As St George Flags and Union Jacks spring up across the country - and are then promptly taken down by puritanical councils - the idea that Britain is experiencing a strange form of tyranny has begun to percolate. The phrase, “when your own flag is a symbol of resistance, you are living under occupation” has been thrown around, and there’s an emotive resonance beneath it.
Flags are symbols, both in the literal and metaphorical sense, and as “Operation Raise the Colours” spreads across England, it would be easy (as the commentariat often likes to do) to ask who is coordinating this, and what their goals are.
When people speak about patriotism today, they can imagine it as something stage-managed from above; flags waved at official ceremonies, sombre speeches on Remembrance Sunday, the carefully airbrushed iconography of monarchy.
But in Britain, many of the strongest expressions of national loyalty have not been orchestrated by the state at all. They have come about when ordinary people, concerned with their immediate communities, have acted in ways that later revealed a deeper political truth: that patriotism is spontaneous.
A good example is the Neighbourhood Watch scheme. Born in the early 1980s, it was not originally dreamt up by Whitehall. It was the product of ordinary citizens deciding that if crime was rising and police resources were stretched, then they themselves would step in.
Operation Raise the Colours, a campaign encouraging households to fly the Union Jack from their home, has emerged not through state decree but through grassroots initiative. Almost, in fact, in spite of state decree.
First piloted in the village of Mollington, Cheshire, the idea quickly spread: residents banding together, placing stickers in their windows, and watching over one another’s homes. The movement became so widespread that the Home Office eventually lent it official support, but its origins were bottom-up. It was people, not government, who acted first.
What made Neighbourhood Watch potent was not only its practical impact on burglary statistics, but its symbolism. It said that the nation begins on your street, among your neighbours, in the shared responsibility for safety and decency. It turned ordinary terraced houses into a microcosm of citizenship. And it thrived precisely because it tapped into instincts already there: people wanted to belong to something larger than themselves, yet rooted in the familiar.
Fast forward four decades and something similar is stirring. Operation Raise the Colours, a campaign encouraging households to fly the Union Jack from their home, has emerged not through state decree but through grassroots initiative. Almost, in fact, in spite of state decree.
Its supporters argue that the national flag has been unfairly maligned, treated with suspicion in some circles as if patriotism were synonymous with extremism. The campaign’s message is deliberately simple: be proud of who you are, show it visibly, and encourage a culture of belonging that transcends politics. As Dr Rakib Ehsan recently said, the act of flying the flag is often a call to community rather than a tool of exclusion, bringing people closer to together.
Like Neighbourhood Watch, Operation Raise the Colours has caught on because it builds on sentiments that already exist. For many families, the flag is not about aggressive nationalism but about continuity; about seeing your identity reflected in the skyline of your own street.
It transforms the private sphere into a civic space, where allegiance to country is expressed with the same informality as hanging flower baskets or decorating for Christmas. That informality is precisely what makes it powerful.
Yet controversy has followed. Several local councils have moved to restrict or forcibly remove flags, citing planning regulations or the need for “community cohesion.” The symbolism here is telling: bureaucracy steps in precisely where people are expressing themselves most naturally. A council van arrives to dismantle what residents have erected with pride, and suddenly what was once a quiet statement of loyalty becomes a flashpoint of resentment.
This is a pattern familiar from history. Edmund Burke, writing in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), observed that attachments do not begin with abstract humanity. They begin at home: in family, neighbourhood, parish, and only then extend outward to the nation and mankind. His warning against tearing up local sentiment in the name of universal ideals remains relevant.
Burke argued that when people feel their immediate loyalties threatened, they recoil not only from the authority that threatens them but also from the grander abstractions that authority claims to serve.
That insight helps explain why attempts to suppress flag-flying can backfire. To many people, raising the Union Jack is not a political manifesto but an extension of the same loyalty they show by keeping an eye on their neighbour’s house or tidying a shared verge. It is the small, almost invisible fibre that binds civic life together.
Strip that away and you are not left with a neutral space, but with disaffection. To have the state take down the flag that represents that very state across the world is a deeply powerful symbol that tells citizens something clear: you should not feel pride. You should feel shame.
The lesson of both Neighbourhood Watch and Operation Raise the Colours is that patriotism is not imposed. It grows organically where people see themselves reflected in the community around them. It is more credible when it emerges from lived reality -graffiti scrubbed off a wall, a suspicious car reported, a flag flying from a garden pole - than when it is dressed up in official grandeur. That is not to dismiss ceremonial patriotism, but to note that it works best when it builds on instincts already present.
Burke argued that when people feel their immediate loyalties threatened, they recoil not only from the authority that threatens them but also from the grander abstractions that authority claims to serve.
There is also a wider political implication. Much of the British state’s difficulty in recent decades has been the gap between the grand narratives pushed from the centre (multiculturalism, global citizenship, managed decline) and the loyalties that people actually feel in their daily lives. When policy ignores or denigrates those loyalties, the result is not an enlightened cosmopolitanism but a vacuum that populists are quick to fill.
The genius of Burke’s observation is that it captures something anthropological: the way affections scale. People rarely begin with abstract commitments to humanity; they begin with the people they know, and only then does their sense of belonging expand outward.
National patriotism, in this view, is simply the natural enlargement of local attachments. And that is why schemes like Neighbourhood Watch or flag-raising campaigns resonate so strongly, because they give ordinary affections a visible form.
What we are witnessing, then, is not the invention of patriotism but its re-discovery. In the 1980s it was the fear of crime that galvanised people; in the 2020s it is the sense of cultural loss and political disorientation. In both cases, the solution was the same: ordinary people acting first, with the state lagging behind or, in this case, even actively resisting.
One could say this is the truest form of conservatism. Not the ideology of think tanks or the rhetoric of Westminster, but the lived practice of people conserving what they value, often in the face of official scepticism. To quote Burke again:
To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.
People will act to defend what they find lovely, whether it be the security of their street or the dignity of their flag.
And so “patriotism is spontaneous” is not a slogan but a fact of social life. Attempts to suppress it only make it more obvious. The more councils confiscate flags, the more people will buy them. The more authorities treat national symbols as suspect, the more ordinary Britons will treat them as precious. That is not a paradox but a reminder: the nation lives most securely not in government offices but in the instincts of its people.
When policy ignores or denigrates those loyalties, the result is not an enlightened cosmopolitanism but a vacuum that populists are quick to fill.
In the end, the most enduring acts of patriotism are rarely orchestrated. They are the neighbour watching out for you when you are away, the family planting a flag in the garden, the small rituals of care and pride that accumulate into something larger. They are spontaneous, and because of that, they endure.