The Revolution will not be wrapped in cotton wool

Trigger warning: this post contains flags.

This article answers three questions about the Fête of Britain graphic identity we believe are fundamental to the work of Absurd Intelligence:

1. What the fuck do you mean, “Britain”? 
2. And what’s with the Union Jack?

or, rather

3. How will we have any hope of collectively making a better way to live, if we can’t address what it is to be an inhabitant of our islands in the 21st century?

It’s easy to think that everything was so much more simple back in the day. A Home Sweet Home embroidery on the wall, some crazed crockery celebrating several ancient coronations; the occasional standing-up at the national anthem. 

The rituals and signifiers of what made Britain – and for many made it Great – were well-honed and distributed. Even if most of them were fairly recent inventions, we largely knew what and where home was, and we could all hum the theme tune. 

As late as the 1990s leaders like John Major were still able to trot out the Orwellian cliches of warm beer and cricket, and while football and alcopops were actually already the collective comfort blanket, it was easy for many to identify. Outside our (apologies for sweeping assumptions about who’s reading this) educated, liberal metropolitan woke bubble, in the shires, it often still is. 

I’ll stop here though. This isn’t a cod socio-political history lesson, nor an attempt to address the nuances of the current shitshow debate over national pride or British identity. There are plenty of other places on the internet to get that. 

This post is simply to outline the strategic creative thinking that has gone into naming, and designing assets for The Fête of Britain. 

Country Mc****Face

Anyone who has worked on ‘national’ campaigns will be familiar with the challenges of how to refer to the place we call home. 

In no particular order: 

• Our nation is made up of four countries, and only one of them is ever remotely happy with using any of the collective terms
• Also, the official The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is as sad as calling someone by all their middle names, when one of those names is a really divisive compromise between divorced (and still bickering) parents
• Just using Great Britain leaves out Northern Ireland...
• ...and doesn’t please Wales or Scotland anyway
• Only map nerds know (or care about) the difference between Britain, Great Britain and The British Isles
• Everyone has an opinion on this, so you can never get it right

‘Britain’ is what we’ve settled on using. It’s the Big Island, and a simultaneously vernacular and ancient word. 

Anyone saying “butwhataboutIreland?!” will be referred to our complaints department, Kneecap. 

Britain is a word that spans both geography and time, and in an attempt to start navigating, our identity word mark is built by both. Each letter of Fête of Britain is inspired by the cultural history of our amazing countries. 

From Doctor Who’s police box to the Festival of Britain, Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art to striking Welsh miners (via British Rail, the Empire Windrush, Harry Potter and more) the Fête of Britain is spelled out via some of our nation’s biggest stories. Belfast’s Titanic, the common treasury that is the NHS...

It’s a work in progress, and will eventually be a multi-glyph typeface.

Neighbourhoods and Nations

As we write and talk we’re also going to repeatedly refer to the ‘neighbourhoods and nations’ of Britain. From ancient regions to modern multicultures our islands have always been a mosaic of people and places. 

We’re going to double-down on this diversity in how we dress our spaces too. At the recent Convention in Conway Hall the bunting from the amazing Emergency Exit Arts is already inspiring us to make Fête bunting that will foreground the features and folk stories of our counties, towns and landscapes.

As we find new friends the length and breadth of this nation of ours, the Fête will be an ever-better and fun-filled representation of brilliant Britain! 

Flag: shag, marry, kill?

If what we call our home is a massive invite to join a circular firing squad, flags send us into overdrive.

They mainline stock reactions: good and bad. It’s what they’re built to do, and they’re very good at it. The Union Jack (or, Union Flag) is the OG. An English, Scottish, Irish compromise (and fuck the Welsh).

And since forever, it’s been ‘owned’ by The Right – progressives recoiling from it like vampires at Garlic & Shots; fearless social warriors reduced to blubbing wrecks by red, white and blue kryptonite.

Like rabbits caught in the headlights, politicians who would lock up their own family if they thought it would help them be liked just a little bit more, stand blinking on the telly, haplessly saying how much They. Like. Flags. 

It’s obviously pathetic, such flag-shagging; catnip for the snide commentariat of all sides. But similarly sad is how a bunch of fascist grifters can literally own the current story of Britain, and what is ‘needed’ to make it Great, using the flag to smother the rest of us.

Which is why we decided to neither shag nor kill. 

Like a marriage, a relationship with a national flag is filled with ups and downs. It requires work. It should endure; for better and worse, richer and poorer. 

And for all the fallings out, sometimes, just sometimes – Swinging London, music, The 2012 Olympics – we can collectively surrender and have A Brilliant Time under its flutter. 

Flying a flag doesn’t have to mean we’ve signed-up to a millennia of enclosure, the subjugation of the class system, the evils of empire or a lifetime membership of the Chelsea headhunters.

And – just as in a marriage – there’s Love. And what’s better than feeling Love? Or worse than being denied the ability to express it? 

Being told to fly one flag, say 🇬🇧🇺🇦🇮🇱, discouraged or forbidden from flying others 🏳️‍🌈🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇵🇸 is a LARGE relationship RED FLAG 🚩. We should resist abuse and coercion in any relationship, even if it’s with our flags. 

Brilliant Britain

I Love Britain. And I’d wager you might too – wherever you are reading this. 

From Curry to Corrie, the Windrush to Windermere, the aforementioned NHS to XCX these beleaguered isles ARE brilliant. Lots and lots and lots of shit – of COURSE – and we should never run away from that. But brilliant too. 

Brilliant like the Beatles, Bowie, Blake and the Brontës. Fill in your own brilliants:

We all have them. 

That’s why rather than marching to the beat of the five bob fascists, or wrapping ourselves in cotton wool, we’re embracing the complicated, difficult, challenging power of the union jack to help us carve a way. 

The Fête of Britain design programme uses the flag to help build a visual story. 

Recognisably the thing that waves wildly at Last Night of The Proms, but also disassembled, jumbled. Confused. We call it The Fucked-Up Flag; it feels a bit like Britain. Squint and you know it, but it doesn’t really make much sense. 

Here’s our Clare, at the recent Humanity Project national gathering talking about the importance of finding love amidst the fragmentation, with the welcome banner from our convention made by Clive and Maddy.

In our minds this messed-up symbol is an invitation that grounds us in the physical reality of where we happen to live, asking us to participate in the re-ordering of things. It’s a recognition that business as usual is broken, posing the question: 

so what are we now going to build?

The imagery is confrontational. It’s supposed to be. For what is the rebuilding of Britain, if not a revolutionary project? Comfortable gets us nowhere. Comfort for some is how we got in this mess.

The flag helps us build-out a wider set of identity assets. Badges, stage sets, promotional materials.

Jack and Jill

We go further than the Union Jack though. Our colour palette ventures way beyond the red, white and blue, embracing a kaleidoscopic range of hues. 

In shite design agency parlance it ‘reflects diversity’. In revolutionary talk, it’s all about the Union Jill. 

First made by women in the anti-roads protest movement the Union Jill is everything the Jack isn’t. Softer, kinder, immeasurably more joyous. It’s a flag that is recognisably ‘British’, but it’s a Britain we might only conjure in our mind’s eye. Tantalising, just out of reach, it’s a flag for a parallel (different, better?, new) nation. 

Also: it’s total sacrilege! Both shibboleth and shitstorm, Jill is a (not at all) red white and blue rag to a John Bull. A feminine fuck you. Confrontational.  Complicated. 

We flew Jill at the Fête of Britain in Manchester last year, we’ll be flying her a lot more over the next couple of years.

Hit the road, Jack

Our next outing is in Liverpool, on 17 October with the amazing Stealing Sheep and a brilliant bill of local talent, together with grassroots organisations like Squash and Neo Community.

As the Fête visits more and more corners of brilliant Britain we’ll be iterating. 

What effects do the flags and the colours have? 

Who ‘gets’ it, who detests it? 

Does ‘Britain’ hinder more than help? 

Can we wave hello to a better story while waving Jack and/or Jill? 

At this stage we really don’t know – this is a genuinely collaborative experiment. 

But we do have a hunch that the hapless flag-shaggers and the grifting flag-blaggers will get us absolutely nowhere. 

And that to run away from the issue of belonging is to leave our brilliant Britain undefended. 

So much of the weaponised story of our country in 2025 is about what’s broken. 

The Fête of Britain is about what’s brilliant. 

Our nation is spending so much time obsessing about what we want to run away from. 

The Fête of Britain flies a flag for what we might all decide to run towards. 

Elsewhere in Absurdity....

• Clare and Maddy had a flat out weekend at the Humanity Project national gathering where they brought together partners from across the UK to connect, learn, and plan their next steps to achieve their vision of a new kind of democracy, built from the ground up - by us, for us, where we live.
• Alanna attended The Values We Share, The Politics We Don't - Building a Popular Front strategy session organised by Compass and Common Cause, where she met organisers from around the country to begin building a strategic response that reflects shared values and organise civil society around systemic change that denies space to extremism.
• Clive's brilliant The Right to Protest Exhibition with the Museum of UnRest and Pro Radix is in full swing and getting some ace coverage. If you haven't been along yet, you'd better hurry as it ends this Sunday!
• Our pals, Brian Eno and Tracey Seaward, alongside producers Khaled Ziada and Khalid Abdalla, pulled off a night for history books with the Together for Palestine gig at a sold out Wembley Arena last week. They brought together an unrivalled line-up of musicians, actors, poets, journalists and more with Palestinian artists and front-line workers. If you weren't there you can watch clips here and there's also still time to donate!