From patriotic to racist — can England flag ever be reclaimed?

It’s hard to pinpoint when it happened — the exact moment when the England flag went from being a benign show of patriotism to a dog-whistle call to racism. At one point, the St George’s flag was even considered the “safe”, more inclusive alternative to the union jack, the latter having been co-opted by the National Front in the late 1970s.

Football was arguably the driving force behind this: in a 2019 speech, former Labour leader Ed Miliband said: “Since Euro ’96, English football fans have helped to reclaim the flag of St George from the BNP.”

Sociologists Paul Bagguley and Yasmin Hussain, meanwhile, described in their 2005 essay, “Flying the Flag for England? Citizenship, Religion and Cultural Identity among British Pakistani Muslims”, how St George’s flags were displayed from the windows, shops and taxis of Bradford’s British Pakistani population during the 2002 World Cup.

“The St George’s flag was felt to represent a multi-ethnic Britain, whereas the union jack is associated with colonialism and white racism,” they wrote.

But somewhere between Labour MP Emily Thornbury’s infamous 2014 tweet, Brexit, a run of anti-immigration PMs and the swift rise of the Reform party, something shifted in the national consciousness. It’s no coincidence that, in many of the recent anti-asylum hotel protests, the St George’s flag features prominently. No, it might not seem fair that to fly our country’s flag is tantamount to throwing your lot in with the far right — yet the connotations are now hardwired. So found a Worcestershire community group recently, when their campaign to fundraise to put England flags on every lamp post in their village quickly drew censure and accusations of right-wing sympathies.

The Wythall Flaggers fundraising page has mustered up over £3,500 in pledges, to be used to cover “the local community in England flags as this is home and we should be patriotic and proud ... We need help to cover every street in Wythall with our beautiful St George’s cross”. The campaign, reads the page, “is NOT racist never has been never will be”. The group claims to “have members of the community of all ethnicities and religions stopping by and praising what we are doing so please don’t call this racist”. And indeed, as Bridget Byrne, a professor of sociology at the University of Manchester and the director of the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity, puts it: “A flag doesn’t hold any inherent meaning — it’s about why you put it up and what’s behind it.” But, clearly, waving a flag at a football match for the England team is very different to putting flags up en masse around the country.

Perhaps if this enthusiastic show of national pride were an isolated incident, it would be easier to see it as such. But the Wythall Flaggers are part of a wider movement; Manchester Road in Tower Hamlets, east London, was lined with St George’s flags over the weekend, while residents in Weoley Castle and Northfield, near Birmingham, did likewise. At least six mini-roundabouts in the Birmingham area were painted white with red crosses. The councils in both areas removed the majority of flags, citing health and safety and explaining that it’s their responsibility to monitor and maintain council infrastructure. “Where flags are attached to council-owned infrastructure without permission, they may be removed as part of routine maintenance,” said a Tower Hamlets council spokesperson.

What’s wrong with a few flags, you might think? In one of those strange coincidences that life throws up, as I was literally writing this article I overheard a woman on the train talking about the story. “Who cares if they put them up?” she said in exasperation to her friend. “Get a life!” The thing is, however much these groups might claim to want to separate flag from politics, the support they’ve attracted paints a very different picture. The mass flag hanging is thought to be part of “Operation Raise the Colours”, an online movement encouraged by none other than Britain’s own face of the far right, Tommy Robinson, alongside far-right group Britain First (which has allegedly donated 200 flags thus far). In this instance, flying the flag appears to point to a “racialised notion of what England is — it’s about distinguishing ‘Englishness’, an imagined ethnically white identity of Englishness, which doesn’t include multiculturalism,” says Byrne.

The campaign has also received backing from Reform UK, who now have control of 10 local authorities in England. They pledged on Monday that they would not take down union or St George flags, calling them “symbols of unity and inclusion”, and have also described troubling plans to increase the flag’s prominence by banning “local authorities from flying any flags aside from the union jack or the St George’s Cross in councils they control”. And yet it is very hard to make the case that the England flag represents inclusion. “No,” is Birmingham City University’s Black studies professor’s simple answer when asked whether it’s possible to separate patriotism from racism when it comes to the St George’s flag. “Nobody who has a proper understanding of what it’s used for and what it means would pretend otherwise,” says Kehinde Andrews, who has also authored the book The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism still Rule the World. “It’s a clear symbol of racism.”