It comes to something when, in this complicated, fearful and dangerous world, the person who speaks the most sense is the former right-back of Manchester United.
Gary Neville, Sky Sports football pundit, property entrepreneur and would-be political agitator, is not everyone’s idea of a social commentator, but he addresses a large constituency (5.3m followers on X) and he is unafraid to discuss controversial subjects beyond football.
So it was that he took to his LinkedIn feed to tackle an uncomfortable truth that I feel has been missed in the reaction to the devastating Yom Kippur attack on Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue.
Much has been made of the correlation between the pro-Palestine marches and the rise in antisemitism. These marches may have been something of a breeding ground for sentiment that, in some cases, mutates from an opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza into a hatred of Jews.
It is easy to understand why prominent figures within Britain’s Jewish community are adamant that these demonstrations should be proscribed in the aftermath of the attack. I think, however, that there is a danger of conflating one person’s perverted, murderous antisemitic purpose with the peaceful intention of many, many thousands to draw attention to a grievous harm. Besides which, I don’t think any of us would want to live in a country where peaceful protest was banned.
But Gary Neville was drawing attention to another, toxic element in the highly combustible mix of populist opinion: the proliferation of Union Jacks or flags of St George, which, whether Keir Starmer admits it or not, have become symbolic of a strand of right-wing, extreme nationalistic ideology that has the demonisation of foreigners at its heart.
Jewish people can rightly point to those on the left and on the right of politics who hide their antisemitic feeling behind support for Palestine. But what about those who stoke hatred of all minorities (including Jews) while masquerading as patriots? As a Jewish person, I feel there is an implicit threat in the display of a mass of flags of St George, as much is there is from a collection of Palestinian flags or from people shuffling down a street shouting slogans.
square SIMON KELNER I’ve never worried that people hate me because I'm Jewish – that's changed
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And yet it’s taken Neville to connect the sudden appearance of British flags with an unpalatable reality. “I’ve been building in this city [Manchester] for 15, 20 years,” he said, “and there’s no one put a Union Jack flag up in the last 15 to 20 years. So why do you need to put one up now? Because quite clearly it’s sending a message to everybody that there is something you don’t like. The Union Jack flag being used in a negative fashion is not right.” That the flag is being used as an instrument of defiance and not pride is undeniable.
“We are all being turned on each other,” he added. “The division… is mainly created by angry, middle-aged white men who know exactly what they are doing.” He concluded his three-minute treatise, seemingly ad-libbed to camera as he walked down the street, by saying we are “all being turned on each other. The messaging is getting extremely dangerous.”
I couldn’t agree more with Gary. Like Gary Lineker before him, Neville will be shouted down by those who disagree with his thesis, and/or think that he is just an uppity pundit who should stick to discussing football. Already, there is talk of a boycott of Sky Sports amid the obligatory social media trolling that Neville is a seditious force who hates his country (even though he has represented England 85 times, and talks of his love for both Manchester and Britain in his message). I hope Sky give him their unqualified support.
It doesn’t suit the crude and simplistic nature of public discourse at the moment to suggest that things are more complicated and nuanced and less convenient than they might appear. It is not just a pro-Palestine and anti-Jewish zero-sum equation.
We only need to look around us – at lampposts, at houses, at street signs – to see the standard of a growing movement that spreads a hatred of others, and which very quickly leads to lethal attacks on hotels housing migrants, and, yes, on synagogues full of Jewish people.
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