What is "raising the colours" about?

On a new campaign, flying the flag, and elites who hate who we are

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Every now and then, something small but significant catches my eye. And the “raising the colours” campaign that’s currently unfolding in some local areas is one such thing.

In recent days, from Birmingham to Tower Hamlets, ordinary British and English people have, seemingly spontaneously, started to raise Union Jack and St George’s flags on lampposts and buildings. Some have even painted flags on roundabouts.

The campaign started last week when it was revealed flags of St George and the Union had started to spring up in neighbourhoods in Birmingham, in what the local people taking part described as “a patriotic outpouring”. Local residents even set up a GoFundMe website to help purchase more flags and support the displays.

Shortly afterwards, however, local council workers quickly began taking down the flags, arguing the “unauthorised items” were “dangerous”, on the basis they might distract and even kill passing motorists and pedestrians.

Yet many, understandably, see glaring hypocrisy.

While the Labour-run council in highly-diverse Birmingham is now rushing to take down English and Union flags, it has left Palestinian flags flying for months (for its part, in what is another depressing insight into the dire state of modern Britain, the council says it needs police protection to remove Palestine flags in Muslim areas).

At the same time, Birmingham council is pulling down Union Jack and St George’s flags while seemingly having no issue lighting the taxpayer-funded library building in green and white to celebrate the independence of … Pakistan.

All of which helps to explain why, unsurprisingly, some locals have started to rebel by joining the “raise the colours” campaign. And nor are they alone.

In similarly diverse Tower Hamlets, in east London, residents have also been spotted raising flags on lampposts, while the local council, run by the pro-Gaza Aspire Party which has also left Palestine flags flying for months, just vowed to remove any English and British flags “as soon as possible”.

Yet things seem to be spiralling.

Social media is currently filled with viral pictures and videos of seemingly ordinary people –builders, workers, citizens—going to great lengths to “raise the colours”, suggesting this campaign may yet gain momentum and, perhaps, go national.

What is going on?

On one level, this is very clearly a spontaneous and organic act of resistance against what we have often talked about in this newsletter —the ongoing and very extreme policies of mass uncontrolled immigration, broken borders, and housing illegal migrants in the heart of Britain’s communities while forcing the British people to pay billions for the privilege and then using their own money to rig the housing market so that it favours illegal migrants and asylum-seekers over the British people.

As one local resident of Birmingham remarked, people in the area have simply “had enough”. “This isn’t racism”, they went on, “it’s frustration at being pushed into a corner and silenced”.

But this is also clearly about something else, something deeper. And to make sense of it it’s worth returning to conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton.

“The English”, Scruton once said, “are reluctant to display their identity — reluctant to sing their national anthem, to wave their flag, or to affirm their nationhood”.

What he meant is that the English have long had a very uneasy relationship with national symbols, even feeling embarrassed about the kind of displays of national pride that would appear entirely ordinary in, say, America.

A combination of post-imperial guilt, mass immigration, a model of multiculturalism that prioritises minorities over the majority, and the rise of a so-called ‘progressive’ elite have all established a taboo around flags, discouraging people from raising them.

But Scruton, rightly, saw this as a bad thing for British society and the future.

He warned that the taboo around national symbols and flying the flag deprived the British and the English of something that could be incredibly powerful and precious.

Such displays, he argued, were not merely symbols of exclusion, as elites argue, but could become a powerful, unifying emblem of a shared identity, a shared sense of history and collective memory, and a shared way of life.

A flag, in other words, is not just a symbol; it is where the individual connects with their collective cultural inheritance. It is where the individual can locate themselves in something greater which they also, in turn, recognise as their home.

Without this, warned Scruton, nations will soon run into major problems.

The reluctance to fly the flag in England, he suggested, brought with it huge costs, including what he described as “the steady erosion of something precious –a shared first-person plural”, or, in other words, a shared sense of “we”.

With no sense of shared identity or culture, and few symbols to give expression to this, Scruton warned that the British and the English would soon be left vulnerable to endless, ongoing cultural fragmentation and rootlessness, no longer sure who they are, where they belong, or what is ‘home’.

Which is how, I would suggest, millions of people on these islands are starting to feel, if they do not feel this way already.

Bombarded by mass immigration. Appalled by open borders. Angered and frustrated by a ruling class and a ‘two-tier’ society that puts minorities ahead of the majority.

And utterly demoralised by a political system that is mainstreaming Lebanon-style sectarianism, from pandering to Islamism to Labour MPs showing more interest in Pakistan than Britain, many people can now feel that sense of “we” evaporating.

Furthermore, as reflected in the response of Birmingham and Tower Hamlets councils, or the school in Rugby that turned away a schoolgirl who wore a Union Jack dress to a ‘Culture Day’, many British and English people are now also starting to grasp the extent to which their leaders are invested in rejecting, repudiating, or suppressing their identity, history, and culture —what Scruton called “Oikophobia”.

Coming from the Greek oikos (home) and phobia (fear), Scruton --alongside scholars such as Daniel Bell, Samuel Huntington, and Christopher Lasch-- was among the first to point to …

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