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The best decades I have lived through are the 1960s and the 1990s.

One thing they have in common is that the Union Jack did not belong to the far right or the establishment. It belonged to everyone and was often used playfully.

Can it happen again?

Well, here are five reasons the Conservatives and the wider right can be Ridiculed for their lack of patriotism.

• On Tuesday Boris Johnson used the unveiling of a memorial to police officers who died on duty as the occasion for a comic turn with an umbrella
• Johnson and Priti Patel have made it clear they have no objection to people booing the England football team,
• The right has spent the five years since the Brexit referendum attacking the BBC, a British institution that is respected around the world.
• Now they have turned their fire on the Royal National Lifeboat Institution - volunteers who risk their lives to save people in danger at sea. The RNLI is about as good as Britain gets.
• Campaigners have taken the government to court in an attempt to stop them driving a tunnel under Stonehenge. Yesterday they won their case.

If the opposition parties cannot do something with this little catalogue, they may as well give up.

We needn't wrap ourselves in the flag, but we should rip it out of the hands of the right.