British identity isn’t neatly tied in red, white and blue

Anyone black or Asian who had grown up in 70s and 80s Britain would probably have felt the same. The union jack in those days was a sign, meaning “enemy territory”. You found union jacks mainly on National Front marches and National Front pubs. “There ain’t no black in the union jack, send the fucking bastards back” was a common football terrace chant.

Littondale in the 2010s was, of course, a very different place from Manchester in the 1970s or east London in the 1980s. The meaning of the union jack has transformed, too. The pub was welcoming and friendly and we returned there more than once. It was symbol of how much Britain has changed over the past half century.

Signs and symbols are essential to our lives, helping us navigate the social world and providing a means of signifying who we are and what we stand for. The meaning of any symbol, though, is often contested. Someone wearing a Palestinian keffiyeh might view it as an act of solidarity with the people of Gaza; others might see it as an expression of Jew-hatred. A woman wearing a hijab might think of it as demonstrating her belongingness to her faith and culture.

Others, including many Muslim women, regard it as a symbol of their oppression, a tawdry reminder of the second-class status women possess in many Muslim communities.

This contestation of meaning is why there has been such a fierce debate over Operation Raise the Colours, the movement to fly the national flag and to paint the cross of St George on walls and roundabouts that, since its beginnings in Birmingham, has spread across England, from Plymouth to Newcastle.

For many of the flaggers, and many of the commentators, it is a refreshing and overdue expression of patriotism. The shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, welcomed it as the movement of “patriotic Britons… to put out our flags and restore pride in our country”. “The English nation is astir,” one academic believes.

Operation Raise the Colours did not, though, emerge from nowhere and is defined by the conflicts and contradictions that are shaping today’s Britain. Two developments are particularly important in fuelling the movement.

The first is the broken social contract and the sense, within many sections of the working class, of betrayal by successive governments that have failed to address questions of falling living standards and the depredations of the “flexible” labour market; of entrenched poverty and slashed benefits; of a dearth of decent housing and a decades-long failure to build; of public services that no longer function and of private services that are merely rapacious; of a lack of accountability of public officials and private corporations, even for terrible misdeeds.

All of which has been exacerbated by a sense of abandonment by the organisations that once gave voice, even if in a limited and distorted way, to working-class aspirations, from the Labour party to trade unions.

Whereas this sense of betrayal and abandonment has been nurtured over many decades, the second development has emerged much more recently: the fraying of social norms that for much of the last seven decades has kept racism in check. Ideas, particularly in the context of immigration, that not so long ago were solely in the province of the far right – talk of mass deportations, of “remigration”, of migrants as “invaders”, of white people as losing their homeland, of ethnic notions of national identity – have seeped into mainstream political conversation.

“From Epping to the sea, let’s make England Abdul free”, tweeted Douglas Carswell, the former Tory and Ukip MP who now runs a US thinktank. What is striking about such bigotry is not just that Carswell should casually spout the language of the BNP but that he should be so comfortable in doing so. It shows how far the boundaries of the acceptable have moved in recent years.

“Good news. The Overton window is moving and we are helping move it,” Matthew Goodwin, the academic turned Reform propagandist, gleefully announced. It is a claim echoed by many on the right. Named after an American political analyst, the “Overton window” is used to describe the ideas and arguments politically acceptable to mainstream society at any particular time. And, yes, it is shifting. But the fact that arguments that once belonged to the far right are now seen as mainstream, and the growing assertion of casual bigotry, is hardly something to celebrate.

Britain has not regressed back to the racial landscape of half a century ago. Most people still hold to liberal norms about racism, still view their black or brown neighbours or workmates as English or British. What has changed, though, is that racists, both online and in the physical world, have become far less inhibited in flaunting their bigotry.

It is the collision of these two developments that explains why immigrants have become symbolic of what is wrong with Britain and why discontent has become expressed through anti-migrant riots, and protests outside hotels housing asylum seekers.

Against this background, it is naive to view the raising the colours movement simply as a proclamation of patriotism. For some, it is certainly a means of asserting a sense of pride and belonging that can sorely be lacking in today’s Britain. For others, though, it is an act of provocation against the “liberal elite”, against “woke” attitudes, and against the presence of minorities.

For others still, it provides an occasion to mock minorities and to physically attack people, homes and businesses. From the racist vandalism of a Chinese takeaway in York to the abuse hurled at a Muslim mother and her child by men painting St George’s flags on other people’s properties in Basildon, from the racist graffiti (“Keep the dirty Muslims out the villages” and “child rapists”) painted on walls alongside St George’s crosses in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, and “Fuck Pakis” on a bus stop, to the “This is England” vandalism of the South Essex Islamic Centre, flags have become a platform for overt bigotry. They have become as much about marking out territory and defining who does not belong, as it is about national pride.

“In England”, George Orwell wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn, “all the boasting and flag-wagging, the ‘Rule Britannia’ stuff, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious.” Those who simply insist that “flag-wagging” today is merely a patriotic movement, or an assertion of national identity, are, just as in the immigration debate, opening the way for the racists to become even more aggressive.

A flag may signal an attachment to a nation or an identity, but what it means to be British or English is not given or fixed, but continually challenged and changeable. The different threads that make up Britishness and Englishness do not come neatly packaged up in red, white and blue ribbons.

There are many aspects of British life that I admire and many I despise. There are many British traditions that resonate with me and many I find abhorrent. There are many moments of British history that bring a lump to my throat and many that make me shudder. And that is surely true of most Britons.

There is a rich tapestry of conflicting ideas and visions that make up English and British history, culture and identity. Britain is the nation of the Levellers, the Suffragettes and the Shrewsbury 21. It is also the nation of Robert Knox, Cecil Rhodes and Lord Rothermere.

To be English or British is to engage with this richness of contradictions, to wrestle with the ambiguities, not simply distil it down to a single set of meanings. A flag may symbolise a sense of belonging to a national identity, but it can also be used to erase the complexities of that identity.

Forty years ago, I was an angry young man knocking on the door of a nation uncomfortable with my presence. I have since grown to be at ease with my Britishness and Britain, though it may be beginning to change, with me. What links the old me to the current me is an insistence that common values are important but that these can emerge only through political contestation and struggle.

It is not so much in “flag-wagging” as in the struggle over the values we want to define us that we find common meaning.

Photograph by Leon Neal/Getty Images. Others pictures by Jacqueline Lawrie/LNP, Facebook