The England football team’s magnificent start to their World Cup campaign has understandably led to a surge in national pride.

After Harry Kane and his happy warriors secured their memorable victory over Croatia, a mood of celebration mixed with heartfelt relief has swept the country.

As an immigrant to Britain from South Africa, I have been only too happy to share in the jubilation. England is my adopted home and I’ve always tried to abide by Britain’s traditions, customs and rituals.

It is not for me, as a new arrival, to question aspects of the British character or challenge features of its island story. On the contrary, I believe it is a duty of migrants to show respect for the people who have welcomed them. That is why I revel in the sense of belonging that moments like this can bring.

Indeed, there is perhaps nothing in British culture that unites people of all classes and creeds so successfully as sporting glory. It should be said that the same spirit of togetherness prevails in Scotland, where the national side has qualified for the World Cup finals for the first time in 28 years and, like England, made a winning start, with the defeat of Haiti in their opening game.

Yet not everyone is pleased with this patriotic frenzy. The great American journalist H. L. Mencken once described puritanism as ‘the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy’.

Those words can be applied to the woke brigade in modern Britain who see the Flag of St George and the Union Flag not as inspirational symbols of sporting endeavour and national solidarity but as xenophobic and offensive provocations that alienate ethnic minorities.

Tragically, that is the attitude of my own local county council here in Oxfordshire. Run by earnest Liberal Democrats, who seem unable to look at anything that smacks of Britishness without getting a fit of the vapours, the council is seeking an injunction to ban flags – including that of St George – from highway lampposts.

The apparent justification for this draconian move is that such flags stoke ‘fear and division within our communities’, while their display amounts to ‘an act of intimidation’.

Only someone who has drunk deeply from the well of wokery could come up with nonsense like that. There is nothing intrinsically intimidating or frightening about Britain’s national emblems.

But to virtue signallers brimming with self-righteousness, the iconography of our heritage and identity is unacceptable because it is tainted by past associations with imperialism or racism or exploitation.

The British Empire was not perfect but its faults have to be weighed in the balance against other historic achievements such as the spread of individual liberty, the pioneering of parliamentary democracy and the defeat of Nazi tyranny.

Moreover, it is the height of arrogance to prevent the expression of patriotism – one of the most essential elements of human nature – simply because of some forebears’ deeds.

That twisted mentality is a recipe for permanent self-loathing. The great British patriot George Orwell summed it up in a famous passage in his book The Lion And The Unicorn, written at the height of the Second World War: ‘England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In Left-wing circles it is always felt there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution.’

Woke campaigners often complain that the Flag of St George and the Union Flag have been hijacked by movements such as Raise The Colours, which encourages people to fly the flag on lampposts and public buildings. It is an argument that makes me furious because it is the same progressive activists who have encouraged people to take matters into their own hands through their abandonment of our national symbols.

Their distortion of the concept of patriotism has allowed repugnant figures such as Tommy Robinson to portray himself as the true defender of Britain’s identity when he is nothing of the sort. The thugs who caused such mayhem in Belfast and Southampton this month are wholly unrepresentative of the tolerant, decent British public.

Others, too, disdain the pride most of us feel in our national flags. There is a large, querulous body of Muslim hardliners who, despite settling here, thrive on sectarianism and grievance, constantly objecting to our British way of life and seeking to turn this country into an outpost of the Middle East. They prefer the hijab to the Union Flag, sharia courts to Magna Carta and blasphemy laws to freedom of speech. The second group that I despise are those radicals who work in academia, the quangos, the media and the civil service peddling sophisticated hatred of this country.

Worshipping the doctrine of diversity, obsessed with identity politics and hierarchies of victimhood, they have tremendous double standards in that they seem to admire every culture except their own.

One of the worst is Professor Kehinde Andrews of Birmingham City University’s black studies department. He has spread his gospel of discord, claiming that the Union Flag is a symbol of racism and that Winston Churchill was as big a menace to the world as Adolf Hitler.

But he has less to say about notorious African tyrants and mass murderers such as Idi Amin of Uganda and Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic who massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent victims.

Professor Andrews’ views are lapped up by broadcasters and publishers because he can be guaranteed to generate controversy wherever he goes, but it is disgraceful that he has any influence over the public agenda.

It is time that the mainstream of politics and public life took charge again. Unrepresentative troublemakers and cynical manipulators should no longer be in control. The majority should not be silent any longer. We should reclaim the Flag of St George and the Union Flag from the mob and fly them proudly over our streets once more.

The World Cup is the perfect moment for the recapture of our national symbols. Instead of listening to the burghers of Oxfordshire in all their defeatist gloom, we should be embracing our British and English patriotism. There is nothing sinister or reactionary about such a force.

On the contrary, it represents a noble ideal, one that encourages sacrifice for the greater good. Along with Parliament and the monarchy, our national flags are indicators of what it means to be British.

Dr Taj Hargey is provost of the Oxford Institute for British Islam