If it started anywhere it was among the suburban streets off a large roundabout in Weoley Castle, known by local people in this part of south-west Birmingham\u2019s urban sprawl as \u201cthe square\u201d.<\/p>\n
From Falkirk to Folkestone, Harwich to Holyhead, fluttering off the Angel of the North and marked out on a Wiltshire white horse, the national colours of England and the United Kingdom, and Scotland<\/a> and Wales to a lesser extent, have been on show across the country in recent weeks.<\/p>\n The blue and white saltire in Maryhill, Glasgow. Flags are also being hoisted in Scotland and Wales, to a lesser extent. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Explanations abound as to the genesis of the flag-hoisting and street furniture painting. Some associate the outbreak with its most extreme cheerleaders, of whom Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, also known as Tommy Robinson, may be the best-known.<\/p>\n It was certainly an initiative Robinson had been been keen to exploit before his so-called free speech rally in London on Saturday, to which an estimated 110,000 people were drawn and where 26 police officers were injured in skirmishes.<\/p>\n Among the firebrand speakers addressing a turbulent sea of St George crosses and the red, white and blue of the union jack was the French far-right politician \u00c9ric Zemmour, who claimed the UK was enduring \u201cthe great replacement of our European people by peoples coming from the south and of Muslim culture\u201d.<\/p>\n Others, wearily, or indeed angrily, reject claims that there is anything fundamentally \u201cfar-right\u201d or racist about what is going on around the country, regarding condemnation of the flag phenomenon as confirmation that the \u201cuniparty\u201d that has run Britain for decades in cahoots with \u201cthe mainstream media\u201d cannot be trusted. But there is at least one thing on which there is agreement: it was in Weoley Castle (pronounced Wee-lee), a neighbourhood of largely postwar council stock homes, where the first organised flag display got going.<\/p>\n Flags fly in Weoley Castle in Birmingham. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n The key men behind the spark-that-spread, a 45-year-old heating engineer known as Sean Doolan and his brother, have been notably shy about explaining their motivations.<\/p>\n \u201cA group of proud English men with a common goal to show Birmingham and the rest of the country of how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements,\u201d Doolan\u2019s self-styled Weoley Warriors wrote on their crowdfunding page. \u201cGiving hope to local communities that all isn\u2019t lost and they are not alone.\u201d<\/p>\n Any army marches on its stomach, and the \u201clads\u201d, as approving local people describe the 20 or so core members of these warriors, have been nourished by the two ladies buttering white sliced loaf at the Castle Snax cafe on the south side of \u201cthe square\u201d.<\/p>\n Flags on lamp-posts in Weoley Castle in Birmingham. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Between filling the sandwiches, Nicole Moy and Shazza McCormack collect donations for the flags and pass on quietly offered suggestions by local people, anxious about possible illegality, as to where the flaggers should visit next with their ladders and cherrypickers.<\/p>\n Spending time with Moy and McCormack, along with those hoisting the colours elsewhere around the country, and speaking to those who despair at the emergence of the flags and those who celebrate them, is a journey of discovery \u2013 about what is being said and what is being heard.<\/p>\n Ali Raza Khaki, a senior lecturer at the Al Mahdi Islamic studies institute in Weoley Castle, said he had an open-mind, but wondered what lay behind it. \u201cIn principle, it\u2019s fine, but when it\u2019s done with an agenda, that\u2019s where the problem lies. So we don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n Can an angry protest also be a celebration? Can such a visual street-by-street campaign against immigration policy avoid feeling like an attack on first, second and third-generation immigrant families? Is it responsible to use what are supposed to be national symbols of unity to pursue such a campaign? Is it responsible for the authorities to let them carry on, or indeed to stop them?<\/p>\n West Midlands: <\/strong>\u2018That\u2019s all you want, isn\u2019t it: everyone to get on and be happy?\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n It was not the most encouraging of introductions to Castle Snax. \u201cNot talking to you, you tell lies,\u201d said a bearded man sat on one of the two high stools squeezed into the tiny cafe. The aproned women, busy behind a glass counter laden with fillings spooned into plastic containers, giggled.<\/p>\n Nicole Moy (left) and Shazza McCormack at Castle Snax. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cA lady come today with a Scottish flag and a donation, it\u2019s not just the English,\u201d said Moy. \u201cPeople are just loving it. There is a little note, with a clip and some money in there. We had an old lady come in with \u00a32 worth of 5ps.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe raided her money box,\u201d said McCormack.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople are making it a racism thing \u2026\u201d said Moy.<\/p>\n \u201cThey are not doing it for racism\u201d interjected McCormack.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, but I think we are making a bit of a stand,\u201d said Moy.<\/p>\n A stand over what? The suffocating cost of living (\u201cYou go to Asda, it\u2019s an extra 40, 50 quid\u201d), the scale of immigration in recent years and the people on the small boats arriving on the south coast and \u201cgetting everything for free\u201d. Then there is the right of the people here to speak their mind.<\/p>\n \u201cI think people saying that we can\u2019t fly our flag, I think it\u2019s made us a little bit more determined,\u201d said Moy.<\/p>\n It started four months ago. Flags were put up on nearby Bristol Road in response to the proliferation of Palestine flags in other parts of Birmingham in support of those suffering in Gaza, they said. People liked what they saw, and asked for more. Now the warriors were buying pallets of 2,000 flags at \u00a34,500 a time, said Moy.<\/p>\n \u201cThey say it is racist \u2026 You\u2019ve got other people putting up their flags, and we\u2019ve got to accept it,\u201d said one of the cafe\u2019s younger customers popping in for her lunch.<\/p>\n Flags outside homes in Birmingham. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Some had torn down the flags outside their homes, said Moy. But they are soon put up again. Among those donating were people of Islamic faith, it was claimed.<\/p>\n As to Robinson? \u201cI do like certain things he says, but then other things \u2026 he is making out all Muslims are bad. They are not, they are not,\u201d Moy said.<\/p>\n At the back of the cafe, McCormack pulled a face. The former leader of the English Defence League was not for her. The flags were a celebration of a British way of life, she suggested. They provided a much-needed morale boost.<\/p>\n The women understood that Doolan planned to spend what was left of the donations after \u201cit was all done\u201d on a party on the square\u2019s green.<\/p>\n \u201cThe communities are getting together,\u201d McCormack said. \u201cThat\u2019s never happened. That\u2019s all you want, isn\u2019t it, everyone to get on and be happy?\u201d<\/p>\n Westminster: <\/strong> \u2018Its meaning is very determined by its context\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThis does periodically happen,\u201d said Prof Nick Groom, author of The Union Jack: the Story of the British Flag, when asked of precedents to the recent flag-hugging.<\/p>\n The St George\u2019s cross was selected by Oliver Cromwell as his standard in the civil war. The union flag could be said to have been a symbol of the sexual revolution in Britain too. \u201cEvery hip cat had a union jack bed spread, a union jack on the wall, bands draped them over their amplifiers and made jackets out of them \u2013 part of the reason for that was there were so many flags after the war,\u201d said Groom.<\/p>\n It was then associated with skinheads in the 1970s, and rescued by Cool Britannia in the 1990s when Tony Blair conceived his revolutionary reimagining of Britain as a young country.<\/p>\n Then there was Boris Johnson, who appeared to want to put a union flag stamp on the Brexit revolution with an announcement that all civic buildings would hoist it in an expression of national pride.<\/p>\n The key to understanding the pliability of the meaning of the British flags, said Groom, was that unlike in France, where there are rules over the use of the tricolour, or in the US, where there is veneration of the stars and stripes, \u201cthere have never been any laws about how the union jack should be used or flown\u201d.<\/p>\n \u2018There have never been any laws about how the union jack should be used or flown.\u2019 Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n \u201cIts meaning is very determined by its context,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is a responsibility not to let the extremists set the agenda as to what it means.\u201d<\/p>\n Part of that responsibility could be said to lie with those waging political campaigns around the flags.<\/p>\n Gordon Brown, in his first speech as prime minister in 2007, also recognised the government needed to acknowledge pride in place and flesh out what these national symbols meant to avoid them being \u201chijacked by those who seek to work against values of tolerance and respect\u201d.<\/p>\n Yvette Cooper, who moved this week from home secretary to foreign secretary<\/a>, was unattractively accused of \u201cflag shagging\u201d by some on the left of British politics when she disclosed that she had union jack bunting in her home.<\/p>\n Was it not, though, a nod to Brown\u2019s prescience about the fragility of the union, her allies countered? A recognition that showing respect to the flag was to show respect for the norms and values of the people who live in this country and not just foreigners in peril?<\/p>\n Such arguments are nothing new. \u201cIn leftwing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman,\u201d George Orwell wrote more than eight decades ago. \u201cIf you were an intellectual you sniggered at the union jack \u2026 It is obvious that this preposterous convention cannot continue. The Bloomsbury highbrow, with his mechanical snigger, is as out-of-date as the cavalry colonel. A modern nation cannot afford either of them. Patriotism and intelligence will have to come together again.\u201d<\/p>\n The north of England: <\/strong>\u2018Identity is hardwired in people, especially when confronted<\/strong>\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n The flags spread to York a month ago, causing much controversy, and leading to a most peculiar scene in the car park outside Tang Hall working men\u2019s club on Thursday evening.<\/p>\n Flags flying at Tang Hall in York. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n In response to the activities of a group who call themselves Flag Force UK, who have successfully plastered the St George\u2019s cross and union jack across the city, a so-called International Flagging Committee had started going out in the dead of night to put the flags of other countries and movements up alongside the British flags on the lamp-posts of York.<\/p>\n It was not a criticism of the act of flying the home flags, said the group\u2019s spokesperson, a young PhD student at York University, but an attempt to make it more friendly, amid evidence of a surge in racist attacks.<\/p>\n This had not gone down well. Someone connected to Flag Force UK had pulled the flags of the other countries down and taken them hostage. The International Flagging Committee wanted them back. The police had been called. An amnesty had been arranged at the working men\u2019s club.<\/p>\n The arrival of David, a polite man in his late 20s carrying a black bin bag full of the looted international flags, marked a moment of high tension. In the end it was settled in the most British of ways.<\/p>\n There was an apology from David, a university graduate, to the irate landlady of the working men\u2019s club, who was unhappy to have her establishment embroiled in the row.<\/p>\n This was followed by a meandering and lengthy debate between the campaigns about the meaning of the international flags, which concluded with a handshake. Everyone was getting cold in the Yorkshire rain and the International Flagging Committee spokesperson said she was starving.<\/p>\n Earlier in the day, the City of York council leader, Claire Douglas, had announced that all the flags would be taken down, at an estimated cost of \u00a3250,000 to taxpayers.<\/p>\n It was \u201cright to have a deep pride in our home, our city and our country\u201d, Douglas said, but the hoisting of the flags had coincided with a rise in the number of racist attacks.<\/p>\n She said: \u201cMany in our communities are feeling threatened and uncomfortable. Children have been racially abused by adults on their way to school and council staff are being abused simply for doing their jobs of removing graffiti from our roads. This cannot go on.\u201d<\/p>\n A flag flies near the university east campus in York. Photograph: Christopher Thomond\/The Guardian<\/p>\n Why is it going on? \u201cIt\u2019s a protest,\u201d said Joseph Moulton, 22, who, independently of the initiative in Birmingham, came up with the campaign for York with a group of friends. \u201cIt\u2019s a protest against Westminster. It\u2019s a protest against the government who haven\u2019t acted in the interests of the British people and that\u2019s the last 20-plus years of my entire lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n He and his friends had spent time abroad and they concluded in a York pub that \u201cwe just don\u2019t really see our national flag outside sporting events or coronations, when actually it should be used in a civic way\u201d.<\/p>\n They started putting flags on a local estate. It was well received on social media. More people asked them to visit or provide them with flags.<\/p>\n They combined their flagging with picking up litter. \u201cAnd as we were doing that, we had loads of people beeping, people shouting out of windows and they liked it,\u201d Moulton said.<\/p>\n They helped out others around the UK who wanted to follow their lead and set up a website with a live map showing where flags had been put up around the country. It has long since become outdated. They can\u2019t cope with the number of notifications.<\/p>\n Moulton said that people were sick of being called racist for being concerned about the pace of change brought about by net immigration figures that peaked at 906,000 in the year ending June 2023, but have since declined.<\/p>\n \u201cLook at the last 10 years,\u201d he said. \u201cReal wages have gone [down] dramatically. The quality of life is decreasing. The cost of living is increasing. The privatised national infrastructure services like the water and the electric and the trains don\u2019t work. The prices go up. They\u2019re poorly managed.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd then on top of that, you\u2019ve got the migration debate. Brexit was a protest vote against immigration and people voted for Boris on the platform of reducing migration. After both of those votes, migration only increased. The democratic apparatus is not working for people\u201d.<\/p>\n David, drinking a pint after handing over the international flags, said he would not personally protest outside a hotel housing asylum seekers, but that such places were lightning rods for anger at the lack of a plan regarding migration into the UK or care about the impact of new people on the home culture.<\/p>\n