Flags keep appearing in places where flags don’t normally go. Some of them are Union Jacks; some St George’s Crosses. Some fly from lamp posts or hang off the side of flyovers; others have been painted directly onto the street. Online, you can find Facebook groups of enthusiastic supporters, fundraisers claiming to be raising cash for more flags, petitions demanding wicked, unpatriotic councils leave the interlopers be.
It feels weird and sinister. In England, you tend to see flags during royal events, or sporting competitions, or occasionally wrapped around Geri Halliwell’s torso. Mostly, though, this mode of jingoism just isn’t a mainstream English “thing”.
So far right activists seem to have spotted an opening. Anti-extremist campaigners Hope Not Hate have revealed that, “While many instances of flags being raised, or crosses being painted… are being carried out by ordinary people inspired by posts on social media, the main organising force behind the campaign is ‘Operation Raise the Colours’.” That’s the group raising the money; its founders include men associated with Britain First. At least some of the flags, reports suggest, were hung at night by men in balaclavas. That does not feel like a spontaneous expression of unthreatening local pride.
This feels like a mark of territorial control: a way of saying this is a place for people like us, not people like you. But there are plenty of people – many of them decent, not all of them white British – who don’t see the problem. They’re just flags, aren’t they? Why would a national symbol make anyone uncomfortable?
So the whole project seems calculated to draw a dividing line between liberals and the left on one side, and those who don’t spend much time thinking about politics on the other – where they will find themselves unexpectedly aligned with the nationalist right.
And it’s put the authorities in a difficult position. Affixing things to highways without express permission, for example, is technically breaking the law. All this pushes councils or the Highways Agency towards removal: in Worcestershire, even a Reform councillor, Karl Perks, has warned against painted flags, on the grounds it’s vandalism.
But, in fulfilling their legal duties, the authorities risk putting themselves on the other side of a debate from a large and vocal section of the public. That goes double if they’ve not taken the same approach to, say, pride flags or Palestinian ones. That might explain why Robert Jenrick has gone out of his way to attack those “Britain-hating councils” who enforced the law by removing flags. (It’s tempting to suggest we club together to find a really big flag and drape it over one of his houses, to see how he likes it.)
It can be irritating to feel like your national identity is one of the few it’s unacceptable to take pride in: it’s not as though France and Spain and a dozen other countries don’t have their own imperial-atrocity strewn history to contend with. But England is not just a recovering imperial power, but by far the largest component of a multi-ethnic, multinational state. Occasional liberal discomfort around vocal expressions of patriotism is the other side of the coin to the success we’ve made of diversity compared to most European countries. That we don’t shove pride in a majority identity down everyone’s throat enables minority ones to feel included.
And the fact we don’t “do” flags means that, when people do, it inevitably looks weird and try-hard – in a way that American or French flag-waving does not. More than that: it does make one wonder about the views on race-relations of the flag-waver. That may be unfair: not everyone who likes, or even hangs, such flags is an extremist. But when the last government’s “plain English guide” to such things, dating from 2021, claimed that flags are a “very British way of expressing joy and pride”, the problem is that they weren’t.
There’s a strong argument for reclaiming such symbols from the far right: if we all embraced the flag, regardless of politics or ancestry, it would lose its power as a symbol of extremism. Change who hangs the flag, and you change its meaning, too. The problem is that doing that overnight would be hard. Doing it at a time when many of those posting them really do intend them to be offensive? That might be impossible.
[See more: Flying planes with the most powerful people in Britain]
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