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If you’ve been paying attention to England’s flag wars, you’ll have noticed the hierarchy. The Palestinian flag is permitted, even applauded; the Ukrainian flag flutters proudly outside every British embassy; and the rainbow banner is dutifully hoisted on every council mast as if it were the national standard. Yet England’s own flag—the red cross of St. George—remains an object of suspicion, a guilty pleasure to be draped from pubs, football terraces, or bedroom windows like contraband.
The flags came first. Not the officially sanctioned bunting of the new state religion, but the outlawed cross of the old country—cropping up on terraces, hung from windows, then carried into the streets. Once it was dismissed with a condescending sigh, a sign of soccer hooliganism. Not anymore. Flags have become tribal markers, territorial claims. And when the national majority must fly its own emblem as if it were graffiti while every imported grievance enjoys official blessing, you are not witnessing “community cohesion.” You are watching a slow-motion partition.
“In a country that still believed in honor, ministers would have resigned.”
The country has noticed. What it sees is not harmony but a referendum in cloth. One half of official Britain shudders; the other half pretends not to see. And behind those flags lies the spark: the killings in Southport in July 2024, when three schoolgirls were murdered at a dance party. Police withheld the suspect’s name for days—an infallible sign he wasn’t a Smith from Surrey. When it emerged, he’d been born in Wales to Rwandan parents, the “Welsh” part was recited like a charm. But the rage hadn’t begun there. For years the public had watched grooming gangs operate with impunity in Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford, and dozens of other towns—victims ignored, whistleblowers punished, inquiries smothered. Southport was merely the detonator on a bomb that had been ticking for a decade. Within forty-eight hours, riots broke out across England, and a government that had been curiously paralyzed in Harehills—where an immigrant mob had driven police out of the neighborhood—suddenly found its backbone.
Everyone remembers the images: cars burning, masked teenagers sprinting off with boxes of sneakers. But the real story was the speed with which a tenderfoot government converted chaos into authority. We were told it was improvisation, a panicked response to “far-right thuggery.” In truth, the kit was already packed in the trunk: round-the-clock courts, mass arrests, exemplary sentences, and a fresh theology of “harmful speech.” The country was in flames, yet Whitehall displayed a ruthless efficiency it had singularly lacked when the rioters were of a different complexion. Farce with fangs.
And with those powers came Britain’s worst-kept secret: two-tier policing. Riot by favored minorities. Negotiate, retreat, offer workshops. Riot by white working-class men. Send in the dogs, smash down doors at dawn, hand out ten-year sentences for “incitement.” The authorities deny it, of course. But when London’s top cop was asked on camera whether he would end two-tier policing, he simply tore the microphone from the reporter’s hand—a little aria in the national opera buffa.
From those riots to today’s flag protests runs a straight line. Ordinary people sense, in their bones, that their country has been reordered without their consent. They don’t need to parse legislation; they can count flags. Palestine: permitted. Ukraine: celebrated. Pride: compulsory. St. George: suspect. The message could not be clearer. The ruling caste is ringing its own curfew bell, and the majority is expected to obey.
The same pattern repeats in migration. Numbers are fiddled exactly as riots are managed—not to solve a crisis, but to tidy the story. One quarter it’s 740,000 newcomers, the next it’s 906,000, and by the time the statisticians finish their “revisions,” ministers are on television boasting that 728,000 is a triumph because it’s twenty percent lower than the newly invented figure. On this carousel, arithmetic isn’t truth; it’s stagecraft. Yet Britain is still importing the equivalent of Boston every year. The slogans change just as quickly: “Stop the boats” becomes “Smash the gangs,” as though a Downing Street press officer growling like the Incredible Hulk will terrify the Albanian mafias who largely run the Channel. Officials call it a “business model,” as if it were a Harvard seminar. It isn’t a business—only a protection racket in rubber dinghies. Models obey. Reality doesn’t.
Where objections can’t be brushed aside, they’re pathologized. Blocking or slow-walking an inquiry into child-rape gangs isn’t “safeguarding girls”; it’s safeguarding careers. In a country that still believed in honor, ministers would have resigned. Instead, the press corps sneered “misinformation,” then quietly deleted the sneer when the charges proved true. And when the public still refused to clap, the censors were summoned. Britain now polices what its own citizens may say online from Whitehall even as it cannot police who clambers into a dinghy at Calais. It is the perfect symbol of decline: a ruling class confusing the regulation of speech for the possession of power, while real power drains away daily.
The mandarins behind this drift plead incompetence. That would be comforting. But it isn’t incompetence; it is intent, wrapped in fluorescent jackets and presented as virtue. The old radicals discovered long ago that it was more effective to colonize institutions than storm barricades. Their heirs now sit at desks as “diversity officers,” “equity consultants,” and “misinformation czars”—governing by division, rewarding their clients, and treating the majority as a problem population. It is the colonial method in reverse: import new tribes, demoralize the old, and rule the fragments. As Enoch Powell—one Roman-minded prophet—warned in 1968, “Like the Roman, I seem to see the River Tiber foaming with much blood.” He had fought the real Nazis; he knew what fascism was. The line is forever misquoted and forever denounced, but its civic meaning is plain: ignore the consequences of your policies and you will, in the end, be governed by them.
And so, we return to the flags. A confident nation is untroubled by its own cross. A nation that has lost confidence treats its emblem like graffiti and everyone else’s like sacred relics. Today’s flag protests are not a hobbyist quarrel about bunting; they are a flare in the night sky, a signal of revolt against a country rewritten from above while its people slept. The riots have been over for a year, the images long archived. But the powers they licensed are very much alive. Britain’s descent into parody is complete when law and order is entrusted to a political class that cannot define a woman, cannot define a border, but feels perfectly entitled to define your thoughts. And if they keep lighting fuses under their own house, they should not be surprised when, sooner or later, it blows.