Flag Wars: How Everyday National Symbols Become Sites of Far-Right Contestation in Contemporary Britain

Recent scholarship on everyday nationalism highlights how national identity is reproduced not only through elite discourse and formal politics, but through mundane symbols, affective attachments, and ordinary social practices. Yet, as national symbols circulate in increasingly polarized digital environments, the meanings attached to these “everyday” objects have become intensely contested. Flags, in particular, have emerged as sites where competing actors claim authority over what the nation is, who belongs to it, and what constitutes the legitimate patriotism. Despite growing interest in symbolic politics, we still know little about how grassroots digital campaigns reinterpret everyday national symbols and how these reinterpretations generate broader public debate about the true “nation-ness.” This paper examines the recent surge of local patriotic campaigns in the United Kingdom—most notably Weoley Warriors and Operation Raise Your Colours—which have encouraged residents to display the Union Jack or St George’s Cross in their public neighbourhoods. While participants describe these initiatives as apolitical acts of national pride and community spirit, critics portray them as racially coded signals aligned with far-right movements, often referencing founders who have ties to extremist organisations. As a result, an ostensibly ordinary practice—hanging a national flag—has become a focal point for public argument and digital contention. This case offers a timely opportunity to investigate how national symbols become politically charged and how their meanings fracture across different audiences. Drawing on data from Facebook, X, and local media reporting, the paper examines how these movements communicate, frame, and visually curate their activities online. The analysis uses a mixed-methods approach combining computational text analysis—topic modelling to identify dominant narrative themes; sentiment and moral-emotional lexicon analysis to capture emotional registers; and keyword co-occurrence networks to trace symbolic associations—and descriptive measures of digital mobilisation such as video/image frequency, rates of resharing, posting rhythms, and the visibility of conflictual interactions (e.g., videos of opponents, public confrontations). These digital traces allow us to observe not only what narratives groups promote, but how their content circulates, escalates, and triggers counter-narratives. By comparing supporters’ self-framing—often using terms like “warriors” or “crusaders”—with critics’ reframing of the same practices, the study shows how national symbols become embedded in competing claims about identity, heritage, and exclusion. The paper argues that digital platforms play a crucial role in amplifying these conflicts by making symbolic acts highly visible, replicable, and emotionally charged, enabling ordinary users to participate in redefining or contesting national symbols in real time. The paper contributes to scholarship on everyday nationalism, digital politics, and far-right mobilisation by showing how mundane symbols become arenas of contested truth and belonging. It also offers a novel empirical examination of a rapidly evolving case, demonstrating how the politics of belonging is increasingly shaped through the interaction of everyday practices and online visual-discursive dynamics.