Amusingly, BBC viewers and the Flag Institute have picked up on a minor gaffe at the signing of new trade deals between El Gordo, Peter Mandelson and the Chinese Prime Minister.
On the desk they posed behind for photos, the tacky plastic union flag was flown upside down which is historically a symbol of distress. 
In the case of the union flag which looks almost identical both ways up (the white diagonal lines are slightly thicker on one side of the red ones) it’s a subtle way of telling anyone who’s looking that you’re in a spot of bother that Johnny Foreigner is unlikely to notice.
The Flag Institute and the BBC both assume that it was a gaffe – that the flag was flown upside down in error – but was it? Was it perhaps a freudian slip, the Trade Minister’s flunky responsible for putting out the flags subconsciously turning it into a distress signal? Or was Mandy asking for help? In the BBC’s picture (right), Gordo is standing menacingly behind him and Mandy doesn’t look like the cat that got the trade deal that’s going to save the economy. Was there a Chinese midget under the desk with electrodes attached to Mandy’s scrotum? Is there a Chinese SWAT team just out of shot?
Technorati Tags: Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, China, Union Flag
Maybe they are stupid uneducated knob gobblers who did not know the flag could be upside down?
I did not know it could be upside down until i read the article on the BBC
As the plastic flags were 99% certainly made in China I reckon Chinese Gordon and Mandy Manchu were either ignorant of the Union Flag’s design or, more likely, couldn’t be bothered. And the Chinese were having an inscrutable laugh at our expense – “We think in centuries and we’ve just got our own back for the Opium Wars and the humbling of China by Britain from the nineteenth century onwards.”
Had the same problem with a German colleague who outside his apartment put the Syrian flag upside down.
Visitors were either amused or indignant that an international consultant had not done his homework.
Most took it as his ignorance.
Judging by our totally failed economy under Stalin Brown we need some of their $1 trillion reserve. Chinese Marshall Aid?
Axel: I\’m not all surprised.
That aside: Technically, as I understand things, there is no Br*tish flag: The Union Flag is actually a royal flag and what we all think of as the Union Flag is literally the royal jack, which is why it is illegal to fly it on any vessel other than from the jackstaff of a royal warship, except with a white border on certain other vessels, such as those belonging to Trinity House (I think) and Customs and Excise (I think). It is the monarch\’s \’house flag\’.
The flag that everyone recognises is actually the naval version and that used by the army originally had white bands of equal width all round.