by Tom Slater, spiked
Operation Raise the Colours is a quiet rebellion against multiculturalism and national self-loathing.
A nation in which hoisting the national flag has become somewhere between a provocation and an act of resistance probably isn’t in rude health. But that’s where we’re at in Britain in 2025, with local councils hastily ripping down England and Union flags, put up by groups of grassroots activists.
Hot on the heels of the pink ladies’ protests outside migrant hotels, Operation Raise the Colours is the latest organic, decidedly patriotic, social-media-driven initiative whose success can be measured in the outsized, outraged, utterly predictable reaction it is receiving. While councils continue to remove the flags, on health-and-safety and property-maintenance grounds, identitarian rent-a-gob Kehinde Andrews was invited on to Good Morning Britain yesterday to insist that the Saint George’s Cross is racist and this campaign is a faux-patriotic stunt by the fash. Presumably, Dr Shola was busy.
The sudden, nationwide explosion of Operation Raise the Colours is basically all the proof you need that this isn’t being driven by the far right – a pathetic fringe in British political life that has long struggled to fill a minibus. Apparently beginning in Birmingham, the campaign has since spread to Swindon, Bradford, Newcastle, Norwich and London. Like the migrant-hotel protests, it seems to be decentralised, leaderless, rallied on Facebook and group chats.
It’s a fascinating, bottom-up campaign against a now undeniable, galling double standard – that in ‘multicultural’ Britain all identities are to be celebrated except for Englishness and Britishness.