#union flag

A Liberal Democrat-run city council has gone to the High Court seeking an injunction to ban people putting up Union Flags and St George's Crosses near public highways.

The first ban of its kind in Britain. Ordinary people can face up to two years in prison or unlimited fines for contempt of court. They've already spent £15,000 of taxpayers' money ripping down more than 300 flags, and that's an average of 40 quid a flag.

And the miserable bastards are doing this while [England] are in the World Cup, and lots of normal, ordinary, decent folk across the country are flying the colours to support our team.

What is wrong with these nasty, heartless people? These ideological Karens have decided that the greatest threat to public safety in Oxfordshire isn't potholes, crime, or failing services. It's a bit of red, white, and blue cloth fluttering in the breeze. They now treat patriotism as a public health hazard. It would be funny if it weren't so sinister. They claim safety risks. They hilariously claim alarm, distress, and intimidation. What absolute nonsense. This is a pretext, a virtue-signaling cover for their discomfort with any visible love of this country.

True patriots know that our flags are symbols of unity, not division. This is why we must fly them permanently, not just during the World Cup. The flag brings people together across class, background, across race, anyone who loves this country and wants to be part of its history. It creates real unity because it reminds every person who lives here that we share one home, one history, one set of values worth defending.

It is a permanent statement that we belong to something bigger than ourselves and that we're proud of it. Every nation should love its own story, yet the English are told that we cannot. The English flag, the flag of St George, is seen as far right by unhinged leftists. They say it causes alarm and distress. We're not allowed to love our own flag and our own country. That is the hypocrisy at the heart of this. We're told to cheer everyone else's identity, while ours must be hidden.

Britain has done extraordinary things for the world. We alone stood against Nazi tyranny when the rest of Europe had fallen. Our ancestors shed blood in two world wars for freedom. We gave the world parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, the industrial revolution that dragged humanity out of poverty, and we ended the slave trade. The Royal Navy poured blood and treasure into stopping it across the globe, even though the left pretends this chapter of our history never even existed. Our language, our literature, our science, our genius for exploration and invention. A nation with that record has nothing to apologize for.

When you truly love your country, you feel a deep responsibility to look after it. You defend its values, preserve its best traditions, fix its problems with intelligence and courage, and hand something better to the next generation. Patriotism is not racism; it is the natural, healthy love of your homeland, your culture, your values, your people. Real unity, the kind that actually holds a country together, comes from that shared affection, not from lectures about diversity or enforced guilt.

The flag cannot be racist. If the sight of the English flag in England or the Union flag in Britain makes you uncomfortable, then the problem is not the flag. The problem is you.

Let's be clear about what is really dividing this country, and it's not our beautiful flag flying on a lamppost. What divides us is the hateful left's anti-British Marxist ideology that has infested our institutions for decades. This ideology teaches shame instead of pride. It divides people into oppressors and oppressed by race and identity. It demands open borders and mass uncontrolled migration from parts of the world that do not share our values, and we are living with the consequences.

If we do not rip up this woke anti-British ideology out of every institution, root and branch, before it's too late, social cohesion will collapse. We will risk descending into the kind of division and civil strife that has torn other nations apart. Do not underestimate how serious this is.

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When flying your own nation's flag is subversive or dangerous, you've been conquered.

People who feel uncomfortable or threatened by the presence of the flag of the country they've chosen to immigrate to don't belong there and should be removed and sent back.

Fly your flags, Brits.

🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

HG 1/144 World Economic Union Mass Production Transformable Mobile Suit SVMS-01 "Union Flag"

Picked up this funky little HG 00 kit from model building club last weekend. It's a pretty simple late 00s kit, just like others from its time, with just three sprues and not much in the way of optional parts. Regardless, it's still a very creative kit with a surprising amount of colour separation, even if it really only has two colours.

The Union Flag is one of the grunt suits from 00 Gundam, being the main fighting unit of the Union of Solar Energy and Free Nations or World Economic Union (world here being Europe, Australasia, and Japan, like some sort of bizzaro NATO, probably leading to the UN baby blue of the kit). It's a very Macross looking design, "transforming" into a fighter jet inspired flight form in a very seamless manner, without any parts-forming whatsoever (more than one could say of the HG Zeta or HG Macross kits). There's a bit of clever engineering in the waist and pelvis that lets everything rotate into orientation.

There's stil a fair amount of painting, despite the simple bicolour scheme. I added grey to the backs of the hands, the barrel and top of the linear rod rifle, and the insides of the air intakes and jet exhaust ports, as well as adding my standard metallic drybrush and pigment powder to all the grey sections. I also made sure to add a lot of sooty oil staining over the intakes and exhausts to give the impression of use. I also painted over the safety nubs on the wings, turning them into blue and green navigation lights (as I don't have a metallic red). I still don't trust myself to cut them off cleanly. I also added a bit of metallic weathering pigment over other high-points on the blue parts of the kit, helping accentuate the worn and used nature of the machine, and mask how plasticky the blue looks right out of the box.

This is a pretty simple and plain looking kit, with no included marking stickers so I made sure to deck it out with a ton of custom markings and decals. I don't have any 00 decals, so I had to just freehand the Union logo, but I think I did an alright job at it.

I also included some hit markers, a flying group decal on the leg, and a unit number, as well as some cool stripes and caution markers. There's a metallic silver sticker that goes behind the (UV reactive trans orange) visor, which was appreciated as it added a lot of nice shine even without a UV light. The M motif works well as a pilot identifier. I stole it from the Gyan decals meant for M'Quve, but I think it looks great here, contrasting nicely against the blue. I just wish I had some proper NATO or UN decals, as I feel these would've been thematically appropriate and gone well with the blue colouration of the kit.

I do think I should've placed the wing markings the other way around, as they look upside down when the kit is viewed from the rear.

This kit included the linear rod rifle, which slots into the waist in flight mode to form the "nose" of the plane. It's a little loose in the hand, and being designed to look good in plane mode makes it look a little awkward as a weapon, but I think I managed to make it look cool in a few poses. The gangly proportions of the kit certaintly don't help.

The kit also includes the bizzare "defense rod", a shield modeled after an aeroplane propeller that is meant to rotate in order to deflect incoming damage. It seems super impractical, but they manage to make it look cool and effective in the anime. I painted on the white tips as I don't like dealing with foil colour correction stickers when folded over sharp edges - they tend to lift.

Oddly enough, there are these little tabs under the wings that look like spots to add missile pods or other weapons, although none are included. If I find any spares from other people in my model club I'll probably come back and add them.

Further included is the sonic blade/plasma sword. In the anime, it's a small flip-out combat switchblade that vibrates at ultrasonic frequencies to cut through armour. It can also generate a plasma blade turning it into a large sword. Unfortunately, the age of the kit relegates this weapon into a single "chopstick" piece, only allowing display of the plasma sword form. There's also not really anywhere on the kit it can be stowed, so I'm not sure where it comes from. I painted it with metallic blue, but I really would have preferred a traditional transparent beam effect piece.

Overall it was a fun little build, that let me prectise using my new liquid panel liners, as well as pracitse decals and weathering. Might take a bit of a break from gunpla for a bit, until I have more display room.

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The flag consists of the red cross of Saint George (the patron saint of England), edged in white, superimposed on the red saltire of Saint Patrick (the patron saint of Ireland), also edged in white, superimposed on the saltire of Saint Andrew (the patron saint of Scotland).

Wales is not represented in the flag by Wales's patron saint, Saint David, because the flag was designed while Wales was part of the Kingdom of England.

The origins of the flag date to the earlier flag of Great Britain, which was established in 1606 by a proclamation of King James VI and I of Scotland and England.

The present design was established by an Order in Council following the Act of Union 1801, which joined the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland to create the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.