The UKIP former councillor Brian Silvester is a nasty piece of work, and a pseudo-patriotic fool who doesn't know what he's doing to boot.
Silvester was forced out of the Tory party in 2012 for being a slum landlord. He was fined £45,000 at Chester Crown Court for serious fire safety breeches at a multiple occupancy building. This scandal meant that his position in the Conservative group on Cheshire East Council became totally untenable.
We all know where the natural home for disgraced former Tories is, and Silvester was soon welcomed with open arms by UKIP.
In 2014 Silvester was investigated for using his council email address to try to set up a land deal to build houses on greenfield land he owned. Not only an obvious breach of public standards but also a grotesque display of hypocrisy too, given that he actually campaigned against greenbelt development!
UKIP saw nothing wrong with his outrageously hypocritical behaviour and let him stay in their party, but in 2015 he lost his council seat at the local elections.
Since losing his seat Silvester has been chuntering away on Twitter. Back in November he provoked a storm of criticism for trying to incite mobs of Brexiters to intimidate judges by protesting outside their houses.
On the day that Theresa May triggered Article 50 silvester decided to celebrate "Brexit Day" by displaying the Union flag and posting a picture of it to Twitter, but he found just about the most disrespectful way of displaying the flag imaginable; upside-down and strapped between two wheelie bins!
You don't have to be an expert to see that the flag is upside down. When the hoist is on the right as Silvester has arranged it, then the white St Andrew's Saltire should be above the red of the St Patrick's saltire in the upper quadrant closest to the flagpole.
Tradition also dictates that when the flag is displayed statically (rather than on a flagpole), the hoist should be to the left, so not only has Silvester got the flag upside down, he's got it the wrong way around too!
Displaying a flag upside down is considered a grave insult to the country, region or city in question, but tradition doesn't record whether strapping a flag to a pair of bins is also an insult. I guess that if any vexillologist had ever imagined anyone attaching flags to bins, they probably would have concluded that it probably shouldn't be considered standard practice.
In a way Silvester's wheelie bin tribute is a perfect metaphor for Brexit: An ugly pseudo-patriotic mess cobbled together by an out-of-touch right-winger who clearly doesn't have a clue what they're doing.
Another Angry Voice is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.
No comments:
Post a Comment