Raise the colours!
What really motivates the Britons raising and tearing down British flags?
The protests of August 2025 spawned an unprecedented movement to ‘raise the colours.’ Private citizens affixed flags to public lampposts, and painted flags on roundabouts.
Flaggers provoke counter-flaggers, sometimes violent (flaggers in Stevenage were attacked with Molotov cocktails). Both sides come loaded with accusations about intent.
What are their real motivations?
The two sides are clarifying multiple schisms in British society. Some welcome the return of Britishness, others view Britishness as racism. Some are motivated by virtuous patriotism, others frame it as vicious nationalism. Some hope for an awakening of the silent majority, others fear populism. Some view flagging as communitarianism, some as vandalism. Some sense an un-British appetite for reform, others claim Reform UK is agitating divisiveness. Some say they are standing up to authoritarianism, others fear rebellion.
The visibility of British flags has always been political. They fell in the 1960s with decolonization, and again in the 1970s with Europeanization and economic collapse. They rose again in the 1980s with the resurgence of self-reliance, Euroscepticism, and national sovereignty.
However, flags were simultaneously tainted by football hooligans and white nationalists. And more recently the woke has made British flags symbols of colonialism. Kehinde Andrews, a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University condemns ‘raise the colours’ as racist: ‘If you genuinely wanted something to represent an inclusive, anti-racist Britain, you’d make a new flag. It’s a clear symbol of racism.’
But why condemn a flag for how some people use or see it? Flags can still symbolize the nation even if it symbolizes nationalism. And I struggle to see how you can have any symbol of a nation without that symbol being used by nationalists!
British intolerance of Britishness has always seemed more political to me than the intolerants care to admit. Intolerance became politically dominant with the advent of Tony Blair’s administration in 1997. He clarified a cleave between left and right, actually a new ‘progressive consensus’ and everything else. The progressive consensus favours internationalism over nationalism, foreignness over Britishness, open borders over controlled borders, transnationalism over national sovereignty.
The new progressives are the ‘anywheres,’ ‘everywheres,’ or ‘nowheres’ (they identify as citizens of the world or no nation-state in particular), in contrast to the ‘somewheres’ (who prefer to be rooted). The ‘somewheres’ are more likely to overlap the ‘natives.’ ‘Natives’ used to be a politically incorrect term for foreigners abroad, but now refers to self-interested Britons at home. And why not? Yet the other side uses ‘nativism’ as a slur, akin to ‘nationalism.’
Throw in some assumptions that nativists are ‘far right,’ and you make a simplistic bipolarity, between British nationalist, nativist, somewheres, who favour controlled borders and right-wing politics, and internationalists, transnationalists, and foreigners, who favour open borders, who want to be everywhere and nowhere in particular.
The new progressives promoted multiculturalism, except Britishness is relegated below other cultures. The value of Britishness was reduced to its tolerance of other ‘cultures.’ The word ‘cultures’ became a catchall for any ethnicity, race, religion that is not traditionally British.
And, thanks to intersectionality, the Scots and Welsh are sometimes boxed with all the non-white, non-British, non-Christian identities, because they are victims of English ‘colonialism.’ That’s why the British flags that are considered most ‘problematic’ are the English and Union flags, while the Scottish and Welsh flags get a pass. In 2024, a survey found lowest support for flying the English flag than any other.
Northern Ireland is a province, not a nation, so doesn’t have a national flag. The dominant flags there are sectarian: British versus Irish.
Notice that nobody is condemning the flying of Irish flags, even though some terrorists wrap themselves in it.
Britishness was degraded by the new progressives, including the tribute acts that were the nominal ‘Conservative’ governments under David Cameron and Theresa May. The belated triumph of Brexiters, led by Boris Johnson, brought some deviation. In 2019, Conservative voters tended to have much more positive views of British flags, particularly the English flag. But Johnson’s conservatism was always schizophrenic, and Rishi Sunak scuttled the Party.
Before Brexit, our institutions habitually flew the EU flag at equal standing. Since Brexit, the rainbow flag became dominant. Already in 2022, Brendan O’Neill observed that the ever-changing sexuality-and-gender pride flag seemed to be on every street in London. In 2023, a viral video shows municipal workers in Westminster replacing British flags with rainbow flags, five in a row, across Regent Street, while they casually drop a Union Jack on the ground.
Just this year, a school sent home a 12-year-old girl for wearing a Union Jack dress on ‘Diversity Day.’ And police are routinely filmed protecting foreign flaggers while shutting down Union Jack wavers.
So, one should safely conclude from recent history that ‘raise the colours’ is a reaction against long-running denial of Britishness. Adding to the induction is that English flags – the most neglected and maligned of the British flags – were most raised this summer.
But raising the colours is a reaction to not just anti-Britishness and anti-Englishness.
