Across the nation, we’re seeing rising numbers of St George’s flags. Is this nationalism? Xenophobia? Or can our flags mean something better? 02/09/2025

I drove the length of England this weekend, 500 miles to York and back. We saw quite a few St George’s flags on the journey.

I came home to read a discussion on our local neighbourhood social media chat (think Twitter with fewer Russian bots and even more cats). Someone was complaining about the number of flags that had recently been put up around the town. The response they received wasn’t entirely supportive. “Deal with it. I’m proud to be English/British” was the general tenor.

And then, last night a friend messaged me with a picture of the local Islamic Centre on the walls of which someone had drawn, none too artistically, two red George’s crosses.

Depending on your perspective, this sudden flourish of flags is either a long overdue public assertion of proud patriotism or an ugly spasm of xenophobia and Muslim–baiting. Or maybe it’s both.

I’m not a flaggy kind of a person but I completely get and on principle support the idea for communities to have symbolic centres of gravity. If we are to be ‘us’, in any meaningful sense of that word, we need things – ideas, institutions, people, narratives, symbols – to rally around. Solidarity needs handrails.

To be clear, therein lie perils, and one of the things that attracts me to Christianity is its determined relativisation of all such ideas, institutions, symbols, etc. Communities, societies, nations: these are goods of the created order, and the things that symbolise them are thus also good. But they cannot be allowed to accrete to themselves ultimate significance. That is what is known as idolatry, and it is why nationalism, of the kind that puts my country above everything else, is unacceptable. Wave a flag by all means, but don’t cocoon yourself in it.

As long as we remain cognizant of these perils, however, and we guard against the proper solidarities of life sliding into exclusivism and idolatry, the principle of such unifying symbols is a good one. And yet, this is only part of the challenge. Because for all that those symbols can unify us, they do not necessarily unify us for the good because they have no intrinsic content. Flags don’t mean anything in and of themselves.

Postmodernism long ago alerted us to the idea that texts are not static or self–interpreting, and rarely is this more the case than when it comes to the “text” of a flag. Yes, there are things on a flag – lines of red, expanses of white, triangles of blue – that are, so to speak, objectively there. And yes, there are histories that can’t be altogether ignored or rewritten. But ultimately it is by whom and in what way these symbols are used that determines what they mean. The Nazi appropriation of the swastika, which once symbolised prosperity and good luck, is the most obvious and egregious example of this. But any flag, any symbol, any narrative, can be appropriated in such a way as to redirect its meaning. The cross, for example, was once subverted from being a symbol of violent imperial power into one of redemption and life, and has been re–subverted – national belonging, ethnic symbol, cultural identity, etc – ever since.  Things that mean one thing can be made to mean another thing simply by the way people use them.

So it is with the English flag. In spite of its widespread use during World Cups, the St George’s cross has not been widely deployed in public life. Presumably that is because of England’s outsized role in the Union, and the historic desire to emphasise that fact of union rather than the dominant nation within it; Jack rather than George, so to speak. The surge of Scottish nationalism over the last two generations, plus the widespread use of other ideologically–oriented flags, such as the Pride flag and the Trans flag, has made this absence seem more and more like a silence. The rise (return?) of the flag of St George should surprise no–one.

But what this actually means is still up for grabs. Put simply, if the only people who deploy the St George flag do so to broadcast hostility and alienation – spray painting it on mosques, wearing it when protesting outside asylum hotels, putting it on the campaign literature of far–right groups – then that is what the flag will come to mean. But it need not, especially if those who have a different vision of Englishness step in.

So, wave the flag by all means but do so in a way that redirects its meaning towards humanising solidarity and hospitality. Let people carry a St George’s cross placard when campaigning to welcome asylum seekers. Let them hang them in reception centres. Let those who celebrate the fact that the nation has freedom of religion use it in their literature. Let anti–fascist campaign groups wear it as a badge. May those who have a vision of England as one of welcome and refuge claim the flag as their own. It will take courage and a lot of explanation.

“What’s in a name?” Juliet famously asked, before reasoning “that which we call a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet.” She was, as we know now, wrong. What we call things, even things as objective as a rose’s smell, does affect how we think of them. (Cue The Simpsons… Bart: “Not if you called them stench–blossoms”. Homer: “Or crap–weeds.”)

As with words, so with flags. Flags absorb meaning from the people who carry them. May the St George’s cross stand not for hostility to those with a “different” religion or skin colour, but for a welcome to those who are tired, broken, alone, in pain.

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