Small children cheering the English national football (soccer) team as it makes its way through the UEFA European Football Championship have been derided as a “sea of aggressive white faces” on social media.
Children at Flakefleet Primary — roughly equivalent to an American elementary school — found themselves at the centre of a social media storm after teachers posted a video of children dressed in England-themed attire and waving England flags to the tune of Vindaloo, a comic-satire football anthem released by Fat Les in the late ’90s.
“Very depressing. What does it even mean? Poor kids, already brainwashed. A sea of aggressive white faces… Is that global Britain?” wailed Twitter user @InlimboV, who goes by the rather cumbersome moniker V. #IWearAMask #InLimbo #LesMaitresdelOrage.
“Just check the amazing English team and learn from it,” commented the user, who purports to be a Franco-British author and co-editor of an anti-Brexit essay collection, alongside an image highlighting the extremely disproportionate number of England players with a migration background.
“A sea of white faces screaming nonsense and flagshagging. Very sad,” she reiterated elsewhere — “flagshagger” being a term of abuse which has become popular among British leftists in recent times, intimating that patriots partake in sexual intercourse with the national flag.
“[W]ell done teaching kids to act like football hooligans,” sneered another user, one @R_Jones_Exmoor, who selling himself in his Twitter biography as an “Engineer. Inventor. Undercover Investigator. Business Entrepreneur. Council Candidate. Father. Citizen of the World. European. Democrat. Rationalist.”
“I guess the ‘great’ response [to the video] is why you took your twitter account offline last night,” he added.
The user has earlier boasted of having “left a complaint on [the school’s] website” shortly after it — apparently temporarily — took its own Twitter account offline.
“It’s disgusting behaviour these children are being pressed to participate in by the school,” he alleged, suggesting that the small children were displaying “mindless hooliganism”.
The school did have its defenders, however, such as Kate Hoey, the Brexit campaigner and former Labour MP who now sits in the House of Lords.
“What a wonderful little film,” she said. “Suggest this is a school that understands the power of sport to motivate young people.”
Claire Fox, the left-wing Brexiteer who was until Britain left the European Union a member of the European Parliament for Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, was similarly encouraging.
She wrote: “Credit to teachers, after a year in which kids have had a miserable time – to have involved their pupils in such a spirited, fun film. Not sure I would call critics ‘woke zealots’. But that anyone can see in this a problem, shows a complete late of imagination & empathy.”