Across the country Union Jacks and St George’s crosses are being hoisted in public spaces, and painted on roundabouts.
The national campaign, dubbed Operation Raise the Colours, was sparked by outcry after Birmingham City Council and Tower Hamlets removed unauthorised flags that had been littering the areas.
The media storm has drawn in Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose spokesperson said that “patriotism will always be an important thing to him”. Even US Vice President JD Vance waded in, urging the nation to “push back against the crazies” who want to pull down the flags.
But please do not be fooled. Far from being an innocent show of national pride, this campaign comes from a long tradition of far-right action that has used the flags to intimidate ethnic minorities.
My mother, who was born to mixed parents in the UK, and my father who came from Jamaica as a teenager, both had to deal with flag-waving National Front demonstrations which were bathed in the Union Jack.
I grew up with the spectre of the British National Party and English Defence League using the St George’s cross as a visual weapon. So deeply connected are both flags to the slogan “Keep Britain White” that if I see either of them on a pub, I know better than to darken their doorstep.
It is no coincidence that these so-called protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers, which have been pounced on and exploited by the far right, are awash with the flags. Nor that fascist group Britain First has donated hundreds of flags to the cause. In fact, advocacy group Hope Not Hate has reported that Operation Raise the Colours has, in part, been organised by supporters of Tommy Robinson, who have been crowdfunding to buy and distribute the flags.
Tower Hamlets was one of the first neighbourhoods to be beset with flags and it is also one of the most diverse in the country. Message received loud and clear.
I’m from Birmingham and the neighbourhoods of Northfield and Weoley Castle are notorious for their unfriendliness towards the majority of the city. No one here is surprised that they were two of the first neighbourhoods to hoist the flags, and they are now so drenched in them I know many people (myself included) who are making more effort than usual to avoid to them.
There is a straight line from the virulently anti-immigrant far-right protests of the past to the current spate of flag-waving. Yet they are not just waving the flags; they are being used to send a message, to make a “protest” about what Britain has lost… to migrants.
This is not just about the flags being hijacked by the far right. For one thing, anti-immigrant sentiment has become part of the pitch for nearly all of the main political parties. The truth is the flags have been long been used to convey the racist message that Englishness means white. The same flags flew on the ships that enslaved my ancestors and colonised a quarter of the world.
The irony is that Britain was never white, and its success has only ever been possible because of the blood, sweat and tears of hundreds of millions of people in former colonies. The reason that British cities are so diverse is because, as scholar A Sivanandan put it, “we are here, because you were there”. So yes, waving one of the British flags in some kind of protest and claim of purity is almost always a racist act.
I’m actually struggling to think of a positive act of waving the flag. Whenever they are this visible it is usually because of the Royal Family, when the nation is celebrating the literal embodiment of white supremacy. Or the football, some of whose travelling fans are so toxic we are just waiting for some terrible headlines to erupt onto the front pages (and hoping that no Black players miss a penalty so we don’t have to confront the realities of racism).
The closest to a modern embrace of the flag would be Mo Farah, draping himself in the Union Jack at the Olympics. But even that image is hollow. Were he not a successful athlete he may have been a candidate for a deportation flight to Rwanda, after it was revealed he was trafficked to the UK as a child illegally and fraudulently obtained British citizenship.
We can have a debate about the merits of the flag and national identity. But now is not the time. We must understand that nothing good can come from the so-called “natives” raising the flags in “protest”, and plastering them across public space. The flags should be a warning sign to all of us of the shift to the right that can only be spell danger ahead for those of us who are not white. To blindly join in is to be complicit.
Dr Kehinde Andrews is an academic, activist and author. His latest book is The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule to World