Elon Musk’s hilarious trolling of Keir Starmer

And there you have it: a billionaire born in Pretoria who now lives in a compound in Austin, Texas takes more pride in the flag of England than the UK prime minister himself. Elon Musk has got X all aflutter and Bluesky fuming (probably – who actually knows what’s happening on that libtard hellsite) by posting the Saint George’s Cross. There were no words. No cry of ‘Long live England!’. Just a screenshot of that old white standard with its red cross, the sight of which is enough to get England’s own sniffy intellectuals gagging into their macchiatos.

Britain’s liberal (sic) elites are no doubt huffing over Musk’s flag post. These are the kind of people who’d cross the road if they ever spied a gaggle of portly men wrapped in England flags. The sight of a fluttering Saint George’s Cross always induces ‘uneasiness’, said a writer for the Independent this week. There’s an ‘insidious intention’ to the flying of this flag, apparently. Who other than a ‘bull-headed idiot’ would drape themselves in it, observers wonder? Keir Starmer is insisting of late that he’s a ‘patriot’ who loves to see the flag, but he’s not kidding anyone. We all know he mingles with the wankerati that roll their eyes whenever they have the misfortune to drive their Subaru past a terraced house decked out in the Saint George colours.

Into this posh mob of flag-shunners comes Musk. Intruding on the self-congratulary aloofness of those Englishmen and women who fancy themselves far too clever and cosmopolitan for anything as vulgar as national pride, the Saffer turned American does something they never would: wave a Saint George. ‘He’s trolling’, some will cry. You don’t say! Of course he is. It’s the troll vs the technocrats. The too-online loudmouth vs Sir Keir’s damp-squib government. The internet’s piss-taker-in-chief vs the arseholes and incompetents of England’s own cultural establishment. And you know what? It’s kind of what we need right now.

People from outside the UK likely have no idea how edgy it is to wave the flag of England in England. The French flag is everywhere in France. America’s schoolkids pledge allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. Yet hoist up the English flag on English land and you’ll instantly be judged a racist piece of shit by your supposed superiors. Our elites have so thoroughly liberated themselves from the ideals of sovereignty – loving that they can ship in au pairs from Romania and have their dirty fries delivered by cheap workers from Pakistan – that they now come out in hives when one of the little people does something as gross as say: ‘I like England.’

For the Smart Set, flags are about ‘me’, not ‘we’. They hang the Pride flag to flaunt their fealty to the high-status belief that you can have a cock and be a lesbian. They wrap themselves in the Palestine flag, the ultimate vanity accessory of the middle-class left, so that the world will know how much they care. But the Saint George’s flag? That banner of collectivity? That flag that says England exists and has borders and is a pretty decent place? Vomit! Little wonder England has been rocked this past fortnight by a viral revolt called Operation Raise the Colours, with folk across the nation raising the flag and even painting it on roundabouts. A plebs’ revolt against their flag-dodging rulers.

It’s this very English mutiny that Musk is attaching himself to. He has spied another opportunity to stick it to the world leader who most winds him up: Sir Keir. Those lamenting Musk’s Saint George’s post, those slyly hinting it’s of a piece with his ‘far right’ beliefs, seem blissfully unaware that they have only themselves to blame for the flag-raising insurrection sweeping England and now X. For the truth is that, in 2025, the Saint George’s Cross derives its power precisely from its demonisation by the moral clerisy. It is their superbly snooty loathing of this flag, and the ‘oiks’ who fly it, that made flying it such a searing act of resistance. Thanks to these twats, this flag doesn’t only say ‘I love England’ – it also says ‘I hate them’. That Musk can ‘troll’ just by posting the Saint George’s Cross is a testament to how rad it is to take national pride in this era of haughty globalism.

Not content with his flag post, Musk returned to the rape-gang scandal, too. He said he will ‘help fund legal action against corrupt officials who aided and abetted the rape of Britain’. He’s referring to one of the worst moral outrages in postwar Britain: the grooming, abuse and rape of thousands of working-class girls by gangs of disproportionately Pakistani men as officialdom looked the other way because it feared rocking the multicultural boat. No doubt Starmer and Co think it meddlesome and crass for a distant oligarch to back those who want redress for the state’s failure to protect them from rape. But I bet all normal people think it’s far more disgusting that Britain’s rulers essentially sacrificed working-class girls at the altar of political correctness than that a politically incorrect billionaire now refuses to let that scandal lie.

Nope, Musk is not England’s saviour, as certain Sun-starved dwellers in the X madhouse seem to think. Apart from anything else, hyper-capitalists like him are not exactly known for their love of national borders. The movement of cheap labour and expensive products tends to matter more to them than the thing England’s working class is crying out for right now: a restoration of national sovereignty and the democracy that springs from it. But he’s irritating Sir Keir and he’s grossing out England’s anti-English cultural elites, and that’s got to be worth something, no?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy