The removal of an England flag from a Portsmouth housing block is exactly the kind of minor incident that the far right seizes upon and inflates into a national outrage. A dispute about communal property or fire regulations is presented as proof that “you are no longer allowed to be English”. The facts become secondary. What matters is the emotional message: your country is being taken from you, your identity is under attack and immigrants are somehow to blame.
The establishment media plays a central role in this process. Newspapers select the most inflammatory headline, strip away context and invite right-wing politicians to pose as defenders of ordinary people. Instead of asking why council housing is overcrowded, why local services are collapsing or why workers have so little control over the places in which they live, attention is redirected towards flags, migrants and supposed attacks on national pride.
This is not accidental. The ruling class needs workers to blame one another. A British worker struggling with low pay, poor housing and failing public services has far more in common with an immigrant worker facing the same conditions than with the millionaire politician or newspaper proprietor claiming to speak in their name. But class unity is dangerous to those who profit from exploitation, so every opportunity is taken to turn economic anger into racial and national resentment.
The far right does not challenge the system that has impoverished British workers. It defends that system while directing popular anger towards immigrants, refugees and minorities. The establishment may publicly distance itself from the crudest racism, but it continually creates the conditions in which it thrives: austerity, war, housing shortages, privatisation and the relentless claim that migrants, rather than capitalism, are responsible for the consequences.
Workers should be free to display the flag of their country. But we should also recognise when that flag is being used as a weapon to divide us. The real attack on working people does not come from the migrant living next door. It comes from the class that owns the housing, controls the media, cuts the services and then tells us to fight among ourselves over the scraps.
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