Walk through Britain today and the flags are hard to miss.
They hang from council offices and roundabouts, they stretch across bridges,
and they remain taped to garden fences months after the jubilee bunting should
have come down. People wear them on their shoulders in supermarkets, pub
gardens, even on school runs. This isn’t the occasional burst of national
celebration we associate with football tournaments or royal weddings. It is an
everyday saturation a choreography of patriotism woven into the mundane.
Confident nations rarely need to wallpaper themselves with
symbols. The very proliferation of Union Jacks is a confession: if we keep
repeating who we are, perhaps we’ll finally believe it. The shift has even been
institutionalised. In 2021, the government changed official guidance to
encourage the Union Flag to be flown on all UK government buildings every day
of the year, not just on designated days (BBC, 24 March 2021). ¹ Flags became
permanent backdrops to ministerial press conferences, no longer celebratory but
compulsory, visual proof of belonging.
At the same time, hostility towards asylum seekers has
hardened into national obsession. Small boats crossing the Channel dominate
headlines and news cycles. In 2024, 37,556 people were detected arriving by
small boat, up from 29,437 in 2023 but lower than the 45,774 peak in 2022 (Home
Office, 2025).² Relative to population size, these numbers are modest: Germany,
France, and Italy all process far more asylum claims. But the imagery of
dinghies at Dover has been elevated into existential crisis.
The politics follows the imagery. From the Conservative
government’s failed Rwanda deportation scheme, which cost hundreds of millions
but never actually relocated a single asylum seeker, to Labour’s decision in
2024 to cancel it and redirect focus toward expanded border operations, asylum
has been used less as policy than as performance. The boats matter less for who
is in them than for what they symbolise. They are made to stand for everything
the nation fears: invasion, loss, disorder, weakness.
Flags and boats move together. One reassures us who we are;
the other reminds us who we are not. But if identity needs this much staging,
it reveals its own fragility.
This fragility is not new. British identity has long been
negotiated through contradiction. For centuries, empire allowed Britishness to
be expansive, exported with confidence across the globe. After empire, identity
was rebuilt around the welfare state, postwar resilience, and institutions like
the NHS. From the 1970s onward, Britishness was mediated through Europe: at
once part of the project and always apart from it.
Brexit was supposed to answer the question of who we are.
Instead, it has deepened the uncertainty. Sovereignty is invoked like a prayer,
flags drape over the ruins of austerity, and asylum seekers are offered up as
scapegoats.
Even earlier, the Windrush generation was invited to rebuild
Britain after the war, only to face hostility, racism, and eventually betrayal
through the Windrush scandal where Black Britons were wrongly detained or
deported under “hostile environment” immigration policies (Home Office, 2018).
The same nation that claimed pride in multiculturalism also punished those who
embodied it. This double movement invitation and exclusion is a core feature of British identity
politics. Today’s asylum debates are another turn of that wheel.
The media amplifies the insecurity. Tabloids scream about
“invasions” while NHS waiting lists lengthen and local councils declare
bankruptcy. Protests against asylum accommodation flare in towns where the
anger should be directed at underfunding, not at refugees. The asylum seeker
becomes a lightning rod for structural failures. The politics of exclusion is
useful: it directs anger away from those in power and toward those with none.
Meanwhile, the flags flutter over food banks. They decorate
roundabouts in towns hollowed out by austerity. They cover bridges even as they
span communities divided by inequality. Symbols stand in for substance, but
symbols cannot fill fridges or pay rents.
The unusual thing about this moment is not that Britain has
asylum seekers it always has, from Huguenots to Ugandan Asians to Syrians. Nor
is it that Britain argues about borders every nation does. What is unusual is
the sheer saturation of symbols and scapegoats: flags everywhere, boats on
every bulletin, identity rehearsed daily in a register of fragility.
It is worth asking: what does it mean when a country defines
itself primarily by what it excludes? A confident identity metabolises
difference; a brittle identity panics at it. A confident country does not need
to cover every roundabout in bunting. A confident politics does not need to
vilify the desperate to feel whole.
What We Can Do
We cannot strip every flag from every roundabout, nor can we
undo decades of media hostility overnight. But we can refuse the swap of
symbols for substance. When the next row about boats fills the headlines, ask:
who benefits when our anger is directed at asylum seekers instead of austerity?
We can reclaim identity in ways that are expansive, not
defensive. To belong here should not mean to exclude. It can mean resilience,
creativity, solidarity. It can mean seeing asylum seekers as neighbours, not
invaders.
We can demand competence rather than theatre: schools
funded, clinics staffed, councils resourced. A politics that works does not
need costumes.
And we can remind ourselves that flags cannot fix what is
broken. They can decorate; they can commemorate but they cannot substitute for
justice, dignity, or care.
Britain today is caught in a contradiction: the louder the
flags wave, the more fragile the identity beneath. A nation sure of itself does
not need to rehearse its belonging every day. A nation at ease with itself does
not need scapegoats. The real challenge is not the asylum seeker in the boat;
it is the country on the shore, unsure of who it is without an enemy to measure
itself against.
Because in the end, an identity built on fear is no identity
at all. And no number of flags will ever cover that truth.
References
- BBC
News. “Union flag to be flown on all UK government buildings every day.”
24 March 2021.
- UK
Home Office. “Irregular migration to the UK, year ending December 2024.”
Published February 2025.
- The
Guardian. “Labour scraps Rwanda deportation scheme after election
victory.” July 2024.
- UK
Home Office. Windrush Lessons Learned Review. 2018.
