A word about flags
The St George’s Cross, a simple red cross on a white background, is one of the oldest national symbols in Europe. It began as the emblem of a Christian martyr, St George, a Palestinian soldier serving in the Roman Army in Turkey turned legend. It was a trade flag belonging to the Kingdom of Genoa that allowed safe passage before passports. It was carried into battle by crusaders in the Middle Ages. Later, much later in fact, it became the flag of the Kingdom of England, flown on ships, castles, and eventually woven into the Union Jack.
Let’s get one thing straight: we don’t 'hate the flag'. We’re not offended by it, we’re not 'triggered' by it. No one is. What is more is no one is campaigning to take it down. Most of us don't give a flying shit about it. For decades, the flag of St George or the Union Jack was something you saw at a football match, or hanging in the bunting at a Jubilee street party. It was a shared national symbol, a bit of decoration for a big occasion, something you brought out on special occasions.
But what’s happening now is different. The flag has been turned into something else: a tool, a prop, a weapon. Instead of a symbol of community, it has been turned into a badge of division, hammered onto lamp posts, stencilled onto roundabouts, and strung across suburban lawns like a warning sign that tells us morons live here. That shift didn’t come from nowhere. It was manufactured. And the people behind it are not the ones doing the flag-waving.
Who drove this transformation? Start with the billionaire press, the Sun, the Mail, the Express endlessly running stories about immigrants, Muslims, or 'woke lefties' supposedly hating the flag'. A narrative designed to whip up resentment, so people forget who’s really robbing them blind. Rupert Murdoch and his successors don’t pay tax here, but they’ll happily flog you a cheap sense of belonging wrapped in red and white.
The Raising the Colours campaign is fronted as though it were a spontaneous outpouring of English pride. Scratch the surface, though, and you’ll find it’s been whipped up by the likes of Paul Golding, Tommy Robinson and Andy Saxon, the usual suspects of Britain’s far-right ecosystem. These aren’t community organisers; they’re professional agitators, people who’ve built careers out of stoking division and turning the flag into a tribal marker. Their project isn’t about love of country, it’s about control. And behind them lurk the familiar financiers: US alt-Right outfits happy to pump money into Britain’s culture wars if it keeps people too busy arguing about flags to notice who’s really hoarding the wealth and fucking the over. Quick! Look over there! a small boat!!!
Then there’s Nigel Farage and the Reform Party. They’ve spent years trying to make the flag theirs, parading it on TV backdrops and at rallies as though it were the property of one political tribe. Look at CPAC in the US, look at Trump’s MAGA rallies, and you’ll see the blueprint: flood the stage with flags, shout about 'patriotism' and use it to cover up an agenda that’s about dividing working people while the wealthy walk away with everything.
And now even parts of the Conservative and Labour parties are at it, competing to see who can pose in front of the biggest flag. Starmer’s Labour HQ even issued guidance that MPs should have the Union Jack behind them in interviews. Why? Not because ordinary people demanded it, but because political consultants think it plays well with a certain demographic they’re desperate not to lose.
The irony is that flag shagging and obsession with symbol is not really very British. We’re not Americans. We don’t salute the flag before breakfast. Our tradition is muttering, queuing, and quietly rolling our eyes at anyone who takes themselves too seriously. That’s why the sudden cult of the flag looks so false, so desperate.
Because it isn’t pride. It’s insecurity. It isn’t belonging. It’s the fear of losing something that was never yours to begin with. It's screen printed fragile masculinity made in China. And that fear has been stoked, deliberately, by people who profit from division.
So when you see a street bristling with St George’s Crosses, you have to ask: what does it actually say? Does it say 'community' or does it say: 'I swallowed what Murdoch sold me'. Does it say 'pride' Or does it say: 'I’m dancing to Farage’s tune'.
Do you really want to be associated with that? Do you want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with rent-a-gob racists, tax-dodging billionaires, and the kind of politicians who use the flag as a smokescreen while they flog off your NHS, your jobs, and your kids future? Because when the flag is reduced to that, a banner for division, a mask for insecurity, a stage-prop for liars, a badge of honour for fucking idiots, a gammon rallying point, it stops being a symbol of a nation. It becomes a confession. A confession that the only thing you’ve got left is a piece of cloth on a stick.
And frankly, that’s sad.
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