Flagging politics
‘We just kind of thought, why don’t we just go put up some flags down one road, just because we think it’d look nice, and we just made the area look better.’ The words of Joseph Moulton, interviewed by YorkMix Radio. Moulton is credited by YorkMix as the instigator of the widespread appearance of Union and St. George flags along the highways and byways of that city. He conceded that the action was rather more than merely cosmetic.
His political rationale stems from a family background in the mining industry of South Yorkshire, communities, ‘…targeted and destroyed by the government through the closing of communal spaces, high tax on pubs and meeting places, stuff like that’. Self-employed, running websites and online businesses, having been mentored by an unnamed someone in the defence and private security business, Moulton has worked as an independent contractor in that sector. This appears to indicate a vague political awareness of social and economic problems, endemic in capitalist society, filtered through a sector directly involved in profiting from the widespread instability of volatile international politics.
Rather than second-guessing his own politics by attributing far-right motivation to his actions, his flagging campaign rather reflects a confused and superficial political viewpoint: identifying widespread problems without any serious understanding of the root cause. Raising the flag up the local lampposts became the summer trend nationally for a while. This was a popular movement, perhaps inspired by Reform UK, or by even more sinister right-wing groups, a widespread outbreak of xenophobia maybe, people outraged by boatloads of migrants tipping up on the south coast, with governments of either major party unable to repel them. Certainly, along with lamppost-hoisted flags were those carried into battle with the state outside asylum-seeker hotels.
Tripadvisor describes The Bell Hotel, Epping: ‘Plenty of parking and good location… Sadly a lot of the hotel is run down and in need of an urgent refurbishment.’ All the more so, most likely, having been laid siege to by the aggressively discontented. At first the local state authority, via a court ruling, declared the hotel must be closed, without any apparent consideration of what would then happen to those housed in its less than salubrious facilities. Then a legal volte-face resulting in more outraged British (or were they English?) patriots turning up at the hotel, along with counter-demonstrators.
August is often referred to by the news media as the ‘silly season’ with parliament on leave and frequently no British news worth reporting. Not in 2025 though as the battle of Epping featured night after night on broadcasts. The focus was a single asylum seeker arrested and charged with several offences including the sexual assault of a 14 year old girl. He was subsequently convicted. Other asylum seekers housed at The Bell made clear not only their abhorrence of his actions, but their overall dislike of the man for his general behaviour, which they had had to put up with prior to his arrest.
There were obviously political actors at work quite prepared to further exploit the 14 year old victim for their own ends, as was the case with the tragic victims in Southport the previous year. The disaffected meanwhile allowed themselves to become an unreasonable, unreasoning mob, most of whom are usually rational, sociable people in their everyday circumstances, however trying those might be.
As Joseph Moulton identified in South Yorkshire, people nationally and internationally are having to deal with social and economic stresses which politicians will not, or more likely, cannot deal with. Pre-election promises all too readily made are rapidly reneged on.
When people lose faith in politics it doesn’t mean they have no beliefs at all; rather, they can come to believe in almost any ill-founded solutions whose appeal is immediate, without consideration of consequences, and without any analysis of why circumstances are as they are. They identify only symptoms, with no attempt to find causes. It is analgesic politics. It is all too easy to deride those protesting outside asylum hotels. Undoubtedly there will be quite a mix of motives amongst them. Some may well have far-right tendencies, while others genuinely feel threatened and insecure. Many seem to be of the ‘precariat’ strata of the wider working class, those whose immediate economic circumstances make their lives an almost constant struggle. Feelings of vulnerability heighten perceptions of threat and a sense of unfairness. ‘My son can’t get a house, but they get them given!’ is one comment by a protester to a TV news interviewer.
An effect of economic and social pressures is to narrow people’s focus. They don’t look for reasons why refugees risk the treacherous Channel crossing in what are little more than dinghies. The ultimate cause of their own and refugees’ ills lies outside their awareness. The wider world with all manner of disorders caused by capitalism merely enforces a sense of lack of control, a feeling of near powerlessness. So, rather than aspiring to abolish borders the reaction is to make them more clearly defined and secure.
When those who are occupying the moral high ground stage their counter-protests they unintentionally heighten the sense amongst the demonstrators that their concerns are simply being dismissed as those of racist bigots. So when the flag is run up the flagpole (lamppost) people start to salute it and it becomes a trend. When interviewed, some of the more active flag raisers insist their motives are positive, to do with pride and community.
Understandable to a point amidst all the national and international uncertainties. It just makes the task of socialists all the more difficult. As with reformism, it diverts thinking away from what really needs to be done. The media has given the impression that virtually the whole country has been decked out with flags. Online reports carry photographs of lamppost after lamppost sporting the colours. However, the accompanying article reveals that it’s only the same couple of streets being shown. The rest of the town/city being undraped, just as Joseph Moulton indicated in his interview with YorkMix Radio. A few flags, however ill or well-intentioned, will, like closing borders and asylum hotels, change nothing. Within a few weeks, as autumn weather takes hold, those flags will become rain sodden, tattered and faded, hanging limply. An appropriate symbol of capitalist Britain.
D.A.