It was a sun-soaked weekday in the West Country, and all I could think about was the flags. Around the sedate Wiltshire town of Devizes, they fluttered from trees and upstairs windows, with crude versions sprayed across roundabouts. In my adopted home town in Somerset, meanwhile, local desperadoes had vandalised a pedestrian crossing close to a school, which had sparked an online row, partly because they had jettisoned their paint cans down a nearby alley. “Apart from the paint being dumped, I applaud them,” said one Facebook post. There was talk of more St George’s crosses appearing at the car park near the GP surgery – and, in among scenes I usually associate with calm and quiet, a sudden and unsettling sense of mischief and menace.

Such is the impact of Operation Raise the Colours, a campaign which seems to have begun in the suburbs of Birmingham. Its origins apparently lie in a few flags being cleared from lamp-posts as the city council tried to install LED lighting. In the hands of online provocateurs, that was enough to confirm stories about woke local bureaucrats denying people their national identity. That narrative has quickly ballooned, with sometimes grimly comical consequences: the dependably restrained Reform UK MP Lee Anderson says that any elected official who supports removing British or English flags “should be removed from office for betraying the very country they serve”, while his party’s council leader in Northamptonshire insists that for health and safety reasons, “we may need to take them down in the best interests of our residents”.

That very small subplot is probably the only halfway amusing part of the story: everything else is deadly serious. Despite claims that it is all about patriotism rather than prejudice, what has materialised up and down the country feels like an unauthorised version of what the Home Office used to call the hostile environment, as if football hooligans have taken control of road markings and street furniture. And the relevant mood music is not exactly subtle. On the campaign’s Facebook page, there are enthusiastic looks........

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