“Patriotism will always be an important thing to [the Prime Minister]. Absolutely, patriotism, putting up English flags”
—The prime minister’s spokesperson
“I’m going to confess I have not just the St George’s flag, I have St George’s bunting. I have also union jack bunting which is currently still hanging up in my garden shed. I have union jack flags. … So I do I think flags are really important. It’s what brings us together. … Oh, put them up anywhere. I would put them up anywhere.” —Yvette Cooper, Home Secretary
Image by Martin Gollan © 2025
By Alan Morrison
August—a plague of St George flags sprang up
Like conflagrations of gigantic fungi alongside
Union Jacks stalking the land contrapuntal
To protests outside “migrant hotels”—a vexed
Vexillology avowedly serving as warning to all
Immigrants, illegal or legal, foreigners in general,
& all those of colour, Black & brown, whether
Recent arrivals or those of intergenerational roots,
Flags dangling from lampposts signposting
Upsurges in scapegoating accompanying emergent
Faragism & a Far Right never so emboldened
Since the National Front in the Seventies, or
The Blackshirts in the Thirties; ‘Operation Raise
The Colours’—sounding like something dreamt up
By Major Harry Kitchener Wellington Truscott
From David Nobbs’ Fairly Secret Army—might
Well be rephrased as ‘Operation Scare Those
Of Colour’, St George crosses painted on small
Roundabouts (all because of “small boats”) in towns
& cities across the nation, “flag graffiti” serving
To give us all circular directions of recrudescent
Cycles, a red-&-white paint-daubed ouroboros—
A scarlet serpent eating its own tail—our ever-
Revolving self-devouring nativist reversions,
& now the roundabouts are painted it’s the turn
Of pelican & zebra crossings, no more black &
White but only red & white stripes permitted,
It’s every Little Englander’s ‘patriotic’ paint duty…
The spineless ‘Labour’ Government capitulates
At every turn to demands of massed “Gammon”,
Appeasing Farage & Reform just as it appeases
Fascism abroad in America & Israel—
Seemingly no depths to which Starmerites won’t stoop
To prop themselves up in impotent ‘power’;
Rather than setting its own agenda,
Providing a progressive alternative,
Our absentee government dances to the tune
Of xenophobes & racists, legitimising
Ignorance while disingenuously approving
Of the plague of flags throughout the land as symbols
Of ‘national pride, unity & togetherness’—
But now they more symbolise the obverse of such attributes,
Becoming for many numbers emblems of bigotry…
Our self-proclaimed man of the hour-cum-prime
Minister-in-waiting, ‘insurgent’ Nigel Farage
Drives the agenda, & claims his beer-froth Reform
Fascism-fomenters are the “bulwark” against
Civil disorder & further protests & riots by
The Brutish among us British, so he now seeks
To appease the very prejudices he’s spent decades
Whipping up on his xenophobic soapbox,
His resistible rise is barely being resisted
But only enabled by our besotted media
& newspapers, & mainstream politicians;
& now he talks of mass deportations, refugees
To be put in camps on military land, men, women
& children, Old Uncle Tom Cobley & all;
Speaks of ripping up the Human Rights Act,
Rolling back the turf of our freedom from torture,
Even backsliding on Magna Carta if it comes to it,
In his proclaimed ‘Operation Restoring Justice’—
More ‘Operation Establishing Fascists’,
Back to days of rosy-cheeked Yeoman & ruddy-
Faced lads of dale & fell, the old Agincourt
Gesture resurrected, the archer’s salute,
Not V for Victory but for the twos up sign to
‘Johnny Foreigner’, Once more unto the breach
& all that jingoistic clamour; he’s not at all
Implicitly inciting civil disorder & racist rioting,
He’s simply attempting to placate it, to channel it—
Not at all to manipulate these incendiary events
To his grubby-elbowed power-grabbing advantage
Like all classic fascists of his gangster vintage—
We may ask what cost to such bannered xenophobia?
How choppy does the wind have to be to change
A cross on a flag—crux quadrata—to a swastika?
