01.12.07
Flag waving, or drowning?

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It’s been a blood-pressure raising autumn for flag-waving traditionalists. Their fluttering weapons of choice are being questioned right across the globe.

Back in September New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Helen Clark, raised the thorny issue of whether their flag really needed that Union Jack in the corner and dropped several hints about just using the constellation of stars known as the Southern Cross (only viewable from the southern hemisphere).

Of course, a commonwealth country dropping the jack would simply follow what Canada did in the sixties. When the ensign format was dropped, after few design competitions, Canada emerged with arguably one of the world’s finest flag designs (and a design that doubled up for their government as well).

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There is of course another big claim to the Southern Cross, over the water in Australia. With the final ousting of Howard via the election win of Kevin Rudd, we finally have an Australian premier determined to re-open the issue of Australia’s status as a republic (as well as its stance on Kyoto and Iraq, but that’s another story).

Removing the Queen as head of state would mean a new flag, and Australia is well down that road already. Whilst New Zealand’s NZFlag.com tried to push through a stylised silver fern on black in 2005...

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...Ausflag.com has already had a full blown design competition in the late nineties, resulting in the highest placed designs shown below. So if Rudd wants to move quickly, his flags are ready. All he needs to do now is change the minds of Australia’s hard core monarchist blue rinse set (and there are more of those than you think).

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To top it all, this week UK culture Minister Margaret Hodge announced herself open to re-designs of the jack itself, to incorporate a degree of ‘Welshness’.

This is not as easy as it sounds – the jack is a rather cumbersome combination of three flags (St George’s cross, St Andrew’s saltire, St Patrick cross) and much debate surrounds which symbols of welshness we would incorporate. Many wags have suggested that there is already a red dragon in the middle of the red cross, we just can’t see it that well. But, seriously, if we were following the pattern here, the design that should be incorporated is the rather odd looking yellow on black cross of St David. Not very nice.

As you can see from these proposals from the BBC and Guardian websites, adding yellow and black looks really quite odd. Creative Review is calling for its own set of entries too.

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If Ms Hodge is really serious about this, we’d suggest that the colour we’d take for ‘welshness’ would be the green (not the dragon, sorry).

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Then we’d set about the jack itself. It’s a design that is notoriously hard to draw (hence all those smart alec’s grumbling about upside down flags on royal occasions). And it’s too wide, being 2 to 1.

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We’d make it a more harmonious proportion. We’d make it easier to draw. We’d brighten the colours, make them more screen friendly. We’d try different ways to get the green in. Something a bit like this, perhaps?