04.09.2025

Trying to capture the flag

Groups of rightwing men want to plaster their towns with the Union Jack and St George’s Cross flags. Should the left respond, asks Harley Filben, by inventing its own version of patriotism?

They congregate, in smallish groups and patriotic gear; usually men, young and middle-aged, and usually (but not exclusively) white. They do so mostly in small towns and exurbs (Basildon, Bishop’s Stortford ...). Their purpose is to fly the flag, of the union or England - or, failing that, glue a cheap plasticky one somewhere prominent.

Such is ‘Operation Raise the Colours’. Its meaning is disputed, as one might expect: supporters are extremely keen to emphasise a mere ‘innocent desire’ to see the national banner proudly on display. Opponents cast it as an outlier phenomenon of the wider far right, and in truth find very little difficulty in linking leading figures to extant far-right outfits like Reform UK or Britain First.

A useful article in The Times, by Ed Halford and others, interviews a bunch of people participating in these activities, and finds a rather familiar set of anxieties in the driver’s seat. Some seem to be labouring under the illusion that overt displays of patriotism are somehow banned. “It is our country … why shouldn’t we be allowed to fly our flags?” asks a young man in Bishop’s Stortford. (“Allowed” by whom? How many union flags did Sir Keir Starmer awkwardly stand in front of during the campaign season last year?) This man is also “concerned” about illegal immigration: ”We have over a million people here we do not know.”¹

The latter seems to be the motivating question for the local leader of the demonstration - a certain Lacey Kelf:

Kelf, who has previous convictions from 2020 for directing racial abuse at police officers and attacking a former partner, said he was angry that “undocumented males” had been allowed into the UK. He claimed that homeless British men and veterans were sleeping rough on the streets, while a “load of rapists, paedophiles and wrong’uns” were in hotels “buying PlayStations”.

Some others quoted seem to have even vaguer grievances than being allowed (or not) to fly the flag - one young man in a Worcestershire village complaining that “we feel as though we are being ignored by our own government and we feel the future for our country is diminishing rapidly”.

The opponents of this little movement have a rather different spin on things. The flag protests (‘protest’ seems the appropriate word here) are not dissociable from the rise in support for Reform UK, which has led opinion polls consistently for many months. They take place concurrently with raucous demonstrations outside hotels housing asylum-seekers, which have become a flashpoint in general politics over recent weeks. It is, bluntly, not much more than a year since similar protests following on from the Southport massacre spilled over into violent disorder in many cities. In such a context, flying the flag starts to look like an act of intimidation.

The rightwing stereotype of the metropolitan progressive is mostly, but not wholly, false. Adherents of progressive politics are shy of patriotism, on the whole - many, including ourselves and other conscious proletarian internationalists, steadfastly oppose it. A friend of mine - a run-of-the-mill progressive active in the Palestine movement locally - told me of a recent protest where a group of just such red-blooded English patriots (“flag-shaggers”, as she put it) tried to take down the Palestine flags and threatened violence against one of the other protestors, who was attempting to de-escalate the situation.

Even without some general theory of imperialism or whatever, many do instinctively understand that intense patriotism is at least correlated with reactionary politics. Such well-founded suspicion of overt patriotism is readily produced as evidence for prosecution in the yellow press: these people hate Britain, and above all they hate you, salt-of-the-earth sons and daughters of Albion. This is a cycle, and in present circumstances it rolls around to the benefit, over time, of the chauvinist right.

The response of the government - yet another laughably forced Starmer photo-op surrounded by flags, and another wave of ostentatious, anti-migrant legislation - will tend to accelerate this process (as is rumoured to be the objective of Morgan McSweeney, who is supposed to favour a showdown between Labour and Reform at the next time of asking).

Progressive?

That this is a real problem need not be denied, and so it is unsurprising that efforts are periodically made on the left to align us with patriotism, to overdetermine inchoate patriotic feeling with socialist or liberal political content. The Blairite ‘cool Britannia’ ideology of ‘British values’, conceived in wholly liberal terms (tolerance, freedom, rule of law), would be one case; more populist accounts like Billy Bragg’s long-forgotten 2006 book The progressive patriot would be another; the Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain likewise endorses a social patriotism - citation-grazing from Lenin for the purpose.²

In any case, are all the anxieties of the “flag-shaggers” foreign to us? Are we, too, not “being ignored by our own government”? Do we not also see “the future for our country … diminishing rapidly”, and sincerely intend to fix this by means other than drowning children in the channel?

The obvious problem with the ‘progressive patriot’ approach is simply that it is so frequently wheeled out and with spooky regularity fails to catch on. It is always a programme for a future that never arrives: British or English patriotism never, outside of think-tank circles and the broader intelligentsia, takes on the progressive valence promised. (Things are more complex in Scotland, but we leave this on one side.) Reasonably cogent cases can be made that it should do so - some tradition from Winstanley to Shelley and Blake, to the Chartists, to the ‘spirit of ‘45’ can be drawn with confidence. The international character of the capitalist class can be accurately stressed. Yet at the end of the day, the polarisation remains where it was: conservative, chauvinist patriotism versus progressive, cosmopolitan internationalism.

Why should this be the case? There are reasons specific to Britain, and more general ones. To take the general reasons first: the global capitalist system is organised as a system of states, in which capitalist enterprises operate and seek to maximise profit. The largest such enterprises are global, but remain ultimately domiciled for practical purposes in one or another such state, and usually in one of those towards the top of the state hierarchy. Each state is rivalrously counterposed to all the others in ensuring the success of its own enterprises. Only one company can own a coltan mine in the Congo at any given time; only one company, or a few companies, can dominate the market for silicon chips, thanks to capitalism’s ruthless logic of consolidation.

Though this is not a zero-sum game in the sense that mercantilism supposed - it is quite possible that a newly dominant firm in the semiconductor industry may massively increase the quality and overall number of chips produced across the whole sector, for example - it is zero-sum from the perspective of the states. Patriotism entails improving the position of one’s own state, which in turn entails reducing the position of rival states, perhaps through economic competition, but ultimately through war. Thus it tends to generate forms of chauvinism, even among oppressed nations.

Britain, specifically, plays the role of a global financial laundry, as argued by Mike Macnair.³ Taking on this role entailed, at length, shedding most of Britain’s industrial capacity, with the end result an economy dependent on financial services overwhelmingly concentrated in London and the south-east. With a few exceptions - Manchester, Edinburgh, perhaps Bristol - cities outside this region are in decline, never mind smaller towns once dependent on vanished industries. Life is often only able to go on in these places by way of the employment of super-exploited migrant workers.

London occupied

Anti-cosmopolitanism is the result, targeted above all at the capital: London is understood as, in some important sense, under enemy occupation - its vastly more cosmopolitan population than most other cities being evidence for its disloyalty. Local demographic changes - even a few dozen refugees put up in a rotting ring-road Premier Inn - are cathected with anxieties about a bleak, futureless national existence.

In a naive reading, the flag protests are a hopeless symbolic gesture against an apparently hopeless prospect. In a more cynical reading, they are gambits by far-right ideologues to exploit such anxieties and provoke intemperate responses from the left, which will in turn serve as proof that we are all enemies of the demos. Both are true: there really is an inchoate reservoir of anxiety out there, and it really is being exploited, more or less successfully, by committed national chauvinists.

How should we respond? ‘Progressive patriotism’, it should already be clear, is hopeless. The national malaise, such as it is, has to do with Britain’s relation to the world system: we need another world system, not a slightly different canon of national poets, to solve it; and, in so doing, we need common cause with the people all over the world getting fleeced in a million different ways. So far as these diverse forms of exploitation are couched in isolated structures of national grievance, the overall ‘beggar thy neighbour’ structure remains untouched, and so such grievances shall be catnip to the chauvinist right.

If we are to resign ourselves to ‘unpatriotism’, what next? The approach of the SWP, unsurprisingly, has been to amplify the fascist connections of the flag protests. An article by Thomas Foster makes the case at some length, mentioning - at one time or another - Britain First, White Vanguard, the Homeland Party, and many others. Keir Starmer is criticised rightly for his cynicism.⁴ (The SWP, naturally, is aggressively promoting its Stand Up to Racism front’s counter-demonstration against Tommy Robinson in a week or so.) All of this is grist to the mill.

An alternative view comes from David Renton, a former SWPer now on the social-imperialist right of RS21, writing in The Guardian. Labelling these protests as fascist or even Nazi - he reports hearing the classic SWP chant “Nazi scum, off our streets” at a counter-demo in London - is “the wrong strategy”. Even Robinson “doesn’t leaven his speeches with reworked passages from Mein Kampf. He isn’t a ‘Hitler admirer’, nor is he perceived as such by the movement.”

He notes, moreover, that “labelling our enemies fascist depends on a context where the mainstream is willing to isolate and shame Nazis. Those are not the times we are living in.” His example is the recent photo of Robert Jenrick at a hotel protest, with Eddy Butler - a veteran neo-fascist - clearly visible in the background, which seems to have caused no controversy or embarrassment. Renton’s advice is to concentrate on the central element in the fearmongering, that these asylum-seekers are probable sexual predators; after all, some 40% of those arrested in last year’s riots, apparently, had previously been reported for domestic violence.⁵ (Such is also the approach of yet another SUtR spin-off, Women Against the Far Right.)

Renton is right, at least, that calling these people Nazis is pointless in conditions where the cordon sanitaire has already been breached. It was questionable in relation to the British National Party 20 years ago, which draped itself in the flag and made maudlin speeches about Winston Churchill; it was extremely silly in relation to the English Defence League, whose leading lights had no history in classic neo-Nazism, unlike the BNP. Yet his alternative is simply a lower-calorie version of the same thing; after all, if this movement does not buy the identification with fascism, is it going to buy the accusation of wife-beating?

What is missing is a movement at the level of general politics that can spread internationalism, and internationalist responses to the general national malaise. You cannot fight flag-waving chauvinism with taboos - that much is obvious. It is necessary to give people a different flag - a red one, for preference.

1. www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/meet-the-red-and-white-army-hoisting-flags-of-st-george-mq67vn9sk.↩︎

2. See, for example, Robert Griffiths’ comments here: morningstaronline.co.uk/article/victory-day-belongs-left.↩︎

3. ‘Class composition in a snapshot’ Weekly Worker August 28: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1550/class-composition-in-a-snapshot.↩︎

4. socialistworker.co.uk/anti-racism/the-far-right-figures-behind-national-flags-campaign.↩︎

5. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/29/asylum-hotel-fascist-asylum-protests-politicians.↩︎