We’ll keep the gay flag flying high

I popped out at dusk one evening this week to post a letter (for younger readers, this was how people used to communicate until the late 1900s). I live across the road from my previous employer, the University of Hull, and I saw there was a flag at the top of the flagpole on the science block. All I could see, initially, was that it was not at half mast, so at least another retired academic like me had not died.

But it was only as I got nearer the main gate that I saw what the flag was. It was not the union flag or the university flag, which variously fly there. It was the multicoloured striped ‘rainbow flag’ of the LGBT movement. It seems this lurid virtue signal is everywhere: badges; lanyards; ‘zebra’ crossings (although I have never knowingly seen a rainbow coloured zebra); and even on police cars for goodness sake.

The question arises as to, precisely, why this flag should be flying over Nos Universitatis Hullensis. Presumably it indicates that we are an LGBT (plus ‘+’) friendly university and I would be shocked if we were anything less than ‘friendly’ to as broad a spectrum of people as possible. Possibly we ought to draw the line at right wing extremists and terrorists although the battle to draw the line at left wing extremists was lost long ago. I would also not wish to entertain any individuals or groups who had bad intentions towards LGBT people. Of course, that does not include students from Saudi Arabia who bring to the university loadsamoney!

I have no idea how many LGBT students we have but when I met a colleague for coffee last week in the Business School, without exaggeration, I did not see a student who could be classified as White British and I imagine that most of those who I saw were not Black British. Despite 50% of school leavers going to university these days, the UK university sector is utterly dependent on international students who bring their cash, their colour and their culture to the university community. However, I have never seen a flag flying from one of the many nationalities we have on campus, including Chinese students, or a single flag that would indicate that we are an ‘international student friendly’ campus.

Which brings me back to the purpose of the ubiquitous rainbow flag. I am sure in less enlightened times—when the issue would not have arisen in any case—that any proposal to advertise our LGBT friendly credentials, especially in such an obvious way, would have been strangled at birth lest it be considered offensive to ‘people from certain cultures’. But we have no such fears now. On the other hand, do the university managers not consider that flying the rainbow flag could sensitise people from cultures that still find homosexuality and other variants of non-heterosexual conjugations not only offensive, but where they are exhorted to turn them in, ultimately for imprisonment or execution? This, inconveniently, includes some parts of both the Middle East and Africa.

It is not beyond reason that, on the one hand, advertising that there are most likely LGBT people on campus, and they should be respected and, on the other hand, doing this to the exclusion of other groups could be just what a disaffected student would need to plot revenge either by damaging buildings or harming and even killing someone. I bet that has never crossed the minds of the senior management group of the university. To those who run Hull and any other universities here are some ideas for you to ‘run up the proverbial flagpole’. Why do you never stop to think about the potential consequences of your actions? Why supplant the national or the institutional flag with a flapping virtue signal? Why favour one group of people, a fragmented minority whose internecine infighting between those who are LGB and the rest of the ‘alphabetti spaghetti’ of the ‘T’, ‘Q’ ‘C’ and all those unspecified souls under the ‘plus’ label, embarrasses and baffles in equal measure? Come one, come all to university as far as I am concerned. But please take down the rainbow flag.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.