A drive through England in late summer feels like passing through a stitched-up wound. The St George’s cross, once the banner of medieval crusades, now festoons lamp posts, drapes itself over bridges, colonises roundabouts and, in one case, has been painted across the entire wall of a church. To call this patriotism is to misuse the word. What we are witnessing is not love of country but an act of enclosure: a seizure of public space for the purposes of national possession.
There is a difference, often elided, between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism might mean an attachment to place, to the people you live among, to the textures of everyday life. Nationalism, by contrast, reduces that attachment to a question of belonging and exclusion, inside and outside, the pure and the impure. It is not enough for the nationalist to feel pride; he must make sure you feel it too, or at least that you are confronted by its symbols wherever you turn. The flag nailed to a lamppost does not so much announce pride as impose it.
The claim is territorial. To plant the flag on a roundabout is to assert that this space belongs to “us” and not to “them.” Nationalism in this mode is less about memory or history than about occupation. Bridges become gates, lamp posts become watchtowers, churches become fortresses. This is not an embrace of community but its opposite: a marking of borders inside the very landscape of the everyday. Every banner is a warning, and every daub of paint a reminder of who is meant to feel welcome and who is not.
In Pontefract the spectacle took on an even stranger form. There the slogans spoke of “British” and “UK,” yet the daubed emblem was the Red Cross of St George. Perhaps the butcher’s apron was too difficult to manage with a spray can, or perhaps the palette extended only to a single tin of red paint. The slippage is telling: “British” when it suits, “English” when it strikes harder. The flag, after all, is less about accuracy than about possession.
The confusion between “British” and “English” is more than a slip of terminology; it reveals the incoherence at the heart of contemporary nationalism. England is claimed as the seat of identity, yet the rhetoric stretches to Britain when the occasion demands broader authority. Post-Brexit anxieties exacerbate this slippage: the national imaginary contracts and expands at will, driven less by civic belonging than by a need to assert dominance, to mark territory with whichever symbols happen to be at hand. The Red Cross of St George becomes a kind of shorthand for a nation that cannot decide whether it is England, Britain, or some phantom amalgam of both, its own incoherence painted across the landscape for all to see.
This everyday nationalism has its cheerleaders. Robert Jenrick, never happier than when denouncing migrants in the name of “saving our girls,” has made the St George’s cross a kind of policy platform: flags where homes should be, symbols where substance is absent. Nigel Farage, pint in hand, Union Jack for a tie, discovered long ago that the flag could do the work of argument. Why bother explaining your vision for Britain when you can drape it over a pub wall? Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, offers the flag as a cure-all for Britain’s anxieties, a talisman against decline. Even Elon Musk has got in on the act. Together, they elevate what might have been parish-council kitsch into an ideological project: saturating space with the sign of England, and insisting that those who dissent are somehow against the nation itself.
Behind them, noisier and less ashamed, the far right (Britain First, Homeland, and their online auxiliaries) translate this rhetoric into practice. For them the flag is not just decoration but weapon: a way to declare territory, to intimidate migrants, to build an identity out of exclusion. Where the politicians gesture and wink, the street groups act. Only yesterday a gang of masked thugs attempted to storm a hotel in West Drayton where migrants are being housed. They wrapped themselves in the same vocabulary of nation and protection, but what they brought was terror. The respectable right disavows such violence in public, but the relationship is symbiotic. The far right keeps the flag burning; the politicians breath in the smoke.
The West Drayton attack was not an aberration. It belongs to a continuum in which flags on lamp posts are not a celebration but a warning, and where words in parliament become cover for fists in the street. Fascism does not appear fully formed; it seeps into the cracks of national life, first through symbols, then through rhetoric, finally through violence. What looks like pride of place is, in truth, a staging ground. The thugs arrive masked because the mask has already been prepared for them: the flag itself, draped over every available surface, concealing weakness with bravado, absence with colour.
It is no accident that these displays coincide with a politics of fear—fear of migrants, of strangers, of the supposed erosion of identity. The flags proliferate not because the nation is strong but because it is brittle. Nationalism reveals itself in precisely this overcompensation: a neurotic saturation of space with symbols to disguise a hollow core. Where once solidarity was built through institutions, through shared struggle, through collective provision, now it is painted onto walls and roundabouts in the desperate hope that repetition will substitute for reality.
The dialectic here is important. Patriotism is often presented as the gentle cousin of nationalism, a harmless affection that need not spill into hatred. But the moment patriotism is stripped of its material basis, it collapses into nationalism, the only form of belonging capitalism is still willing to subsidise. What could have been a civic love of place is displaced into a red cross on every surface. Nationalism fills the vacuum left by solidarity, just as graffiti fills an abandoned building.
Yet these flags are not neutral signs. They are reminders of conquest: St George, slayer of dragons, patron saint of crusaders. To paint his cross on a church wall is to reassert the unity of nation and religion, blood and soil. It is not just decorative. It is a declaration. The flag says: this is ours. Not yours. It does not speak to the neighbour or the refugee, but against them. The local vicar was correct to call this out as an attempt to intimidate.
It is ironic that none of the same figures on the right who so chastised the police for “permitting” protesters to wear Palestinian kaffiyehs at pro-Palestine marches have anything to say about gangs of far-right thugs storming hotels under the banner of St George. Symbols of solidarity are treated as a security threat; symbols of exclusion are waved through as patriotism. The flag is not neutral here: it is licensed when carried by nativists, criminalised when carried by the oppressed.
It is tempting to dismiss such displays as kitsch, the local eccentricities of bored parishioners with a few tins of paint and flags left over from VE Day. But that misses the point. This is how fascism enters: not with jackboots in the first instance, but with bunting, with the colonisation of lamp posts, roundabouts and bridges. By the time the thugs in West Drayton show up in masks, the ground has already been prepared. The flag becomes both mask and weapon, turning the common space of civic life into a battlefield.
The stain spreads. Roundabouts turn into checkpoints (remember last year), lamp posts into sentinels, bridges into gates. Politicians cheer from the sidelines; street groups push it further. A country that cannot provide housing, health care or security for its citizens can still multiply flags, as if to prove by saturation what it cannot achieve in substance. It is not patriotism. It is nationalism, shading now into something darker: the nativist’s last refuge, the endless painting over of absence with symbols of possession, until absence itself erupts in violence.
