Today, you might have driven past a roundabout in the Midlands and seen a St. George’s Cross daubed crudely onto the tarmac. Or glanced up to notice the flag tied midway on a lamppost, fluttering against the September sky. To the casual eye, it could pass for eccentric local colour; the kind of village-hall patriotism that usually surfaces when England are playing in a football tournament.
But this time, there was no sporting event. The flags were part of something larger, louder, and more deliberate: a campaign branded ‘Operation Raise the Colours,’ urging supporters to festoon roundabouts, bridges, and streets with England’s flag. The rhetoric from organisers was predictable: this was about ‘pride,’ ‘heritage,’ and ‘standing up for England.’ Predictably, critics who questioned the campaign were dismissed as overreacting. After all, what harm could there be in a flag?
This week, the answer became clearer. The research group Hope Not Hate revealed that Operation Raise the Colours was co-founded by Andrew Currien, also known as Andy Saxon - a man with long-standing links to the far right, including Britain First and associates of Tommy Robinson (Hope Not Hate, 2025). What had looked like eccentric patriotism was exposed as something more calculated: a far-right operation dressed in bunting.
The revelation casts a harsher light on those roundabout paintings and lamppost flags. They never were quirky acts of local pride. They are symbols seeded by extremists, part of a campaign to normalise exclusionary nationalism in everyday life. As one anti-racist activist warned, “these flags are not meant to unite us - they are meant to divide us, to mark out territory” (BBC News, 2025).
A flag that could once be shrugged off as harmless has been stripped of that innocence. We now know with certainty that the project behind it was never simply about celebrating England. It was about reclaiming it; not for everyone, but for a narrow, racialised vision of who belongs.
From Patriotic Gesture to Far-Right Smokescreen
When Operation Raise the Colours first surfaced online, it styled itself as a grassroots initiative. The premise was simple: ordinary people, fed up with ‘political correctness’ and ‘woke elites,’ would reclaim public space by plastering it with England’s flag. Local X groups popped up under names like York Flag Force UK and Weoley Warriors. Supporters proudly posted photos of lampposts newly decorated, roundabouts freshly painted, and bunting strung across streets.
The tone was self-consciously wholesome: this was not politics, organisers insisted, but ‘pride.’ In crowdfunding appeals, campaigners pitched their work as a harmless cultural revival. They framed it as the kind of bottom-up community spirit that no reasonable person could oppose. To object was to prove the point: that the English were uniquely forbidden from displaying pride in their country.
But beneath the bunting lay a different story. Hope Not Hate revealed that one of the campaign’s co-founders was Andrew Currien - also known as Andy Saxon - whose connections to Britain First and other extremist networks are well-established (Hope Not Hate, 2025). Investigators also traced donations of flags and funds from Britain First, confirming that far-right organisations were not just cheering from the sidelines, but actively shaping the campaign (The Times, 2025).
The scale of the operation was no accident. A live ‘flag map’ was circulated online so activists could chart their progress, transforming the campaign into something more like a military operation than a village fête. The very name - Operation Raise the Colours - carried a martial undertone: evoking the language of battle, and the brave knights of old; raising the flag over the ramparts, as a demonstration of power over a vanquished enemy.
What looked like a patriotic gesture was, in fact, an act of political theatre. By presenting itself as a spontaneous outpouring of pride, the campaign created cover for a far-right project of normalisation. Once the flags were up, local councils faced a dilemma: remove them and face accusations of betraying ‘ordinary people,’ or leave them and risk lending legitimacy to a movement seeded by extremists. Either way, the far right gained ground.
The smokescreen worked because it relied on deniability. To the casual observer, a flag is just a flag. To those who planted it, and those who funded it, the meaning was sharper: this was about who owns England, and who does not.
Astroturfing the Flag: Manufactured Patriotism
Hope Not Hate’s investigation confirmed what many suspected: this was no innocent outpouring of patriotism, but a project sown by extremists (Hope Not Hate, 2025). One of its co-founders, Andrew Currien/Andy Saxon, has long-standing links to Britain First and other far-right networks. So, these were not just neighbours acting on a whim, but activists with an agenda: to dress hatred in red and white cloth.
In our earlier Plague Island article, ‘Whose Flag Is It Anyway?,’ we warned that when flags are planted on lampposts and daubed onto roundabouts, the message shifts. It ceases to be a declaration of pride and becomes a territorial claim: this is ours, not yours. That ambiguity - patriotism to some, exclusion to others - was always fertile ground for exploitation. What Hope Not Hate has now revealed is that this was never accidental. The message was the point.
The campaign’s martial branding stripped away the pretence. It was never about uniting communities, but about asserting dominance. Britain First’s direct donations of flags and funds underscored the intent (The Times, 2025). This was never a celebration, but mobilisation.
The effect was disunity masquerading as pride. For minority communities, and for asylum seekers already facing hostility, the sudden eruption of flags across lampposts and roundabouts was not a gesture of welcome, but a warning. Each new display marked territory, signalling who belonged and who did not.
What Operation Raise the Colours represents is hatred in plain sight, softened only by the cover of patriotism. It feeds suspicion, pits neighbour against neighbour, and makes public space feel hostile to anyone cast as an outsider. These flags force you to choose a side, and they do not unite; they divide. They are not symbols of pride, but of siege.
When Flags Intimidate, Not Unite
The evidence is now overwhelming: Operation Raise the Colours was not a quaint expression of pride but a far-right campaign designed to divide. To pretend otherwise is to ignore what Hope Not Hate has uncovered (Hope Not Hate, 2025). The question is not whether these flags are innocent. They are not. The question now is why some ordinary people have been willing to take part.
For many, the impulse is rooted in frustration. Public services are collapsing: GP appointments impossible to get, schools overcrowded, bills rising with no end in sight. Councils appear powerless, and Westminster seems deaf to local concerns. Into this void comes the promise of belonging, of ‘reclaiming’ public space. A flag on a roundabout becomes a way of being seen, of shouting back at institutions that have stopped listening.
But what feels like empowerment is, in reality, false hope. A painted cross will not make hospitals run better or energy bills fall. It will not repair crumbling schools or solve the housing crisis. What it does do however, is hand genuine grievances over to extremists, who weaponise them into scapegoating and hate. The problems remain, while communities are left more fractured than before.
Worse still, the flags are not static. Today they cover lampposts and roundabouts; tomorrow they may be accompanied by harassment, street patrols, or open intimidation of those deemed not to belong. The symbolism is designed to escalate, rehearsing for a politics of exclusion where presence alone becomes provocation. Minority communities already know this reality: the flags often appear alongside protests at asylum hotels, or planted outside mosques and schools. Each new display feels less like pride and more like a warning.
Nor is this confined to one corner of England. Operation Raise the Colours has spread from the Midlands to Essex, from Cumbria to the South East - even spilling across borders into Ireland and mainland Europe (The Journal, 2025). Its reach confirms what Hope Not Hate warned: this is not a local quirk but a coordinated movement with ambitions far beyond roundabouts.
The result is disunity masked as patriotism. Every new flag drives a wedge between neighbours, casting those who object as traitors and those who comply as patriots. Communities are left more divided, not more proud. To side with the far right in the name of ‘heritage’ is to play with fire: once lit, the flames will not be easily contained.
Political Responses and Complicity
If Operation Raise the Colours had stayed on Telegram, it would have fizzled out. What gave it lift was the way mainstream politics either looked away or joined the chorus.
In Reform-run areas, councillors have publicly framed lamppost and roundabout displays as patriotism, not provocation. Reform councillors on North Northamptonshire Council defended the lamppost flags as a “simple, visible expression of pride in our country,” language that sanitises a campaign seeded by extremists and puts councils that remove unauthorised flags on the back foot (Northants Telegraph, 2025). By dressing territorial marking as “pride,” Reform gives Operation Raise the Colours a veneer of civic respectability even when health-and-safety rules are being breached.
Labour’s record is hardly exemplary. As we argued in our earlier piece, language matters. Keir Starmer wrapped himself in the Union flag before the election and later warned Britain risked becoming an “island of strangers” - a line he subsequently “deeply regretted,” but still out there doing cultural work (Guardian, 27 Jun 2025). The government’s own White Paper launch stressed “take back control of our borders,” echoing Brexit’s core slogan (Gov.uk, 2025). Starmer isn’t painting roundabouts, but he has helped define the cultural conditions in which roundabouts get painted. (Plague Island, 2025.)
This complicity matters because it normalises the terrain the campaign needs. When Reform figures extol flags as community pride, and Labour reaches for sovereignty talk to deflect attacks from the right, the Overton window shifts. Councils hesitate, police triage, and the activists’ deniable message - ‘this is our country, not yours’ - settles into the street furniture. Even when a Reform-led council stepped in to remove unauthorised bunting on safety grounds in Durham, its statement took pains to validate “national pride” before citing risk assessments, illustrating how far the lexicon has tilted toward indulgence (Guardian, 2025; LBC, 2025).
Symbols don’t just reflect politics; they make politics. Each time an elected figure baptises far-right aesthetics as “pride,” they license the next turn of the screw. Each time a leader reaches for phrases like “island of strangers,” they write a permission slip for those who want the flag to mean exclusion. This isn’t an abstract semantic quarrel: it’s the difference between a public square that signals belonging and one that rehearses intimidation.
There is a moral clarity available, and it’s overdue. Councils can uphold safety law and basic civility without apology. Parties can celebrate civic patriotism without laundering campaigns orchestrated by men with Britain First pedigrees. The line is simple: unauthorised street-level flagging linked to extremist networks is not “community pride,” it’s political agitation. Treat it as such. Anything less concedes that Englishness is whatever the loudest nationalists say it is, and once that meaning beds in, it is brutally hard to undo.
Conclusion: Flags as Warnings
We now know what these flags mean. Hope Not Hate has shown that Operation Raise the Colours was co-founded by Andrew Currien/Andy Saxon, a man with links to Britain First. We know that the campaign has received direct support from extremist groups. We have seen the flags appear not in moments of joy, but in contexts of anger: outside asylum hotels, on school gates, even draped over memorials. They are not innocent, not festive, not “just pride.” They are symbols of exclusion.
And still, mainstream politics hesitates. Reform UK celebrates the flags as “community pride,” laundering the work of extremists into the civic sphere. Labour, desperate not to be cast as ‘soft,’ reaches for the language of borders and control, echoing the very slogans that legitimise nationalist paranoia. Each time a politician dignifies the symbols or borrows their language, the line blurs further.
But language matters. We wrote this in our previous article, and it bears repeating. Every time a leader warns of an “island of strangers” or hails unauthorised flagging as patriotism, they are redrawing the boundaries of belonging. They are licensing hostility. They are effectively saying that intimidation draped in red and white is a valid form of politics.
The dark undertones of these displays are unmistakable. In our own local area, flags tied to lampposts or painted across roundabouts don’t feel like a celebration. They feel uncanny, unsettling; to feel these things brings a sense of not being the ‘right’ kind of English, as though belonging itself is being rationed. It is a strange, unnerving atmosphere, like living through a collective nervous breakdown where the fabric of national life is fraying and symbols are turned into weapons.
The real danger is escalation. What begins with flags ends with street patrols, rallies, and harassment. Britain has been here before: the marches of the National Front, the mob chants of the EDL. Today’s lamppost bunting is tomorrow’s call to action. And the extremists know it. That is why they invest in the flags. That is why they seed the campaign with martial language and live maps of ‘progress.’ This is rehearsal for a harder politics to come.
So, let’s get rid of the pretence. These flags are not benign. They are warnings planted in plain sight. To ignore them is to concede the public square to those who would divide us. To indulge them is to invite something far worse. The choice is simple: reclaim Englishness as a civic identity for everyone, or surrender it to a toxic nationalism that thrives on scapegoats and fear.
What groups like the EDL or Britain First offer is not Englishness or Britishness at all, but its polar opposite. Their vision narrows belonging until it excludes more people than it embraces. To us, Englishness has always meant something different: being welcoming and hospitable, an island of strangers becoming an island of neighbours. It is rooted in care, dignity, friendship, and the quiet strength of good manners. Patriotism, too, is not about shouting the loudest or planting flags on lampposts - it is about doing what is right for your country. And it is precisely because we are patriotic that we reject this hate-filled flagging. True love of country cannot coexist with campaigns designed to divide it.
The flags now tied to our lampposts may have been raised in anger, but they do not define us. The truer story of this country is still waiting to be written - one of neighbours not enemies, welcome not rejection, a pride rooted not in fear but in compassion.
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References
Anti Racist Cumbria (2025) ‘Challenge the far-right flag campaign,’ 23 August. Available at: https://antiracistcumbria.org/challenge-the-far-right-flag-campaign/ [Accessed: 7 September 2025].
BBC News (2025) ‘Essex asylum hotel protests intensify as flags campaign spreads,’ 19 August. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx271162ee3o [Accessed: 7 September 2025].
GOV.UK (2025) ‘PM remarks at Immigration White Paper press conference’, 12 May. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pm-remarks-at-immigration-white-paper-press-conference-12-may-2025 [Accessed: 7 Sept 2025].
The Guardian (2025a) ‘Keir Starmer says he “deeply regrets” island of strangers speech’, 27 Jun. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jun/27/keir-starmer-says-he-deeply-regrets-island-of-strangers-speech [Accessed: 7 Sept 2025].
The Guardian (2025b) ‘Reform UK council removes St George and Union flags over safety fears’, 29 Aug. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/aug/29/reform-council-removes-st-george-and-union-flags-over-safety-fears (Accessed: 7 Sept 2025).
Hope Not Hate (2025) ‘Operation Raise the Colours organised by well-known far-right extremists,’ 22 August. Available at: https://hopenothate.org.uk/2025/08/22/operation-raise-the-colours-organised-by-well-known-far-right-extremists/ [Accessed: 7 September 2025].
LBC (2025) ‘Reform UK council removes bunting after risk assessment’, 29 Aug. Available at: https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/reform-uk-council-removes-union-flags-5HjdBf5_2/ [Accessed: 7 Sept 2025].
Northamptonshire Telegraph (2025) ‘Reform councillors defend flags on lampposts as a “simple, visible expression of pride in our country”’, 20 Aug. Available at: https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/people/north-northants-council-reform-councillors-defend-flags-on-lampposts-as-a-simple-visible-expression-of-pride-in-our-country-5279792 [Accessed: 7 Sept 2025]
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