Happy St. George Floyd's Day – The Daily Sceptic

Today, April 23rd, is St. George’s Day once again – I don’t know about you, but I’ve already celebrated by skewering the nearest Saracen and calling for the immediate reconquest of Jerusalem.

But is celebration of this all-English hero really appropriate in this wonderful new woke world in which we all now live? Twenty-five-plus years on from the Blairite Year Zero of 1997, it is debatable as to whether the country formerly known as ‘England’ even actually exists at all any more. Under such circumstances, perhaps the country now needs a new, more diverse, Patron Saint for a new, more diverse, era?

If so, how about changing St. George to St. George Floyd instead? In June 2020, not long after St. George II died from an act of police brutality/massive drug overdose (you decide!) on May 25th, the following petition appeared on the popular website change.org, addressed to the U.K. Parliament, from a Londoner named George Birch:

“With its history of colonialist atrocities and unequalled racist savagery, Britain needs to prove its commitment to equality and racial justice by changing the name of St George’s Day to that of [the] true saint of colour, George Floyd, a martyr for equality and racial justice,” said Mr. Birch.

Thankfully, this demand – which does not appear to have been satirical, although I guess you never know – only got 1,327 signatures of agreement from the website’s claimed global user-base of 500 million. Compare this to the 4,631,607 souls who much more sensibly signed up to the petition to “Remove Amber Heard from Aquaman 2” a year earlier:

Even less fruitful was the following petition, which also appeared on change.org in the wake of Floyd’s death in 2020, garnering a mere 159 signatures and asking the US Congress to make every October 14th (George’s birthday) into the new national holiday of America’s latest secular saint:

That tall filing cabinet on the left is where Mr. Floyd kept comprehensive copies of his lifetime criminal record, by the way – I believe it was quite extensive.

Medal of Dishonour

I recall some little girls once knocking on my door, holding a clipboard, and asking me to sign their petition for them. “What’s it for?” I asked. They conferred briefly amongst themselves. “We’ll decide later,” they said, collected my scrawl and skipped happily away. For all I know, my name may now be on record as supporting the transformation of April 23rd into St. George Floyd’s Day after all.

Scarily, this is actually the same basic pattern of public ‘consent’ nowadays pursued by our public officials to transform our entire society along racially ‘inclusive’ lines likewise – i.e., by just performing such unasked-for transformations upon the general population’s collective ‘behalf’ anyway, whether they actually want them to or not, then claiming their approval upon a wholly self-assumed retrospective basis.

For example, did you know that you wanted the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George, an obscure medal handed out by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) to distinguished diplomats, to be altered due to the incredible ‘racism’ of its time-honoured visual design? I didn’t, but in 2020, following Mr. Floyd’s death, yet another petition was launched on change.org, demanding this vile decoration be bowdlerised immediately:

That one got 20,622 signatures, which initially sounds impressive, until you consider that’s about the equivalent to the entire current population of Portslade-by-Sea – and how many people do you know who live in Portslade-by-Sea? Exactly. So, yet another not overly popular George Floyd-related petition, then.

But never mind how ‘popular’ or otherwise this demand to modify the medal was, the good folk who run the FCO these days (i.e., those little girls who knocked on my door some years back) had already anticipated the public’s ‘demands’ to censor the award’s design way back in 2011, almost a full decade before Fentanyl Floyd had even snuffed it.

New Order

The Order in question was first created in 1818 under King George (not Floyd) III, to reward good military service upon our Evil Empire’s behalf during the Napoleonic Wars, and shows an image of a white-skinned Archangel St. Michael standing atop a prone Satan, depicted as having a black-skinned head and upper torso, and a scaly green winged lower body, like that of a wyvern, echoing St. George’s famous legendary slaying of a big bad dragon.

Shockingly, however, back when the Order’s medal had first been designed, its creators had unaccountably failed to foresee that, several centuries later, a random black man would die after an equally random white policeman (assisted by several other non-white policemen, incidentally) kneeled on his neck in a city in the middle of a whole other country an entire ocean away. As a result, whoever had first produced the thing had recklessly shown the blue-eyed, blonde-haired, deeply Nazi-looking, St. Michael standing with his foot atop the black Satan’s head and neck area, thus ensuring that the Devil too “could not breathe”. He was furthermore holding him by a sturdy chain, supposedly carrying echoes of the dark days of slavery.

This all proved highly triggering for certain commentators (including, disappointingly, Michael Palin, himself a former recipient of the medal, who called it “inappropriate and offensive” – didn’t Monty Python once sing a race-baiting song called Never Be Rude to an Arab?). Bumi Thomas, described as “a Nigerian-British singer, activist and specialist in visual communications”, told the Guardian that:

It is not a demon [even though it has wings, a snake’s body and a tail, and is enveloped within the blazing flames of Hell-fire, so clearly is a demon]; it is a black man in chains with a white, blue-eyed figure standing on his neck. It is literally what happened to George Floyd and what has been happening to black people for centuries under the guise of diplomatic missions: active, subliminal messaging that reinforces the conquest, subjugation and dehumanisation of people of colour … It is the definition of institutional racism that this image is not only permitted but celebrated on one of the country’s highest honours. Whilst statues are being pulled down and relocated, emblems and symbols of this nature also need to be redesigned to reflect a more progressive, holistic relationship between Britain and the Commonwealth nations.

Sir Simon Woolley, meanwhile, Director of the Operation Black Vote organisation – is there an Operation White Vote allowed to operate anywhere freely in Great Britain these days, I wonder? – added that “it is easy to get rid of an image, but I would like root-and-branch restructuring [of the FCO and British society as a whole], because most of the institutions created by Empire are still there”.

So, there you have it. Just as with the proposal for replacing St. George’s Day with St. George Floyd’s Day, the idea of getting rid of the image of St. Michael on the Most Distinguished Order of St. Michael and St. George medal really just stands in as a metonymic proxy for getting rid of everything else worthwhile and traditional about this country which once made it so great, too.

How amusing, therefore, to find that the black-skinned race-Marxists had already been beaten to it by the white-skinned race-Marxists who today run the FCO anyway, who had long anticipated the post-George Floyd criticisms of their medal by changing the prone Satan to a much more pale-skinned individual back in 2011. Yet even this still wasn’t enough for some professional malcontents, such as someone posing as “The TAOBQ (The African Or Black Question)”, who posted the following petition on change.org during Black Pseudo-History Month in October 2020:

Right, so now the FCO’s post-2011 whitewashed Devil just isn’t “light-skinned” enough, and as such may be intended as a subliminal slight against “both olive-skinned people and those of multiple heritage”, rather than of outright coal-black people like George Floyd? When will these people ever actually be happy? Only when the complete medal has been subject to a wholesale race-reversal redesign so as to have a black man standing with his foot lodged very firmly upon the windpipe of a prone and gasping white man, I suspect.

Making George Cross

When it comes to the specific issue of replacing St. George, just as the true Foreign Office diplomat these days now sees his or her true task as looking after the interests of foreign nations rather than his or her own, so it is that certain elements within the Church of England likewise now see it as their natural mission in life to get rid of England’s national saint, not to protect him.

As long ago as 2006, the CofE’s General Synod considered proposals to swap St. George for St. Alban. On the surface of things, this idea was justified upon the cheeringly patriotic-sounding grounds that, unlike the presumed Middle Easterner St. George, who never actually ever set foot upon English soil (possibly because he may never truly have existed), St. Alban was actually a genuine native of these shores, the nation’s first known Christian martyr from the era of Roman Britain.

Peering below the surface, however, this idea was also being proposed on the alternative grounds that St. George, as a Patron Saint of Crusaders (his inspirational apparition had supposedly appeared to Western warriors during the Battle of Antioch in 1098), may also have been “too warlike” and as such may “offend Muslims”, none of whom have ever been known to be warlike themselves at all.

Alternatively, of course, you could always just cunningly keep St. George in name only, rebranding the notorious Crusader-lover entirely as a kind of St. Diversity instead. That is the preferred path chosen by Ekklesia, a Scotland-based religious think-tank filled with trendy vicar-types of the of the basic ‘Jesus was a big fat Lefty’ variety, whose cringeworthy online report ‘St. George’s Day in a Changing Global Era: A Positive Proposal’, misleadingly attempts to reclaim St. George as “a dissenter against the abuse of power”.

How so? Well, his legend states that, after bravely confronting the anti-Christian Roman Emperor Diocletian, who was both very abusive and very powerful, and telling him to stop martyring all the Christians, Diocletian immediately, um, martyred him. In this spirit of championing the underdog, St. George should now somehow become “a post-Christendom saint”, one who embodies and champions the new replacement Blairite political religion of Blessed Diversity.

Instead of our national saint, George should henceforth become our post-national saint, as “he belongs to those who are persecuted, to ‘the awkward squad’, to Black history, to many nations and regions, to those who sojourn and travel” – i.e., to illegal immigrants. After all, “to consider St. George a symbol of ‘England alone, above, better’, is narrative nonsense, as well as extremely damaging to the English as a people with a delightfully mongrel heritage”. As he is also the Patron Saint of various other places on the planet, not just England, “on closer examination, St. George turns out to be a global icon, not a local hero”.

Rather than celebrating narrow nationalism, every April 23rd should become a national “Day of Dissent” when we should honour “conscientious objectors and peacemakers, anti-racism campaigners, human rights activists, those struggling against debt and poverty and many others” who give Jeremy Corbyn nightly wet-dreams. Freeing St. George from his unfortunate past associations with the “far-Right” (e.g. England football fans, medieval Crusaders, Henry V), the semi-deity should henceforth become indelibly associated with the following qualities instead:

Our role as global relations, [sic] not narrow nationalists.
The need for dissenters to call power to account.
Black Britons as vital contributors to our culture.
Shared values of social justice arising from the past.
Hospitality to migrants in an interdependent world.

Personally, I much preferred it when he just pranced around the desert, stabbing dragons.

Under assault as he is from all sides, then – as racist, as imperialist, as militaristic, as Islamophobic – St. George’s future as England’s national saint seems likely to come under continued threat in years to come, as our islands’ demographics and institutional control continue inexorably to shift. What hope for his continued presence as our national protector remains in decades and centuries to come, then? How can we make sure that our sacred St. George never dies?

Simple. Just tell all those currently trying to replace him that, according to the standard version of St. George’s legend, he is in fact a Palestinian.

Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.