you're going to have to wait 1–3 business days before it's delivered. A lot of planning went into this fuck up.

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Basic reasoning would suggest the video isn't real: personally, if I had tried to set fire to a flag and failed I would not upload that video, even if I had succeeded in burning it a bit and slightly making my point. That someone did suggests it is a fake. But look closer: most parodies have some hint, some clue, some thinly disguised smirk about them. This one doesn't. And it was uploaded to the North West Infidels Facebook page then deleted in a way that intimates shame as soon as people started dubbing it over with "Firestarter." That quite loudly suggests it is real. Plus: this properly seems like something that a shit far-right group would do.

Because it's three minutes of a man struggling with a lighter and a flag, like Sisyphus and the rock if Sisyphus were still really mad about the French ban on British beef. Despite the flag patently refusing to ignite in flames, he still decided to upload it anyway. Your balaclava boy took a look at this footage and went: "Eh, you know. I mean it gets the point across." His point is: the EU is shit and we should back out of it. But his message is: actually the EU is doing a lot of effective work to prevent the burning of easily flammable things. The end result is: pissing about with a lighter for 120 seconds more-or-less says what is needed to say.

The thing about setting fire to a European flag in the jennel behind your garden to prove a point to the EU is: it's not going to prove a point to the EU. It's like shouting at a patch of soil, or a skyscraper. Admittedly, the cliche holds that change starts with one man—one man becomes a wave, one Facebook post to the North West Infidels can actuate at least 30 or 35 Bolton-based racists, one batch of Bolton-based racists becomes a slightly larger group of Bolton-based racists, then they all go to a rally and chat to each other over plastic cups of beer about which set of religious mores they've misinterpreted the hardest—but it's not going to come from a grim video of you in a balaclava shouting about "sovereignty."

If the internet has taught us anything, it's that real change—or at least "raising awareness," the closest approximation to change we have in 2015—comes from soaring string soundtracks and cloying poems about going outside. And this is a problem facing most of the far-right groups jostling to be the racists du jour in the run up to the election—your EDLs, your NFs, your poor, irrelevant BNPs, your NWIs, your South East Alliances—they're just not shareable enough.

That's where UKIP excel. That's the only reason you know what UKIP is: they know how to shout at the right volume and frequency to make you notice them, like a toddler or a pesky dog. Even Britain First have turned their Facebook page into a sort of anti-Islam LAD Bible, making shareable memes about how important poppies are and how bad halal meat is and watching the shares rocket. No one's going to get behind the EDL, or behind anyone, based on a video of them failing to light a flag. Why is there such a direct correlation between "people who think Bradford is under Sharia law" and "people who are extraordinarily bad at using Facebook"?

I suppose it's telling that the strongest statement the far right can make is to buy a non-flammable flag off Amazon and attempt to light it. Without a decent social media manager the EDL are doomed to wither and die, as are every other far-right party that thinks standing outside a town hall massed together in England shirts and shouting chants into a megaphone is a passable method of grandstanding. It's not just the English, either: Scottish racists still print out A4 black and white posters and put them up in bus stops, like luddite white supremacist punks. This is the future of the far right: staring into the headlights of the brave new world, with its studio panels and its hashtags and its funny jokes about bacon sandwiches, and imploding in on itself, sat sadly in a musty caravan, or outside a bus station on a rainy day, or in an alleyway near your house with a cameraphone and a shit lighter, scared of the future and the change that comes with it, too set in its ways to evolve, too benign to die. They tried to start a fire and they failed. An allegory for our times.

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