How flying the flag became a symbol of revolt

A nation in which hoisting the national flag has become somewhere between a provocation and an act of resistance probably isn’t in rude health. But that’s where we’re at in Britain in 2025, with local councils hastily ripping down England and Union flags, put up by groups of grassroots activists.

Hot on the heels of the pink ladies’ protests outside migrant hotels, Operation Raise the Colours is the latest organic, decidedly patriotic, social-media-driven initiative whose success can be measured in the outsized, outraged, utterly predictable reaction it is receiving. While councils continue to remove the flags, on health-and-safety and property-maintenance grounds, identitarian rent-a-gob Kehinde Andrews was invited on to Good Morning Britain yesterday to insist that the Saint George’s Cross is racist and this campaign is a faux-patriotic stunt by the fash. Presumably, Dr Shola was busy.

The sudden, nationwide explosion of Operation Raise the Colours is basically all the proof you need that this isn’t being driven by the far right – a pathetic fringe in British political life that has long struggled to fill a minibus. Apparently beginning in Birmingham, the campaign has since spread to Swindon, Bradford, Newcastle, Norwich and London. Like the migrant-hotel protests, it seems to be decentralised, leaderless, rallied on Facebook and group chats.

It’s a fascinating, bottom-up campaign against a now undeniable, galling double standard – that in ‘multicultural’ Britain all identities are to be celebrated except for Englishness and Britishness. Tellingly, England and Union flags began emerging in Northfield in south Brum around the same time that the Library of Birmingham was lit up in green and white for Pakistan’s independence day. While Birmingham City Council was quick to take down the England flags – insisting these fluttering pieces of polyester, zip-tied 10-feet-high on to lampposts, posed an intolerable risk to public safety – a leaked email has revealed local officials were so scared to remove the ubiquitous Palestine flags that have emerged in the city since the Israel-Hamas war began that council workers were given extra security.

So it is in Tower Hamlets. Since 2022, the east London borough has been run by mayor Lutfur Rahman’s Aspire party, a pro-Gaza, overwhelmingly Bangladeshi outfit that is always happy to play pork-barrell identity politics, in an area that is 40 per cent Muslim and 35 per cent Bangladeshi. Hence, when Palestine flags began to appear across the borough, the council dragged its feet for months, claiming removing them would ‘destabilise community cohesion’. It only relented when forced to by an independent lawyers’ report, arguing the flags contravened planning laws, and threats of legal action. Rahman, begrudgingly announcing their removal, insisted the flags weren’t divisive and lamented ‘Islamophobic smears’ on the borough.

Wouldn’t you know it, Tower Hamlets council was markedly more decisive when those England and Union flags began appearing on those selfsame lampposts. For much of the past week, locals have been playing a game of cat and mouse with council workers, with flags appearing, being taken down, before being raised again. There have also been some ugly shouting matches. Call me a cynic, but I dare say this more robust response isn’t entirely down to the council’s new, hard-earned understanding of the Town and Country Planning Act. Rahman, for one, has been noticeably hesitant to defend the flag-hoisters this time around.

It speaks to the mush that multiculturalism has made of many people’s minds that, of all the flags, those of the nation in which we all live are treated as divisive – as some sinister expression of white ethnic aggro, rather than standards to which we all might rally. Claims that the Saint George’s Cross or Union flag remain irrevocably corrupted by the dark days of the National Front or the British National Party feel rather retro, not to mention circular. After all, if you’re that worried about fascists co-opting your flag, maybe don’t go around insisting your flag is synonymous with fascism? This is really about a queasy discomfort with Englishness and Britishness among not just unabashed minority sectarians, but also white elites who are pickled in multicultural identity politics and gripped by national self-loathing.

There is always a danger that a patriotic pushback against multiculturalism, mass migration and their many discontents could curdle around the edges into a kind of mirror-image ethnic politics of victimhood. The fart-sniffing freaks of the Very Online right are certainly keen to push things in that direction. But at the migrant-hotel protests spiked has covered, which are always a sea of England and Union flags, I haven’t seen much of that at all. You can often barely get a question out with most demonstrators before they feel moved to tell you – in no uncertain terms – that they are absolutely not ‘far right’ and that their opposition to illegal migration has nothing to do with race, often peppered with glowing reference to their mixed-race kids and grandkids. When we were filming at one of the Canary Wharf demonstrations last month, we were struck to find a sizeable contingent of incensed legal migrants.

If you’ll forgive the obligatory Orwell quote, recent events have put me in mind of the great man’s encapsulation of patriotism, from his wartime opus, The Lion and the Unicorn. He called it ‘a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same. It is a bridge between the future and the past.’ What is stirring across the country is not a revolt against a Britain that looks very different in 2025 than it did in 1941, but against changes that no one asked for, and are blowing up the bridges that any nation relies upon.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater