Little Morgan Smith is mad about pirates, so he was delighted when his parents told him they were going to organise a pirate party for his sixth birthday, with pirate costumes, eyepatches and cutlasses. A few days before the party, his father hoisted a skull-and-crossbones flag up the flagpole in their back garden.
And a neighbour complained to the council.
Council officials immediately branded the flag "unneighbourly" and banned Morgan's parents Richard and Sharon from flying it.
The couple must now apply for planning permission at a cost of £75, and then an assessment of the 5ft by 4ft flag's "impact" on the surrounding area of Stone, Staffordshire, will be undertaken.
Desperate criminal and antisocial pariah Morgan Smith.
Morgan's 40-year-old father, an engineer at Bentley Motors, said: "It's not as though I'm building a huge extension which will blight the neighbourhood. It's a child's pirate flag."
For years, the patriotic family have flown a Union Jack or a St George's flag on the 18ft-high flagstaff at their detached home without a problem, but a neighbour complained to the council about the Jolly Roger. Mr Smith said "When the lady from the council came to see me she said that it was no problem flying any of the other flags, it was the Jolly Roger that was of concern".
Councillor Richard Stevens said the council had objected to the flag because "it was unneighbourly and could open the doors for all kinds of flags", and a Stafford Borough Council spokesman said "A planning application has been made for a Jolly Roger flag to be flown at a property in Stone. The application is currently under review and will include planning officers looking at the impact the flag has on the area, with the decision expected by the end of this month. Legislation requires planning approval before it can be flown from the flagpole."
We'll be charitable and draw a discrete veil over the fact that one of Morgan's neighbours was so petty, ignorant and spiteful as to draw the council's attention to the flag. When The GOS was a kid, he and his brother often used to fly flags out of their bedroom window, up a pole in the back garden and from the handlebars of their bikes. It would never have occurred to anyone in those days to protest about it - it's just something kids do. They probably always have.
No, what we have here is a prime example of a dreadful, cheerless, narrow-minded bigotry that has crept into every facet of British life in the last ten years or so. There are laws now about "causing offence", and it only takes one person to claim they've been offended to bring the full weight of the law into action even in the most petty and innocent circumstances. A responsible public body like a local council, which is presumably staffed by reasonably intelligent and educated people and directed by reasonably intelligent and educated councillors, ought to recognise that part of its responsibility is to make sensible judgements - but instead they all too often take the easy way out. Someone has complained, so don't bother wondering whether their complaint is justified or not, just act on it to be on the safe side. If that ruins a six-year-old's birthday, tough.
One wonders whether the vicious neighbour would have complained, and whether the council would have taken any notice, if instead of a Jolly Roger the Smiths had hoisted a flag with Snow White or Cinderella on it? Because in fact the Jolly Roger has no more historical or social meaning than that.
As it happens, The GOS shares Morgan Smith's enthusiasm for pirates, but being ancient he's had time to read and research a bit more thoroughly. So in case any officers of Stafford Borough Council happen to read this, here are a few facts …
The dashing pirates so well-loved in literature and film - the novels of Rafael Sabatini, for instance, or the film characters of Errol Flynn and Johnny Depp - did not exist. They are a fiction, a fairy story, just like Snow White. Even Robert Louis Stevenson's slightly more down-to-earth account is almost entirely fantasy. The real pirates were either hard-bitten soldiers of fortune engaging in land expeditions to prey on the largely-mythical wealth of the Spanish colonies in Central America, or were equally hard-bitten but rather less ambitious mongrels who divided their time between hunting for wild cattle and cutting "logwood" in the swamps of the Bay of Campèche to be shipped back to Europe and used in the dying industry.
Very few of them indeed patrolled the seas with dirks between their teeth, in rakish ships crewed by villainous but loveable seamen. There is no recorded instance of them making anyone walk the plank, although less imaginative forms of murder were known. The number of true buccaneering voyages by captains like Morgan, Kidd and Teach (Blackbeard) can be counted on your fingers, and virtually all of them ended in ignominious failure.
The real pirates, those who attacked shipping most effectively for hundreds of years, were in the Mediterranean off the North coast of Africa, and in the China Sea where pirate fleets could number hundreds of boats. And none of them flew the Jolly Roger or anything like it.
Actually, the Jolly Roger that Morgan Smith's dad hoisted, a black flag with a white skull and two bones crossed behind or below it, would not have been recognised by Captain Kidd or Blackbeard at all. Their flags were usually red, not black. And while they sometimes did have a crude skeleton on them, none of them is known to have used the skull and crossed bones. The modern flag is a fiction, just like the books and the films. It's a product of the entertainment industry over the last 100 years or so. It means nothing. It has no significance, except to a child.
So how can it be offensive? You might as well object to Star Wars or Spiderman - but then I suppose some people do? I mean, some people are so ignorant they think these things are real!
Well, Stafford Borough Council, you've really excelled yourselves this time. We'd like to suggest that some of you stop hiding behind regulations and get a proper job, preferably one that involves actually doing something useful instead of spending your days looking for opportunities to tell children and parents what to do.
Until you do, you are our Wankers of the Week.
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