The flags of St George have appeared, tied to lampposts up and down England, practically overnight.

They have been planted by far-right activists whose views are compounded by TikTokers and YouTubers who vlog outside hotels housing immigrants and incite violent protests.

Initially spurred by England’s Euro 2025 win but increasingly linked to far-right groups, ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ has been promulgated online this week by influencers who believe in, among other absurdities, the use of ‘common law’ and ‘maritime law’ against the police. They regularly threaten to – and occasionally do – march on Parliament over Britain’s accommodation of who they refer to as ‘boat people’. Chronically online right-wing radicals, many of whom profess support for Reform UK, are obsessed with imbuing England’s flag with fascist rhetoric. They post videos and images captioned with tags such as ‘#raisethecolours’, ‘#stoptheboats’ and ‘#dinghyhunting’. In conducting a simple search of those posting this propaganda, you will notice their peers are the sort who shout obscenities outside hotels, stockpile in preparation for an impending civil war set to endanger British women and children, and spread illogical conspiracy theories about, for example, the Islamic infiltration of government.

In social media posts reaching demographics from pensioners to teenagers, the ‘Great Replacement Theory’ that the white British race is being eroded and strategically replaced by immigrants has been spreading rapidly for years. Two years ago, a King’s College London study found that 32 per cent of UK adults believed the Great Replacement conspiracy. On public-facing pages across the internet, thugs excitedly herald a coming race war – a civil war in which ‘Islamists’, like sleeper cells, are expected to rise and fight white Britons for jurisdiction over the United Kingdom.

These views are no longer fringe. They pervade our every town and city, from the Scottish highlands to Penzance.

Profiling the organisers of the flag-flying campaign, the Guardian notes a fundraising page was created by the Wythall Flaggers, a group that intends to use funds to “[coat] the local community in England flags as this is home and we should be patriotic and proud”. Given the broader context, the intentions of many of the campaign’s participants will not be so pure. Our national flag, three decades on from the halcyon days of Cool Britannia, has been reclaimed by the hard-right.

Writing for today’s Sunday Times, Kathleen Stock argues that “it’s time for mainstream politicians to nail their colours to the mast”, citing Robert Jenrick’s raising of Union Jacks in recent days as legitimising the movement’s intent. “To pick up on this trend,” Stock writes, “is exactly the right move. As Orwell noted, patriotism is an extremely powerful political force, and it would be crazily self-defeating to relinquish the rising tide to the fascist fringes”. This seems sensible. The trouble is, fascism is no longer fringe. Meanwhile, many in the Conservative party are signalling their increasingly hard-right positions. This is the same Jenrick who decries immigrants as hailing from “alien cultures” and harbouring “medieval attitudes”. Make no mistake: this is not your grandad’s flag of St George. Attached to lampposts in 2025, it represents a rejection of modern England as a globalist, multicultural, neoliberal state and a return to its colonial, racist, supremacist roots. It is used by many as a symbol of British fascism.

Driving through my town yesterday, I passed flag after flag. On reflection, this is not surprising to me. Ours was among the many English towns that seated new Reform councillors in this May’s local elections, in which the hard-right party took 677 council seats. What strikes me, however, is it was the first time I had seen, in person, a physical symbol of my nation’s far right. It was a mere mile away from my house.

Over August, anti-migrant protesters have forced asylum seekers out of government subsidised hotels with councils using injunctions granted by the High Court, despite the Home Secretary’s efforts to have these cases dismissed. Beginning with Epping – where protests have been staged outside the Bell Hotel all summer – various councils including Hillingdon and Staffordshire are being pressed to do the same, with more to come. Unsurprisingly, the Home Office has declared the court’s decisions will “substantially impact” its ability to house asylum seekers. Ejected from hotels which are to some degree separated from suburban society, immigrants must surely now be housed in rented accommodation. They will go from living in town centres to living next door.

This week, Nigel Farage pledged publicly for the first time that Reform UK would undertake a mass deportation programme. Anyone with any sense knows this is impossible. What kind of remigration deal should London expect to strike up with the likes of Kabul? Will Farage as the next Prime Minister invite the Taliban to Downing Street for diplomatic talks? Of course not – but there exists a more realistic model. Look west to Donald Trump’s militarised United States to glimpse the ‘solution’ to the immigration problem.

On the other side of the Atlantic, a south Florida detention centre dubbed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ (so-called because it is surrounded by alligator-infested swamps designed to deter detainees from scaling the electric fences and swimming to freedom) refuses entry to journalists and bans lawmakers from entering with cameras or mobile phones. Several Democrats have been denied entry altogether. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, was holding 59,380 detainees as of 10 August, marking an estimated 50 per cent increase since Trump returned to the White House. Of those held in immigration custody, 85 per cent are held in for-profit facilities run by companies such as CoreCivic, whose CEO Damon Hininger said in May: “Never in our 42-year company history have we had so much activity and demand for our services as we are seeing right now.” He is not exaggerating. The Financial Times suggests the US detention camp industry is projected to reap $500m in extra annual revenue from just nine additional detention centres totalling 16,000 new beds.

Repatriations on a mass scale are diplomatically impossible, time-inefficient and extraordinarily costly. Detention camps are effective and, disturbingly, profit-generating. If the polling is accurate that Reform will take government in 2029, and it seems to be, Britain is heading towards a period of intense punitive cruelty.

A year ago, I wrote apprehensively of the new government’s existential responsibility:

Starmer’s burden is that he must, he must, ensure that the far-right does not return to the fore in the 2030s. Months into its existence, years before significant change to the lives of Britons, the new Labour government […] might inadvertently precipitate a generation of global suffering.

Labour has already failed. While its left-wing voter base is driven to the new Corbyn-Sultana disaster party and much of its centrist base drifts to a particularly unelectable iteration of the Liberal Democrats, No 10 continues to trust Morgan McSweeney’s plan: contemptible appeasement of a right-wing voter base which has already decamped to Reform UK.

None of it will make a blind bit of difference. The flag-bearing racists, once a niche subsection of an increasingly fractured society, are out in force, ‘coating’ England with their nationalist symbol. They are in your town. They live next door. They’re sitting downstairs.

Welcome to Farage’s Britain.