Red flags: The non-existent company behind Brum's Union Jacks

“I’ve been called knuckle dragging scum. I’ve been called, this week, a nonce,” says the shaken looking man, before he is briefly cut off. GB News presenter Martin Daubney interjects to apologise for any potential offence caused, then allows his guest to continue. “I’ve been called all sorts of names, been put under the spotlight and all I’m doing is what I think is right,” says Ryan Bridge.

It is Friday 26 September and Bridge is on Daubney’s show to talk about his previous night spent flag raising in Stirchley. Wearing a navy suit, his long silver hair tied back in a bun, the 45-year-old director of a no-win-no-fee accident claims management company says he was baffled by the hostility. The evening began well enough with a “carnival atmosphere” as his 20-strong crew affixed Union flags to lampposts along the Pershore Road. Many a car honked in support; the Nepalese owner of a takeaway joined in with his own Union bunting.

The problems arose, Bridge tells Daubney, when they tried to enter some of the drinking spots along the street and ‘white, middle class liberals in pop-up bars’ began making rude hand gestures at them and calling them “far-right”. 

“This is nothing to do with far-right movements,” Bridge insists. His friend Elliott Stanley, sombre-faced and sitting next to him on the GB News sofa, nods in agreement. At the start of the segment, Daubney introduced the pair as the “co-founders and company directors of Raise the Colours”. They’re on the show to set the record straight. “We are normal, working class Birmingham businessmen,” says Bridge, who owns a £600,000 house in Bromsgrove, firmly.

Flags stories dominated the news cycle in September. Since we published our first news story and a follow-up feature in August, we’ve been focusing on other matters.

But in recent weeks there has been a detectable shift. Flags in south Birmingham have migrated upwards, from primarily low-income neighbourhoods like Weoley Castle, into areas with larger middle-class populations, like Selly Oak. In this new terrain, the flaggers are facing more objections and sometimes confrontations. In Stirchley, where rapid gentrification over the past decade has sharpened the divide between longtime residents and relative newcomers, the tension is peaking.

On Tuesday night, two businesses where customers opposed flags raised nearby were pelted with flour, eggs and miscellaneous condiments. On Wednesday morning, staff arrived at Couch cocktail bar and Den cafe to find the front of their businesses coated in the concoction. We don’t know who is responsible, but locals suspect people connected to the flaggers are to blame.

‘Founding figures and master architects’

There is still an air of mystery around the flaggers. Various groups have taken responsibility for starting the craze, even as many involved keep a low profile. For their part, Bridge and Stanley are evidently happy to be public faces. Their website raisethecolours.org — which Bridge plugged liberally on live TV — describes them as the originators of the national flag phenomenon. Visitors can donate money towards the effort, with suggested amounts ranging from £10-£500. 

However, another man, with his own fundraiser, claims he is the founder of the movement — and his links to the far-right are clear as day. Andy Currien (aka Andy Saxon), formerly a bodyguard to Tommy Robinson, runs security for Britain First. As Hope not Hate has revealed, in 2009 he pleaded guilty to affray and was sentenced to 18 months in prison, after a 59-year-old man was subjected to racist abuse and crushed to death by a car in Wolverhampton. Currien uses the buymeacoffee.com site beloved by freelancers to collect money for flags. “We are the founding members of this operation, which has taken off all over the UK,” declares the ‘Operation raise the colours HQ’ donation page.

Finally, there are the Weoley Warriors: a group of roughly 15 men who proudly claimed responsibility for hoisting flags in Weoley Castle during the summer. They also have a fundraiser, this one on GoFundMe.com, where they have almost reached their £24,000 target. “We are the founding figures and master architects of the historic and glorious flag movement that is sweeping across this great land of ours,” states the page. 

Like Ryan Bridge and Elliott Stanley, the Warriors deny any association with the far-right, claiming the cause is about showing “Birmingham and the rest of the country how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements”. But their social media suggests otherwise. On X, they shared photographs taken by one of their members at Tommy Robinson’s recent London march, dubbed the biggest far-right rally in British history. They have also shared posts by fellow attendee, the Polish MEP Dominik Tarczyński who has proudly adopted the descriptor, even saying “my future children will be far right, I hope”.

A case of mistaken identity

Early last week, we began to get messages from people in areas like Hall Green, Kings Heath and Selly Oak to say the flags were spreading. One reader, referring to Sam’s description of the border where, in the September feature story, he observed the flags coming to an abrupt halt, told us: “the invisible barrier between Weoley Castle and Selly Oak has been breached!”

Another called me at 8.30pm on a Thursday, to say he had just seen a fleet of flaggers erect Union flags all the way down from Cotteridge to where Dad’s Lane meets the Pershore Road. He described two men in their 30s or 40s, six younger men and a primary school aged girl wrapped in a flag. “She looked cold,” he added. 

Some people have taken to removing the flags, prompting outrage in the Weoley Warriors Facebook group, with the administrators denouncing the “far-left extremists” who they claim took the flags down, and making hasty plans to replace them. One figure who has drawn particular ire is the street artist Foka Wolf, who is known for hiding his identity behind colourful balaclavas. Foka has been critical of the Weoley Warriors on social media and, last month, he designed a St George’s flag with the satirical message “Divide and Conker” emblazoned across the front. In the Instagram caption, he wrote: “Set people against each other then control the chaos. It’s a classic trick used by the ruling classes.”

Fokas’s criticism has angered Warriors’ fans leading to an unfortunate mishap: in an attempt to dox the artist, a Warrior supporter mistakenly published the name, photo and address of a different person with the surname Wolf.

By contrast, Bridge and Stanley’s raisethecolours.org is a more polished operation. It has an official website complete with a contact page.

‘100% legitimate’

Keen to learn more about their organisation and whether it is linked to the Warriors or Currien, I try to reach Bridge via the site but my email to the press enquiries inbox goes unanswered. I eventually get hold of him at one of the companies he runs, Nationwide Personal Injuries Specialists Ltd, which is based in Kings Norton. “I don’t want to get mixed up in anything that’s not really for our cause”, he says cautiously, when I tell him I’m a journalist. He tells me he is looking up The Dispatch on his computer as we speak.

I tell him I have tried looking up his flag company on Companies House, without success.

“It is, it’s in process now,” Bridge tells me.

“Under the name Raise the Colours?” I ask.

“No.”

“What name is it under?”

“Why do you want to find it? This is nothing to do with what we’re doing going forwards.”

I explain that people donating to the cause will want to know it is legitimate, that their money is going to an official organisation and I want to see evidence of that. 

“Oh, it’s 100% legitimate,” he tells me and promises to send me the details. They never arrive.

What is available on Companies House are records of a selection of businesses created by Bridge, all operating in the compensation claims arena. In 2016 he launched UK Holiday Claims Ltd, although it was dissolved two years later without filing any accounts. This was around the time the news emerged that Spanish police were investigating Bridge and seven other Brits alleged to have scammed hotels in Magaluf between 2016 and 2017. The group is suspected of helping British tourists to make bogus compensation claims for food poisoning via a WhatsApp group called UK Holiday Claims, in return for a cut of the money. The court instruction names Bridge as one of the people in the UK who was in charge of processing the false claims gathered in Mallorca.

When I ask Bridge about this, he says “you’ve got that wrong, if you actually read the article it isn’t about me directly.” It’s not clear which article he means but there are several. One, in the Mirror, describes him as being “at the centre” of the probe and bears his photograph. At the time, he told the paper, “I don’t know why my name has been connected to this. We had a company that dealt with a small number of claims, maybe around five or 10, but the company was shut down as it just wasn’t profitable.”

On the phone to me, he claims the trial has already happened but I tell him I have checked with a journalist in Spain who is familiar with the case, who confirmed it is yet to go ahead.

Growing frustrated, Bridge says “well, that's nothing to do with what y–you either want to talk about flags or that, I mean this is mental. So you're obviously from left-wing, and you're trying to make something that's not…” He trails off.

Later that evening, Bridge, Stanley and about eight others don hard hats and high vis vests as they reattach flags to lampposts on the Pershore Road, with the aid of a cherry picker. Videos seen by The Dispatch show a police woman mediating as a passer-by argues with Bridge. The tension, it appears, continues in Stirchley.