Fifty five years of hurt may or may not be over tonight at Wembley. Italy haven’t lost a match in the last 33, and it could be a massive comedown. But one thing is clear: English nationalism is coming home. In 1966, when England won the World Cup, the flag of choice was the Union Jack. We won’t be seeing much of that tonight.

Perhaps the most abiding image of the Euros was Boris Johnson standing on that massive Cross of St George outside Downing Street. I can’t think of any prime minister who would have done anything similar. Traditional Tories would have thought it vulgar to pose so shamelessly on a national symbol. Liberal Tories like David Cameron would have feared association with the far right, whose emblem that was until very recently.

Indeed, the rehabilitation of The Cross, which used to be the exclusive property of the British National Party, has been quite remarkable. We first saw it displayed prominently during the 1996 Euros, but even then it was regarded with disdain by the football intelligentsia, along with the shameless Second World War nationalism of Piers Morgan’s Daily Mirror. “Achtung, Surrender ... Fritz.”

But all that has changed. Even The Guardian’s ultra-woke columnist, Owen Jones, posted a selfie in front of a Cross of St George, alongside the left-Muslim editor of Novara Media, Ash Sarkar. Oh, just an accident, they say. It just happened to be there. Yeah, right.

All this may well evaporate in a fug of disappointment and self-loathing tonight, but I don’t think it will.

There is something happening here and we do know what it is. We’ve seen it at work in Scotland.

Not only is the flag being reimagined, the whole idea of English Nationalism is being given a new and “progressive” content. English Nationalists used to hate foreigners and sing Rule Britannia – we all knew that. Their flag, unlike our Saltire, was about imperialism, domination and xenophobia.

But thanks to Gareth Southgate, the England flag now represents Respect, multiculturalism, “diversity and inclusion”.

England players take the knee, promote anti-racism and LBGT. Southgate writes about his pride in England being all about BAME. Harry Kane with a rainbow arm band. That is now what the BNP’s old dishcloth is starting to represent, and it flags trouble for the SNP.

As academics like Professor Ailsa Henderson of Edinburgh University, have been saying over the past year, English Nationalism is on the march. Britishness is toast, according to social attitudes surveys. In her recent book Englishness she tends to regard this as a phenomenon largely of the old and the pro-Brexit and people who don’t like foreigners. Like many Scottish academics, Ms Henderson can’t quite get her head round the idea of English Nationalism being progressive.

Alex Salmond more or less invented progressive or “civic” nationalism in the 1990s. First by adopting the policy of Independence in Europe, which horrified many traditional Nats, who didn’t want to leave one union only to join another. In the noughties he rolled out left nationalism: opposition to foreign wars and privatisation, while ending tuition fees, abolishing health charges, and celebrating immigration. His Hugo Young lecture to The Guardian in 2012 called Scotland a “beacon of progressiveness”.

Nicola Sturgeon added LGBT, trans rights, #MeToo and hate crime laws. By adopting the new “woke” agenda, and campaigning tirelessly for Remain, she became a darling of the London media to such an extent that they forgot the SNP is a nationalist party whose paramount objective is to erect a border with England. Anglophobic nationalists on Twitter found themselves regarded as the good guys by the left.

But civic nationalism is a game, like football, that anyone can play – especially a country with a progressive history like England. By shifting the focus from the Union flag (imperialist, racist, slavery) to the English Flag (democracy, Orwell, NHS), we’re seeing the emergence of a new kind of inclusive nationalism emblemised by a football team which is a BAME image of the New England Billy Bragg used to sing about. Don’t knock it. This is a lot better than hooliganism and hating foreigners. The Tartan Army did much the same, remember, and transformed itself from a hoodlum gang to an informal Scottish diplomatic corps.

It is not entirely clear where Brexit fits into all this, since it is regarded – in Scotland at least – as either a spasm of xenophobic nationalism, or a Tory attempt to recreate the glories of the British Empire.

But Brexit was first of all a revolt against globalisation by voters in “left-behind” English provinces. Viewed in class terms, rather than through Remain propaganda, Brexit can be seen as an exercise in civic engagement: a national rebellion against anonymous economic forces hollowing out the UK economy.

It may have been misguided – I certainly believed Brexit was a mistake, if only because it underestimated Brussels’ determination to ensure it would never work. But it won the argument in England at least, and, as in Scotland, showed that voters are increasingly looking towards the nation as their security, and for a sense of belonging in an alienated world.

The pandemic sealed the deal. The ties of Union have been further eroded by the different approaches to the pandemic in the “four nations”. Nicola Sturgeon turned coronavirus into a masterclass in defensive nationalism, portraying Boris Johnson as a reckless toff, who only cares about profit, while she cares about her people. It has been largely successful too with a majority of Scots (and English) voters now regarding independence as inevitable, even if they baulk at the idea of another referendum.

The pandemic reminded us what borders are for: they are not, in the first instance, about hating the “other” and building barriers to trade, but about national security, originally against foreign invasion, then against international capitalism and now against pandemics. English nationalists like the late philosopher Roger Scruton saw the nation state as the largest unit about which we can say “we”. First “we” is the family, then the town or land, finally the nation.

The downside, of course, is that nationalism has a habit of regarding our “we” as morally superior to other “we’s”. Our patriotic identity is always good, whereas your nationalism is narrow and bigoted. We have been playing this game very adroitly in Scotland, under SNP tutelage. Scots are more “social”, more “wise”, more “loving of foreigners”. Yet the first thing you notice in Scotland when you return from England is the lack of black and brown faces here.

Historically, the most remarkable thing about England in recent years has been its lack of national exceptionalism. English intellectuals, and most politicians, have loathed expressions of national identity, unless they are from Scotland or developing countries. The default for the English left has been Emily Thornberry’s ridiculing of white van man for draping his house in English flags.

There is now a battle for the flag, to own the new English Nationalism. Keir Starmer, typically, chose to stand in front of the wrong one: the old, discredited Union Flag. Boris Johnson has more acute populist antennae.

He’s seen the future and it is a Big Red Cross.