England flies the flag – from a lamp post, covered in bird sh*t.

Across England, an extraordinary movement has taken hold: the mass stapling of £2 polyester flags to any publicly funded vertical surface. Many lamp posts, traffic lights and bus stops are now tangled in sagging St George’s crosses. Forget cricket and warm beer - the true test of patriotism in 2025 is how many metres of fraying polyester you can cable-tie above a roundabout.

The England flag, once a symbol of jubilee celebrations and penalty shootouts, now finds itself pressed into the service of a culture war - like a middle-aged pub landlord forced into active combat because someone on Facebook dared to suggest hummus is nice.

Critics argue that the flags are provocative at a time when tensions around immigration are running high. St George’s crosses have become a fixture at anti-immigration protests, where they are held aloft by people who think 5G is a form of government mind control.

While groups behind the flag phenomenon say their aim is to spread ‘love, unity and patriotism’, some of them have been linked to far-right organisations. Supporters insist they’re just ‘ordinary people’ who enjoy crowdfunding for cable ties, and shouting at strangers outside hotels. “We want people to know that this is a country to be proud of. England still stands tall!” declared Dave Crump from Facebook group Walsall Warriors, as a flag slid slowly down a lamp post behind him, like a pole dancer who’s lost the will to live.

Meanwhile, online crowdfunders continue to raise thousands to buy more flags. Britain may not be able to fund the NHS, but by God we’ll never run out of cheap tat from Poundland.

The irony is that these flags - flimsy, dirt-streaked, and perpetually tangled around themselves - feel less like a proud declaration of national identity and more like a national metaphor. They hang at half mast, limp and rain-soaked, as if to say: this is Britain now. A once-proud island reduced to a damp bit of polyester flapping above a pothole. Much of England now resembles an end-of-empire clearance sale that went horribly wrong in a gale, with seagulls treating the whole enterprise as an avant-garde toilet. The spirit of the nation has been encapsulated by a scrap of cheap polyester, slowly decomposing above a Lidl car park.

The country doesn’t look like it’s flying high – it looks like it’s in tatters and stuck halfway up a lamp post, waiting for the council to take it down, probably sometime in 2031.

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