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’s urban sprawl as “the square”.
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 and Wales to a lesser extent, have been on show across the country in recent weeks.
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.
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.
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 Éric Zemmour, who claimed the UK was enduring “the great replacement of our European people by peoples coming from the south and of Muslim culture”.
Others, wearily, or indeed angrily, reject claims that there is anything fundamentally “far-right” or racist about what is going on around the country, regarding condemnation of the flag phenomenon as confirmation that the “uniparty” that has run Britain for decades in cahoots with “the mainstream media” 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.
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.
“A 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,” Doolan’s self-styled Weoley Warriors wrote on their crowdfunding page. “Giving hope to local communities that all isn’t lost and they are not alone.”
Any army marches on its stomach, and the “lads”, 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 “the square”.
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.
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 – about what is being said and what is being heard.
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. “In principle, it’s fine, but when it’s done with an agenda, that’s where the problem lies. So we don’t know.”
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?
West Midlands: ‘That’s all you want, isn’t it: everyone to get on and be happy?’
It was not the most encouraging of introductions to Castle Snax. “Not talking to you, you tell lies,” 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.
“A lady come today with a Scottish flag and a donation, it’s not just the English,” said Moy. “People 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 £2 worth of 5ps.”
“She raided her money box,” said McCormack.
“People are making it a racism thing …” said Moy.
“They are not doing it for racism” interjected McCormack.
“No, but I think we are making a bit of a stand,” said Moy.
A stand over what? The suffocating cost of living (“You go to Asda, it’s an extra 40, 50 quid”), the scale of immigration in recent years and the people on the small boats arriving on the south coast and “getting everything for free”. Then there is the right of the people here to speak their mind.
“I think people saying that we can’t fly our flag, I think it’s made us a little bit more determined,” said Moy.
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 £4,500 a time, said Moy.
“They say it is racist … You’ve got other people putting up their flags, and we’ve got to accept it,” said one of the cafe’s younger customers popping in for her lunch.
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.
As to Robinson? “I do like certain things he says, but then other things … he is making out all Muslims are bad. They are not, they are not,” Moy said.
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.
The women understood that Doolan planned to spend what was left of the donations after “it was all done” on a party on the square’s green.
“The communities are getting together,” McCormack said. “That’s never happened. That’s all you want, isn’t it, everyone to get on and be happy?”
Westminster: ‘Its meaning is very determined by its context’
“This does periodically happen,” said Prof Nick Groom, author of The Union Jack: the Story of the British Flag, when asked of precedents to the recent flag-hugging.
The St George’s 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. “Every 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 – part of the reason for that was there were so many flags after the war,” said Groom.
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.
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.
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, “there have never been any laws about how the union jack should be used or flown”.
“Its meaning is very determined by its context,” he said. “There is a responsibility not to let the extremists set the agenda as to what it means.”
Part of that responsibility could be said to lie with those waging political campaigns around the flags.
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 “hijacked by those who seek to work against values of tolerance and respect”.
Yvette Cooper, who moved this week from home secretary to foreign secretary, was unattractively accused of “flag shagging” by some on the left of British politics when she disclosed that she had union jack bunting in her home.
Was it not, though, a nod to Brown’s 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?
Such arguments are nothing new. “In leftwing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman,” George Orwell wrote more than eight decades ago. “If you were an intellectual you sniggered at the union jack … 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.”
The north of England: ‘Identity is hardwired in people, especially when confronted’
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’s club on Thursday evening.
In response to the activities of a group who call themselves Flag Force UK, who have successfully plastered the St George’s 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.
It was not a criticism of the act of flying the home flags, said the group’s spokesperson, a young PhD student at York University, but an attempt to make it more friendly, amid evidence of a surge in racist attacks.
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’s club.
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.
There was an apology from David, a university graduate, to the irate landlady of the working men’s club, who was unhappy to have her establishment embroiled in the row.
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.
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 £250,000 to taxpayers.
It was “right to have a deep pride in our home, our city and our country”, Douglas said, but the hoisting of the flags had coincided with a rise in the number of racist attacks.
She said: “Many 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.”
Why is it going on? “It’s a protest,” said Joseph Moulton, 22, who, independently of the initiative in Birmingham, came up with the campaign for York with a group of friends. “It’s a protest against Westminster. It’s a protest against the government who haven’t acted in the interests of the British people and that’s the last 20-plus years of my entire lifetime.”
He and his friends had spent time abroad and they concluded in a York pub that “we just don’t really see our national flag outside sporting events or coronations, when actually it should be used in a civic way”.
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.
They combined their flagging with picking up litter. “And as we were doing that, we had loads of people beeping, people shouting out of windows and they liked it,” Moulton said.
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’t cope with the number of notifications.
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.
“Look at the last 10 years,” he said. “Real 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’t work. The prices go up. They’re poorly managed.
“And then on top of that, you’ve 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”.
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.
He quoted the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who said that Yugoslavian people always made a joke of each other but then “the jokes stopped and eight years later war began”.
“Identity is hardwired in people, especially when confronted,” David said. “Things are very tense. I think the riots of last summer were a precursor of something”.
The south coast: ‘It raises the heat’
Just before Liphook services on the A3, about 30 miles north of Portsmouth, a truck with a crane has been parked on the motorway bridge. A grubby union jack hangs lifelessly from the metal arm that hoists it. It has an unfortunate unintentional ugliness.
The Royal Beach hotel, a Victorian whitewashed hotel in Southsea, Portsmouth, was once the pride of the area. Today it is covered in scaffolding and used by the Home Office to house asylum seekers. A perimeter of St George’s cross flags directly surround the hotel.
“It’s like they are saying: ‘Don’t come out,’” said Theresa, 52, who used to work in social housing, as she looked out from a cafe on the south parade pier opposite the scene.
Wendy Regan, 59, a cleaner for the Co-op, said she despaired about the failure to stop the boats in the Channel, as she stopped for a cigarette. “But, no, that’s rude,” she added as she looked up at the flags standing sentinel.
Mosen Kahali, 35, who came to the UK three months ago from Iran, is living in the Royal Beach. He knew the St George’s cross only from the protests. “Not good,” he said in broken English. “There are a lot of protests in Iran.”
All across the south coast of England, there have been flags and controversy. Nick Ireland, the leader of Dorset council, faced a torrent of abuse when he called out those daubing the cross on mini-roundabouts.
“All I said is that you shouldn’t be defacing public property and that for some people, they find it intimidating,” he said. “It’s true, because I’ve had people contacting me saying: ‘You’re spot on.’ One of my councillors finds the flying of the flag intimidating because their parents found that intimidating from the time of the BNP. Amusingly, I have been told to go back to my own country, and I’m a scouser.”
In Exeter, Dr Faith Stafford, a counsellor and psychotherapist, said it was the context that concerned her.
“It is combined with the protests outside the hotels, that’s where the problem is,” she said. “Waving St George’s flag when England is playing football doesn’t threaten anybody.”
Her own therapists at her clinic had told her that they were “keeping out of the public eye” at the moment. “It raises the heat,” she said.
Leigh Frost, the leader of Cornwall council, had just returned from the Great North Run in the north-east of England. He was “shocked” by the number of flags that had been put up in the rest of the country.
“We had someone defile a war memorial, and I think pretty much that just stopped it dead here,” he said. “But people are fed up and I think they’ve got every right to be fed up, if I’m honest. They’re showing their frustrations, I think – from my point of view as a Liberal Democrat, I think they’re probably targeting their frustration at the wrong people. Unfortunately, we’ve had a lot of stoking up of that, of that hatred.”