What ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ is really about

The hoisting of every national flag by an ordinary citizen represents a small act of resistance

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

Pontefract, West Yorkshire (photo: Mtaylor848, via Wikimedia Commons)

The weekend before last, I drove along the A12 through Essex – a route I know well. In the hour or so that I was on the road, I spotted several St George flags hanging from overbridges. I’d never previously witnessed such a spectacle.

And then, driving through a village near my home a few days later, I saw a flag affixed to a post outside the church. It wasn’t there the week before.

Something seems to be happening out there. ‘Operation Raise the Colours’ has caught the wind. I don’t think any of us knows for sure where it’s heading, but it doesn’t take an expert to understand where it came from.

Ordinary Britons know that our immigration and asylum system is utterly broken and are exasperated at the failure of successive governments to fix it. They see that globalisation and open borders have forced rapid – perhaps irreversible – transformation on their communities, and it makes them uneasy.

But it is much more than that.