The flags dividing Birmingham

Dear readers, two and a half weeks ago The Dispatch published a brief news story about the flag phenomenon in South West Birmingham. For weeks, Union and St George's flags had been going up at the rate of knots. No one was sure who was behind them, until a group calling themselves the Weoley Warriors took responsibility.

Since then, that has all changed — not only are the flags now a national craze but the story has been picked up by media outlets across the country and it has sparked a debate about whether flag flying is merely patriotic or a deliberate attempt to intimidate. Even Elon Musk has joined in: see the image of a St George's cross he posted on X yesterday.

While many flag-raisers are ordinary residents, Hope Not Hate has revealed that a national campaign called Operation Raise the Colours has been organised by far-right actors, including Andrew Currien, a longtime ally of Stephen Yaxley Lennon. For a closer look at the situation in South West Brum, Samuel went to Weoley Castle. That's today's story. But before that, your Brum in Brief.

Brum in Brief

💰 Birmingham City Council continues to have the highest debt per resident of any local authority in the UK, new figures show. The deficit was down to £3.35bn at the end of the 2024-25 financial year, while overall councils in the UK added £7.8bn to their growing debt pile, a BBC investigation has found. The council said given the size of the city, a "more suitable comparison" than overall debt would be debt per head of population, which would put it 49th among councils.

🤼‍♀️ A WWE wrestler has come under fire for comments she made about Birmingham and Ozzy Osbourne during the taping of a WWE Raw show at the BP Pulse arena on Monday night. Irish wrestler Becky Lynch was involved in a segment against Nikki Bella, building up tension for their Women’s Intercontinental Championship match in Paris this weekend. “The only good thing that came out of here died a month ago,” she declared. “But in fairness to Ozzy Osbourne, he had the good sense to move to L.A, a proper city. Because if I lived in Birmingham, I’d die too.” Viewers took to social media to say it was “too soon” and “disrespectful”. More on NME.

🎄 The Frankfurt Christmas market will return to New Street this year, earlier than ever before, on Saturday 1 November. The annual, bratwurst-and-beer offering attracts millions of visitors each year, reports ITV, providing a boost to the local economy.

A few months back, when I was reporting on the bin strike in East Birmingham, I felt a pang of recognition. During a ten minute journey between Small Heath and Sheldon, I noticed something change, gradually and then explicitly. Each neighbourhood was displaying very different flags. Within a short car journey, the houses had gone from flying Palestinian, Somalian and Lebanese flags to St George’s crosses and Union Jacks. 

I suddenly felt like I was back in Belfast or a neighbourhood in the south or east of Glasgow, places where clashing flags, colour schemes and murals predominate, illustrating tribal and spatial divisions between Irish Catholic and British Protestant communities. In the England I was familiar with, a sense of patriotism was always worn lightly: with Union flags only appearing on churches, posh hotels and government buildings. Instead, it was at the edges of the British state, in places like Northern Ireland, where national identity was most strongly reasserted.

In that moment, and only for a moment, Birmingham felt like Ulster: starkly visually divided into ‘us and them.’ For years now, commentators have brought up the prospect of the mainland becoming more like Northern Ireland, more divided, more angry, more tribal, summoning the term ‘Ulsterisation’ to describe the process. I ignored this feeling, and the idea of Birmingham’s ‘Ulsterisation’ until recently.

However, when The Dispatch heard that dozens, if not hundreds, of English and British flags were appearing in outlying Birmingham suburbs, the notion came back to me. Last month, in areas of southwest Birmingham like Weoley Castle, Northfield, Allens Cross and Bartley Green, St George’s Crosses and Union flags started appearing in their hundreds. Many of those responsible for the flag raisings in Birmingham, describe the activity on Facebook groups in positive terms: “it uplifts people's spirits & gives the [people] hope that we can still live in a nice & safe city.” As I was to find, not everyone agrees.

A ‘forgotten’ area

Consensus has it that the vast 1930s residential estates of Weoley Castle are ground zero for this phenomenon, areas that rank highly for deprivation. The flags continue throughout the neighbourhood, and then suddenly, at the borderland between Weoley Castle and Selly Oak, they come to an abrupt stop.

Whether this is down to the ‘flaggers’ running out of Union Jacks, or some unspoken psychic boundary between the two neighborhoods, I don’t know. But it adds to the sense of spatial segregation. Some flags have gone up in wealthier areas like Solihull; unlike those in Weoley Castle, these banners have been greeted with annoyance by local residents, who have complained that they “cheapen the area.” 

“I do believe it's a lot to do with having some pride in our area,” Paul Allen, a Northfield community campaigner, tells me. “I think a lot of people of all races feel forgotten in south Birmingham. A lot of the area is deprived; ever since the Rover car factory closed there has been little investment. I think it's partly to say we're still here. We're proud and we deserve better from our city. Birmingham is really in the dumps at the moment.”

The group who have taken responsibility for the flag phenomenon call themselves the ‘Weoley Warriors’; they are rumoured to run their operation out of the Weoley Castle pub in the centre of the estate. Their recently created, private Facebook page currently has 2100 members; its header image depicts Genners Lane, next to Bartley Green reservoir, decked out in St George’s Cross flags. 

One post by a Weoley Warrior admin, declares that: “we have everything to celebrate, don’t let them demonise our flag: in a time when it is OK to fly every other flag, other than our own. We are made to feel ashamed of this great country. A group of proud Englishmen from Weoley Castle have decided to make a stand.”   

The posts in the group range from the mild to the extreme. At one end of the spectrum there are pictures of grandmothers baking St George’s Cross cakes, people trying to organise litterpicking and bad AI generated memes about Birmingham’s inability to pick up rubbish. 

At the other, there’s a smattering of antagonistic and conspiracy-minded posts about “migrant hotels,” “fifth-columns of hostile foreigners” and “white leftist traitors.” Some memes even joke about ‘Loyalist Northern Ireland’ with taglines like: “kinda funny seeing English councils losing their minds over people putting flags up. Wait till we teach our English neighbours the ancient art of painting kerbstones.”