YOU can’t move without tripping over union jacks on the TV news these days. No ministerial Zoom call is complete without a flag the size of the average duvet.

All this is just another round in the culture wars. If, as Samuel Johnson suggested, “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”, there are a lot of patriotic charlatans around at the moment. When they’re not changing the law to protect statues, they’re flapping flags and suggesting that anyone who disagrees is some category of traitor.

The writer of this blog would like to make a confession. While typing this I am not wearing union jack underpants. Feel free to sue my unpatriotic arse if you wish.

An asinine row broke out last week after TV presenter Naga Munchetty “sniggered at the union jack”, according to a report in the i newspaper. She was later coerced into apologising for liking “offensive” tweets criticising a government minister for being surrounded by flags in his office.

If you keep your sensible head on, you will see that Munchetty was sniggering not at the union jack but at ministers wrapping themselves in the flag at every opportunity.

According again to that report in the i, BBC News bosses were angry that such sniggering “undermined the corporation’s major initiative to appeal to working class viewers”.

Oh, they should get over themselves and grant those working class viewers with a bit of nous. I am sure they can see when the union jack is being waved in their faces as a political distraction from other matters.

The BBC running scared of flag sniggering is run by Tim Davie. On Google, “Is Tim Davie…a Tory?” is the first suggested search. The answer is yes, he is a former Tory councillor.

In a surprise turn-around yesterday, the rightwards-tilting new director general was confronted by an indignant Tory MP during a bizarre Zoom exchange about the BBC’s annual report.

James Wild, possibly the oldest 43-year-old in the country, demanded to know why the BBC annual report featured only one or possibly no union jacks (honestly, I refuse to pay too much attention to such a twerp).

Davie pointed out reasonably enough that the union jack flew over Broadcasting House, adding that the lack of a flag in a report was “a strange metric” by which to measure patriotism.

You can be proud about your country without turning your face beetroot-red. And to be proud of your country in a sensible manner, you have to accept the bad along with the good. No country is 100% good and shouting that we’re the greatest is just puerile – and, if you ask me, not very British.

Then there is vaccine nationalism, using the union jack as a convenient sheet to pull over 130,000 deaths so far during the pandemic.

All this anti-Europe shouting has validity only in so far as the EU is being deeply inept in trying to come up with a vaccine policy. Our successful roll-out is a tribute to the NHS and to clear thinking very late in the afternoon. It doesn’t wipe away all the terrible errors. This nation, to quote from last Sunday’s Observer, “verged on criminal incompetence over its attempts to control the disease”.

What the world needs now is global co-operation and no sneering at the neighbours. To borrow a much-abused phrase, we’re all in this together, and gloating over the garden fence, or the English channel, doesn’t help anyone.

We’re not out of this until we’re all out of this.

Oh, and performing well on vaccination doesn’t suddenly make Brexit a good idea. That will still be a stinker long after we’ve waded through this pandemic.