The New Statesman

Has our flag become co-opted by the far right?

And how are Nigel Farage and reform fairing in Scotland?

I'm Anoushia Kellyan and this is the listener questions edition of the New Statesman podcast.

I'm joined by my colleague Harry Clark-Azidio and George Eaton.

Hello both.

Hi. Hi. So thanks to the audience for some great questions this week. Let's get into them. This question is from Lewis, who asks, although I do not believe the English flag is inherently racist, I think it should be flown more regularly. Do you think it has been so easily co-opted by the far right, therefore become a symbol to many, if not the majority of racism because there is no English government that is proudly flying the flag

and building a better narrative around English national pride. Harry, you've been looking

into this recently because you've been covering this, is it called the Raise the Colors, Raise

the Flag? Operation Raise the Colors. Yeah. You went to Birmingham, which is sort of the

ground zero of this flag raising trend that's happening in the flags. Operation Raise the colours. Yeah. You went to Birmingham, which is sort of the ground zero of this flag raising trend that's

happening in the country.

Can you tell us a bit about what you found?

Yeah.

So I went to two areas.

It sort of captured the suburbs towards the south of Birmingham in Wellie, as well as

rubry.

And outside of the central bit which has been

sort of being left alone there's been a litany of Union Jackson St George's crosses going on the

dual carriageway outside it did sort of resemble the Mao towards Buckingham Palace of the amount of

English flags there but it's sort of been the

genesis of this political movement that has been birthed in Birmingham that has been about,

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