Flag Wars in Twee Town

Not much tends to happen down my way. A rural community, with pubs older than the United States, we have traditionally slept the deep, deep sleep of England. Aside from the ubiquitous war memorial—currently dusted with snow—it bears little mark of the wider world, save for the names of those who left here and never returned. 

But such are the extraordinary times in which we live that even here, the culture wars arrived in 2025. Imagine my pleasant surprise when St. George flags and Union Jacks appeared, one sunny autumn morning, on virtually every lamp post down the local high street (one of which is pictured below). We had all seen the organic and viral proliferation of the ‘Raise the Colours’ movement in towns and cities across the country in response to crimes committed against women and girls, largely by migrants. But flag raising was something that happened elsewhere, not in our little backwater. 

Our area is almost exclusively ethnically white (aside from the small, but increasing, number of foreign workers employed by the local NHS), and many of the residents are comfortably middle class. They have chiefly moved up from London because—irony of ironies—they’d rather not bring up their children in that vibrant, multicultural Eden. Luckily for them, they were wealthy enough to leave and watch its decline from afar.

These people have also brought their bourgeois lifestyle with them. Artisan bakeries, coffee shops and art galleries now sit where agricultural suppliers, butcher’s shops and garages used to be. Windmills and watermills have long since been converted into homes, as has almost every barn. Buildings that were once healthily weathered and which displayed the evidence of proud labour are now painfully twee and wouldn’t look out of place on a Christmas card. Many have painted their houses a lovely shade of pink, completely unaware that, until recently, it was a mixture of limewash and pig’s blood that would have given them that colour.

But the arrival of the flags in our village, and the consequent realisation that the working-class people among them might actually have the gall to care about what happens to the country they love, caused those same white-collar professionals to choke on their cinnamon lattes. You could sense the meetings going on behind their closed, imitation-mediaeval doors. After a tension-filled week of unchallenged, patriotic flaggery, came these, posted about the place:

A more historically inaccurate word salad of meaningless niceness you would struggle to find. An AI-generated collage of multicultural hands linked over a Union Jack, and a slogan that screams: “Whether you’ve lived here for generations or have arrived seeking safety and new beginnings, you’re welcome!” 

Sentiments such as these display an utter contempt for millions of everyday, decent people, whose only ‘crime’ is that they feel their country is being taken away from them and given to people who have no right to be here and who often hold the rest of us in total contempt. 

There is a growing feeling among the public in Britain, even in the smallest of villages, that the traditional ruling elites have lost all credibility; that there is absolutely no reason to place our trust in them any longer. These elites have demonstrated a profound disdain for the ‘proles’ and their sense of patriotism. Rather than addressing the mounting problems, they are more inclined to ignore the issues altogether, choosing to avert their gaze from the whole sorry mess—a mess often of their own making. 

Indeed, it seems that high-status individuals despise ordinary people so much that when those people gather to commemorate a mother murdered by an illegal migrant, there is a counter-protest. These demonstrations are crewed by the usual suspects—suspects who never have to deal with the consequences of their luxury beliefs and who prefer the symbols of supranational technocracies or identitarian pressure groups to the flag of their own nation. 

After a few weeks, the flags bedecking our village were removed. I later found out (obviously from a man in the pub) that they were taken down by the local authority in the dead of night so they could escape scrutiny from the public. The same man also claimed to know the flag raisers, who, it will come as no surprise, were people who get their hands dirty for a living rather than sit in front of a screen. They put the flags back up a short while later, but they were again eradicated by the council. At the time of writing, they have not returned. Notably, the aforementioned ‘woke’ posters have never been defaced or removed by anyone, which reveals a degree of tolerance by regular individuals that the so-called ‘progressives’ never seem to possess.

If flag wars can happen here, they can happen anywhere. It demonstrates that the very real concern about the nation’s future is not just the preservation of the former industrial towns and cities of the United Kingdom, but of folk in rural communities who are not directly affected by issues such as mass migration and ethnic Balkanisation. And the response of the clerisy is the same; it is always the same. Rather than confront the crisis directly, they choose to defame those ‘low information’ people who liked their country just as it was. 

God forbid it takes one of their own daughters being molested to change their minds.