Flags can lift spirits. They can also obscure motives.

As the last weather-beaten stock hung limp, battered by months of rain and exhaust fumes, a fresh crop of St George and Union Jack flags sprang up around the roundabouts of South Manchester. Given the timing, coinciding with the Gorton and Denton by-election, one might reasonably assume this was a last-minute effort to stir patriotic fervour and electoral enthusiasm for Reform UK.

If that interpretation sounds cynical, recent events suggest it may not be misplaced.

This week, a businessman in North Yorkshire made headlines after being billed nearly £3,000 by North Yorkshire Council for the removal of Union and St George’s flags he had attached to lamp posts in Scarborough. He said he was “disgusted” by the charge and insisted his intention was simply to “lift people’s spirits.”

But it is fair to ask: lift spirits towards what? These displays increasingly appear less like spontaneous expressions of national pride and more like carefully curated political messaging.

In areas where Reform UK has gained control, prominent public flag displays have become conspicuously common.

In December, a £75,000 flag project was rolled out in Nottinghamshire under a Reform UK-led county council. Reform council leader Mick Barton argued the banners would “strengthen community spirit.” Yet critics were unconvinced. Labour and Conservative politicians alike questioned the motives behind the initiative.

Andy Abrahams, Labour mayor of Mansfield and leader of Mansfield District Council, described the move as “politically motivated” and “divisive.” He argued that patriotism must be expressed “in the right place and for the right motive,” warning that it is “morally wrong to claim patriotism via a political party.”

His concern speaks to a deeper tension about what patriotism actually means. In his 1940 essay ‘My Country Right or Left,’ George Orwell drew a distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism, he suggested, is a love of one’s country and its people, a defensive, grounded affection. Nationalism, by contrast, is inseparable from power. It seeks prestige, dominance and political advantage.

That distinction feels increasingly relevant. When politicians wrap themselves in national symbols while pursuing electoral gain, the line between pride and propaganda begins to blur. The St George’s Cross, once largely confined to sporting events, has in recent years been amplified online through campaigns such as “Operation Raise the Colours,” presenting coordinated flag displays as cultural resistance.

Just last weekend, a sea of Union Jack flags made its way through the streets of Manchester city centre. Organised by the far-right party, Britain First, the gathering was billed as a ‘march for remigration and mass deportations.’

Yet this phenomenon is not uniquely British. Across Europe and North America, right-wing populist movements have made strategic use of national symbols, framing themselves as the defenders of the nation.

Which brings us to back to Nigel Farage, a self-styled standard-bearer of this ‘patriotic’ movement, yet a figure whose political alliances, sympathies and even proposed policies echo forces well beyond Britain’s shores.

Plans to create an ICE-style agency

Consider immigration. While many in Britain have watched the aggressive enforcement tactics of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the United States with horror, Reform UK has pledged to establish what amounts to a British analogue. The party’s home affairs spokesperson, Zia Yusuf, outlined plans for a “UK Deportation Command” with the capacity to detain up to 24,000 migrants at any one time and to operate up to five deportation flights per day should the party enter government.

In a speech in Dover this week, Yusuf went further, suggesting Reform would end the granting of indefinite leave to remain and review existing arrangements. He also proposed revoking visas from six predominantly Muslim-majority countries, Pakistan, Eritrea, Somalia, Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan, a policy that bears sickening resemblance to the travel bans introduced under Donald Trump in the US.

‘Fundamentally un-British’ – Reform’s loss in Gorton and Denton

The proposals have drawn criticism. Labour chair Anna Turley described them as “a direct attack on settled families and fundamentally un-British,” arguing that Britain’s political tradition rests on tolerance, legal stability and equal treatment under the law, not sweeping executive crackdowns modelled on foreign administrations.

Similar criticism emerged following Reform UK’s reaction to losing the Gorton and Denton by-election, where Green candidate Hannah Spencer won 14,980 votes, and Reform came second, with over 4,400 fewer votes.

The party’s candidate Matt Goodwin, who had campaigned on prioritising “local people” over Muslim voters, responded to defeat by alleging “Muslim sectarianism” and claiming Britain was being “lost.”

His remarks were widely condemned. Campaigner Mike Galsworthy accused him of echoing “Trump tactics” and undermining democracy with a “racist libellous story.” Journalist Carole Cadwalladr called the statement “racism, pure and simple.” Former politician Salma Yaqoob dismissed attempts to portray the result as Islamist sectarianism as baseless.

“Almost feel sorry for the haters  who are trying to spin Muslims voting for a woman in a party led by a gay Jewish man is evidence of Islamist sectarianism,” Yaqoob wrote.

Reform presents itself as the guardian of British sovereignty and tradition. Yet much of the party’s behaviour and policies, including its flagship immigration proposals closely mirror those of Trump-era Republicanism. If patriotism means confidence in Britain’s own democratic traditions and legal norms, then importing the playbook of another nation’s culture wars appears less like national renewal and more like ideological imitation.

For a movement draped so heavily in the Union Jack, the influence is noticeably transatlantic.

The Farage and Trump bromance

Farage has never hidden his admiration for Trump. After Trump’s 2016 victory and the Brexit vote, he celebrated with him in Trump Tower, framing their wins as twin populist uprisings, united by anti-establishment rhetoric and ‘patriotic’ appeal – parallel insurgencies.

That association continued over the years. Just last September, Farage posted a photo of himself beside Trump in the Oval Office, writing: “It’s good to be back.”

The closeness has drawn criticism in the United States as well as at home, with Democrat congressman Jamie Raskin dismissing Farage as a Trump loyalist.

Yet Trump’s brand of politics, that is brash, combative, culturally divisive, doesn’t seem to fit as well in Britain as it does in the US. Polling by More in Common suggests that Farage’s proximity to Trump is more of an electoral turn off than an asset.

Farage’s desperate search for his own MAGA cap

The parallels with Trumpism extend beyond photo opportunities. Reform’s branded football shirt, emblazoned with ‘Farage 10,’ a not-so-subtle nod to Downing Street, was seen as a British echo of the MAGA cap, that is politics repackaged as wearable identity, nationalism fused with ‘personality.’ And the choice of football shirt was particularly striking from a politician who, in 2021 regarding players taking the knee, argued football should be kept free of political gestures.

“The baseball cap was the perfect vessel for Donald Trump’s populist revolution,” wrote GQ Magazine, “an accessory heavily identified with the rural, outdoorsy white working class that forms his core base.”

“Like the MAGA cap, the Reform football shirt is confident enough to go big on colour, and so become something people are proud to wear.”

More recently, however, Farage’s tone towards Trump has shifted. As European leaders criticised US tariff threats and economic aggression towards NATO allies, Farage described proposed American tariffs on the UK as “wrong.”

Yet for a movement that relies so heavily on patriotism and sovereignty, the depth of its transatlantic entanglement remains an unavoidable tension and whether Farage’s distancing from the US president is too little too late, remains to be seen.

Farage and Putin

If Trump presents one source of controversy for Farage and Reform, Russia presents another.

From accusing the EU of “poking the Russian bear,” after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, to naming Putin as the world leader he most admired, Farage has a long and chequered record on Putin admiration.

And the issue isn’t fading for Reform. This week it emerged that Reform’s new head of policy, James Orr, holds some worryingly views about Russia and Ukraine, having at one point claimed that “a lot more people have got into trouble for free speech offences in the UK than in Putin’s Russia.”

Such sympathies could prove politically costly. Britain remains overwhelmingly hostile towards the Russian president. A 2025 YouGov poll found that 89 percent of Britons hold an unfavourable view of Putin. In a country so sceptical of the Russian leader, any suggestion of softness may linger far longer than a football shirt ever could.

The late 18th-century English writer Samuel Johnson famously observed that “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.” He was not condemning a love of country. He was condemning its misuse, the cynical wrapping of selfish ambition in the language of national virtue.

That distinction feels newly relevant.

Reform UK presents itself as the authentic voice of British sovereignty, rooted, traditional, proudly distinct. Yet again and again, its rhetoric, alliances and policy proposals echo movements and models imported from abroad. Its immigration blueprint borrows heavily from Trump-era enforcement tactics. Its political branding mirrors the aesthetics of American populism. Its leading figures have, at various points, expressed indulgent or admiring words about tyrannical strongmen far beyond Britain’s shores.

Flags can lift spirits. They can also obscure motives.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch

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