Why was a schoolgirl punished over a Union Jack dress?

British schoolkids have long been encouraged to be ashamed of their nationality and history. They’re taught ‘anti-racism’ lessons and to constantly check their privilege as Brits. They study ‘decolonised’ curricula, shorn of ‘triggering’ British authors. Now, it seems, even dressing up as a Spice Girl and praising Shakespeare are being treated as beyond the pale.

This was what 12-year-old Courtney Wright was shocked to discover last week. She was hauled out of her lessons at Bilton School in Rugby in the West Midlands during so-called Culture Day. According to a Facebook post from her father, she was told that her dress – featuring a sequinned Union Jack – was ‘unacceptable’. She was placed in ‘isolation’ and given a choice: she could wait for her parents to collect her and take her home, or she could put on a school uniform and return to school. She was effectively treated as if she’d arrived in an SS uniform.

Courtney, like all Bilton School students, had been encouraged to wear ‘traditional’ outfits for Culture Day, and to ‘proudly represent their heritage’, including their ‘nationality or family heritage’.

You might say Courtney’s outfit was not exactly ‘traditional’, inspired by Geri Halliwel’s famous Union Jack dress from the 1997 Brit Awards. But that was clearly not the issue. What the school’s instructions really meant was that she should dress as any nationality or heritage, so long as it’s not British. According to Courtney’s father, Stuart Field, the school also turned several other pupils away at the gates on Culture Day, including a boy with a St George’s flag, a boy with a Welsh flag and a boy dressed as a farmer with a checked shirt and a traditional flat cap.

Courtney’s school also stopped her from giving a speech about what being British meant to her. ‘In Britain’, she would have said, ‘we have lots of traditions including drinking tea, our love for talking about the weather and we have the Royal Family’. ‘We have amazing history, like kings and queens, castles, and writers like Shakespeare.’ It also praised British humour, ‘our values of fairness and politeness’, and fish and chips. Not exactly Enoch’s ‘Rivers of Blood’, is it?

Courtney’s undelivered speech contains a few prescient lines, too:

‘Sometimes at schools, we only hear about other cultures – which is great because learning about different cultures is interesting and important… I think culture should be for everyone – not just for people from other countries or backgrounds. Being British is still a culture, and it matters, too. It’s part of who I am.’

The school has since issued an apology, but this is hardly an isolated incident. Far too many British institutions see any expression of patriotism, no matter how mild or innocent, as a problem to be contained.

It really shouldn’t need saying, but there’s nothing racist about loving one’s country. Ironically, a sense of shared national pride is precisely what is needed to knit Britain’s varied populations together.

But from universities to schools, even a Ginger Spice-style dress can be treated like a swastika. This is a national sickness our supposed betters desperately need to get over.

Hugo Timms is an editorial assistant at spiked.