It feels good to see the return of the St George’s Cross

There you have it: in certain parts of England it’s easier to fly the Palestine flag than the English flag. Take Tower Hamlets in London. The Palestine colours fluttered from lampposts there for months in the aftermath of Hamas’s 7 October pogrom. Yet when patriots tried to hoist up the St George’s flag this week, they found themselves surrounded by officious council workers. Their flags were unceremoniously yanked down. Seems English pride is haram in modern London.

The flag wars in Tower Hamlets are so telling. There was a period when the Palestine flag was omnipresent there. It was untouchable. That perhaps wasn’t surprising: the council is led by Lutfur Rahman of the pro-Palestine Aspire party. His office said it would ‘destabilise community cohesion’ to take the flags down. It was only following a legal threat from UK Lawyers for Israel in March last year that the council finally dismantled all the bunting.

The borough’s jobsworths were far quicker to act when some white fellas tried to fly the St George’s flag this week. Within hours council officials had their poles out to dislodge these wicked emblems from local lampposts. One of the men confronted the busybody flag-draggers. ‘The whole of the Isle of Dogs has paid for these flags to be hung’, he said, so who are you to demand they ‘be taken down’? Then he asked the killer question: ‘What about all the Palestine flags?’

We should all be asking this. We should all be asking how on earth there’s a borough in the capital of the United Kingdom where you’ll get an easier ride if you fly the flag of a foreign nation than if you fly one of the flags of the kingdom itself. I won’t lie, that there are communities in London that felt more chilled around the flag under which more than a thousand Jews had just been murdered than they do around the flag of England itself worries me enormously. It horrifies me, in fact.

It isn’t just Tower Hamlets. It isn’t only boroughs with large Muslim populations. You see the Palestine flag everywhere. It flies on university campuses. Bourgeois leftists wrap themselves in it on their depressing weekly trudges against the Jewish state. A vast Palestine flag hangs from the Cotswolds HQ of the green energy firm owned by sexagenarian hippy Dale Vince, much to the chagrin of locals. Never mind Israel’s supposed colonisation of Palestine – it sometimes feels like Palestine has colonised Britain.

It feels good – admit it – to see the St George’s Cross make a comeback in the midst of this Palestine mania. The England-loving insurgents in Tower Hamlets who had the temerity to fly the flag of their own country were part of a digital movement called ‘Operation Raise the Colours’. The flag bug is spreading. From Swindon to Bradford, Norwich to Newcastle, the English flag and the Union flag are being raised by men and women sick of being told by their supposed betters to feel ashamed of their nation.

These are stirring acts of resistance. The guerrilla wavers of the kingdom’s flags are implicitly revolting against the post-national, post-borders delirium of our technocratic ruling class. It sometimes seems you can wave any flag in the UK as long as it isn’t any of the UK’s flags. The Pride flag is festooned in military formation across London’s boulevards every Pride month, like we’ve been conquered by some genderfluid militia. The Palestine flag is inescapable. The Black Lives Matter flag was all the rage a few years back. Liberals wear Ukraine pins on their collars. Some of these people – not all, I know – would run a mile if they ever encountered an ‘oik’ with a St George’s pin on his jumper.

So in 21st-century Britain you can be a ‘flag-shagger’ so long as you aren’t ‘shagging’ the St George’s Cross or the Union flag. Wave those flags and you’ll be branded a xenophobe, a ruffian, one of the dim little people who hasn’t quite caught up with globalist correct-think.

The Raise the Colours people are pushing back against the noise and nonsense. Against the hyper-individuating flag of Pride, which promotes the sin of pride in the self, and the anti-Western flag of Palestine, which is really about expressing a frothing hostility to our great ally of Israel, they are waving the unifying flags of this nation. They’re hoisting up our kingdom’s great emblems of collectivity to counter the divisive, separatist drift of British life under the unforgiving boot of multiculturalism.

I’ll be honest with you, reader: I was brought up to be wary of the Union flag. In the London-Irish community I come from, no one would have dreamt of waving it. Britpop, with its Union paraphernalia, was a nightmare for us foreign-origin teens. Now? Now I love to see Britain’s flags. Symbols of national interest and national pride in an era of woke Balkanisation and anti-Western hysteria? Yes please. Hoist ’em up.