“Get your hands off our flags,” shouts a slender young man out the window of his soft-top convertible. My legs turn to jelly. His friend, slightly stockier, leans over to look out the window, a lit cigarette dangling out of his mouth. “We’ve paid good money for them, we’ll have you know.”
There are five of us standing around a lamp-post on an island on the A2 in Faversham, Kent. Me and four middle-aged men with their faces covered. It’s just after 2am on a Saturday morning and I’m out with Faversham’s flag vigilantes – known locally as “the ninjas” – as they begin what they hope to be their final mission at the end of a back-and-forth battle to rid the town of the ocean of St George’s Crosses that appeared at the end of the UK’s hottest summer.
The flags first went up in mid-August, when “Operation Raise the Colours” was launched in Birmingham and quickly spread across the country. It launched a culture war. Those who raised the flags suggested it is nothing more than good old-fashioned patriotism – a way of restoring lost pride in our country. Sceptics felt the sudden show of this national pride – which just so happened to follow a string of anti-asylum protests in Epping and other towns – had undertones of racism, compounded by the fact that the initial campaign was spearheaded by known far-right activists.
Some local authorities began to take them down but, in late August, Kent’s Reform-led council announced that all flags, except for those that hindered the work of the council or put people’s safety at risk, could remain up. On the train to Faversham, many of its surrounding towns are still thick with both England flags and Union Jacks. But take a short drive around Faversham, and all you’ll see are the straggled red and white remnants of St George’s Crosses torn down from lamp-posts on almost every main road.
The young men in the car are smiling, but they’re not friendly. One of the group I’m attached to, James, pulls out his phone and begins recording – a tried-and-tested tactic to prevent confrontations from escalating. “Do you want this one back, then?” says Peter, who’s holding a long, extendable pole with a toilet seat attached to it. It was used to pull down the flag from a 12-foot lamp-post. “Leave it, or we’ll shove that up your arse,” the driver shouts back. No one backs down. The boys in the car decide to leave it and whizz round the roundabout but not before calling us wankers.
The men and I discuss calling it. This is only the first flag, and there’s a long, dark stretch of road to tackle, leading to an estate where the group were confronted in the past. “I don’t feel comfortable continuing,” says Peter, shaking. He’s worried that the car will alert other “flaggers” in the area and the possibility of violence. According to Hank, an older, burly man, it’s a “poor turnout” compared with previous missions. While the ninjas have pulled off most missions unscathed, they’ve been threatened online by some of the people responsible for putting up the flags, who also sent out counter patrols one night.
As Jack, the man who started the ninja group, tells me before the mission: “[One night] we started to de-flag around the station, and a man saw us and made a phone call.” The team went to wait in their car. About seven minutes after the phone call, ten people arrived. “That was all the information I needed.”
They decide to keep going. With a small crew, ladders are out of the question. They’re too clunky and it would be difficult to run if necessary. Often, the ninjas use pine resin to help them scale lamp-posts and remove the flags, as well as a pair of pruning shears to cut them down. But tonight they have just one tool: the flag flusher, a fascinating contraption invented by Peter to grab hard-to-reach banners with little effort.
This tool is essentially a lasso. It’s made out of an extendable pole, toilet seat and rope, fed along the pole and glued to the seat and a single peg. “Once the flag is captured, the rope is then pulled until the flag comes away from the lamp-post,” Peter explains. “If it wasn’t for people threatening us, I’d rather enjoy using it.”
In Faversham, a typically liberal market town outside of Canterbury, some locals expressed concern about the flags being zip-tied to lamp-posts outside their homes. Many of them are put up by a group of activists who wear St George’s Crosses for capes and promote and organise anti-immigration protests, according to social media posts. Flaggers posted videos verbally attacking and intimidating those who objected, and locals have reported being watched and threatened. Some have been doxxed, their homes marked with double flags. More recently, one of the ninjas was attacked after flaggers posted the location of some new flags on Facebook and waited for them to arrive.
“Very quickly, it became clear that people were in a state of fear and hope was low,” says Jack. So he made an announcement in the WhatsApp group for Faversham Against Racism, a group formed to resist the anti-immigration protesters in the town, asking if anybody would like to join a team of de-flaggers.
Eventually, he selected four trusted teammates. On a September night before anti-asylum activists planned to march on Acacia Court, a disused care home turned centre for unaccompanied asylum-seeking teenagers, the group went out at 3am to remove as many flags as possible. The following day, some locals on Facebook thanked “the ninjas”.
On the day before Tommy Robinson’s “Unite the Kingdom” rally in London on 13 September, the ninjas decided to clear the flags from the route of the far-right march to the train station. With a bigger group of ninjas, they deployed a “decoy team” so the actual de-flagging team could remove flags without interference.
“As we started to see hope within the majority of people in Faversham, we thought it was time for a community movement to happen,” says Jack. “On 20 September, we organised a public de-flag of the town while the far right was on another protest in Canterbury. We knew there would be opposition, so we decided to have a decoy group while another smaller group was actually doing the de-flagging. About 100 people turned up.”
It was during the community de-flagging mission that James joined the ninjas. “I’d seen the flags around the town and I felt really angry about it, and I’d been hatching my own plan to take them down,” he says, treading carefully between lamp-posts. “When I woke up the next day, they were gone.” He joined the community de-flagging day and joined the ninjas from there. “I have a lot of love and pride for this town, and this casts a stain on it,” says James, who moved from London over 10 years ago. “This is doing something to clean that stain.”
The Daily Express recently called the ninjas “[a] gang of machete-wielding thugs.” The people I met were mostly middle-class homeowners with moderate politics, wearing jeans and good-quality raincoats. Some are Faversham natives, though there are many Down from London-ers who have moved to the area in the past three decades. There are remnants of their cosmopolitan pasts: as we make our way along the A2, conversation flows between culture and life in the capital.
They claim that removing the flags is less about making a political statement and more about making sure everyone in the community has a say. Their stance is that “empty lamp-posts are neutral” (although many in the group do see the flags, as Hank puts it, as “a ruse and cover for xenophobia”, and a device for dividing people and communities). But more than that, I’m told over and over, it’s about “standing up to bullies”.
The idea, really, is to “demoralise” the flaggers, so that they’ll give up flagging Faversham altogether. In the space of six weeks, the ninjas have removed more than 350 flags, which are being made into bags and sold for charity. I ask if there’s a risk of this turning into a wasteful war of attrition. “I think if we wanted to be really annoying, we would take them down on the houses as well, but we don’t do that,” says Owen, a ninja I meet after the mission. “I believe that the rights of the individual are paramount, and if they want to fly flags on their property and believe whatever they want to believe, that’s absolutely fine by me. But when you go into the communal space, the space shared by all of us – we didn’t consent to them putting these flags up. There’s a small group of people who are very vocal, and I’m just sick of it. Because it doesn’t represent our town.”
As they edge closer to the final flag of the mission, Hank jokes that there’s a symbiosis between flaggers and de-flaggers and I wonder how much enjoyment the de-flaggers get out of their night-time vigilantism. All four men assure me that they would much rather not be doing it. “For one thing, it’s not nice having to wake up in the early hours of the morning,” says Peter, who is visibly sweating from the exertion.
The last flag, back near where the team started, is caught in an apple tree, and takes five attempts to get down. We’re so close to the end and I’m still scared. Each car that passes makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I look up at the brightening sky as the flag is torn away from the lamp-post. By 3.30am, it’s done: this is the last set of Faversham’s original flags. The ninjas’ mission is finished. “We’ve nothing left to prove,” says Peter. “We’ve cleared the whole town.”
Their sense of accomplishment is short-lived, however. The ninjas’ hope that flaggers would lose interest is misplaced: the following week, new flags are put up. With winter approaching, neither side looks like it will back down.
Some names have been changed.
[Further reading: Nigel Farage can be stopped]
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