How the British media are helping Reform carry out a flag coup

Along the main coastal road between Brighton and Seaford, a quiet town in East Sussex, flags were hoisted on street lights this week: the red and white England colours, with union flag ribbons. On the M23 to London, flags were hung on motorway bridges.

It was all part of the Raise the Colours campaign, initiated by associates of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, in the name of patriotism - in reality, white nationalism.

In Birmingham, a South Asian friend saw lots of St George's flags up, and said he noticed a cooling of people's behaviour towards him. In an army surplus store he frequently visits, the usual friendly reception was replaced with discomfort. Half the customers were buying England flags.

Incidents of racial intimidation around flag painting on roads and shops prove this is not a jolly bit of patriotic fun.

This is an unprecedented outbreak of native nationalism in a country where the flag, especially the red, white and blue Union Jack, is not universally popular. It is seen at major sports events and on royal occasions, but was not widely flown until recently.

For under-50s, displaying the England flag is viewed positively by only 24 percent, and by just 11 percent among under-25s.

For those over 65, however, more than 60 percent see it positively.

Reform and the media

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has attempted to use the flag to appeal to older patriotic voters, emblazoning the Union Jack on Labour literature and standing beside it at press conferences.

Labour has also tried to appease Reform on migration by touting deportations of failed asylum seekers, but this is a failing strategy.

In the wake of last summer's far right-inspired riots, there is a relentless media focus on the so-called small boats crisis and the hotels where asylum seekers have been placed across the country.

The BBC is just as culpable for keeping migration as the top news story day after day, enabling and assisting the rise of Nigel Farage's Reform party

Organised far-right groups have joined protests outside these hotels, while the Labour government attempts to assuage so-called legitimate concerns about migration with deportation videos and hardline language.

The media narrative is that "out of control" immigration and small boat arrivals are destroying the social fabric of the country. There is talk of "civil war" from newspaper columnists like Rod Liddle in The Sun.

We are close to the point warned about by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, when the elite and the mob join forces in a move towards state-backed violence against minorities.

The BBC is just as culpable for keeping migration as the top news story day after day. This is no longer simply a concern of the right. It has become the driving issue for the media and political class, enabling and assisting the rise of Nigel Farage's Reform Party.

As just one example of this systematic effort to force Farage on the country, Jeremy Corbyn has been on BBC Question Time three times in 42 years as an MP. Left-wing MP Zarah Sultana has never been on it. Farage, who was elected an MP only last year, has appeared 38 times.

Deportation politics

The City trader turned politician is promising to dismantle the legal protections afforded to asylum seekers and UK citizens alike, saying a Reform government, if elected, will pull out of the European Court of Human Rights, repeal the Human Rights Act, and "disapply" the Refugee Convention of 1951.

Every single asylum seeker who arrived by irregular means would be removed from the country, with deportation camps for up to 24,000 migrants, including women and children. This is a UK version of US President Donald Trump's brutal ICE raids and mass detentions.

Labour's surrender to Reform's narrative means Farage has already won

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Farage claims 600,000 migrants could be deported in the first parliament of a Reform government. With only around 110,000 asylum seekers currently in the UK, that would mean targeting roughly half a million other long-term residents in his deportation plan.

The Reform narrative has been backed by billionaire-owned media and the BBC since before the last election, when it was clear that the Conservatives were doomed. Almost overnight, news outlets gave the floor to Farage and Reform - a process reminiscent of early 1930s Germany, when capitalists went from seeing Hitler as a crackpot to the man who could stop communism.

This attempt to create an unstoppable narrative - that most people support Reform policies on migration - appears to be working.

The real crisis

The key elements of the crisis are twofold: migration has risen partly due to global crises and wars that drive forced displacement, and partly because the UK's low-wage, deregulated economy requires migrants to fill job vacancies in care, hospitality and health.

But while these underlying issues are rarely discussed, the media focuses solely on numbers and supposed concerns about migrants "taking away" resources from British people.

The crisis in public services, housing and the cost of living is caused by a 60 percent cut in local authority funding since 2010, alongside government policies that protect landlords and builders by keeping rents high, while allowing asset funds like Blackstone to profit from new housing developments.

High asset inequality has led to an expansion of billionaire fortunes, while greedy supermarkets, energy firms and privatised utilities squeeze the middle and working classes. This has nothing to do with migration, but people have been persuaded that cutting migration will somehow solve all these problems.

This is the same trick pulled with Brexit: create a single narrative about a single enemy - for Brexit, the EU; for small boats and migrant hotels, "uncontrolled" migration - and then promise to fix the problem by leaving the EU or deporting migrants. It's a strategy that worked politically from 2014 to 2019, but produced only more misery and, in fact, higher migration.

The asylum hotel crisis is itself a problem created by the last Conservative government, which decided to place asylum seekers in poorer towns across the UK - a recipe for tensions and a bonanza for under-occupied hotels.

Naming the culprits

After 20 years of propaganda that Britain is being overwhelmed by migrants, this narrative is now accepted by a significant group of voters.

If you accept that there is "not enough money" to fix housing, poverty and failing public services (false, but touted by all major parties), you will also believe that no money should go to anyone not "born here" - and that borders should be "closed".

Labour is seeking to calm this storm by throwing red meat to Reform voters on asylum and migration. It won't work - it simply feeds the frenzy

One big lie leads to another false solution.

Of course, some have always opposed Britain's changing ethnic makeup. Margaret Thatcher claimed the UK was being "swamped" more than 40 years ago. Sixty years ago, Enoch Powell declared that the "black man had the whip hand" in his notorious "rivers of blood" speech.

Labour is seeking to calm this storm by throwing red meat towards Reform voters on asylum and migration. It won't work - it simply feeds the frenzy.

It is time to push back: to explain why migration in a post-Brexit, slow-growth economy is unavoidably high (because wages are too low for UK residents to live on, and private service firms prefer to hire from abroad).

It is also time to name the real culprits: the billionaire media, 50 years of privatisation since Thatcher, and 15 years of cuts and austerity.

Some reliance on foreign labour could be reduced by raising wages and ending the privatisation of social care and the NHS, shifting employment to UK-based workers. But without migrant workers, social care and the health service would collapse.

To solve the small boats issue, we need safe, legal routes, and asylum seekers should be able to work legally, which currently they can't, as they wait months or years for their case to be processed. Mass deportation will only cause untold misery and cost many billions.

Challenging the Reform story is a difficult task, since "we are full up" is hammered daily by the media as common sense.

Yet a single word - "privatisation" - is the unspoken problem. The cause is not migrants but offshore, tax-avoiding billionaires who control politics and the media. They have made the toxic, divided country we live in now, and they need you to blame the new arrivals, instead of them.

Labour must raise wages, control rents, and tax the rich. Instead, they are pursuing status quo policies for their corporate backers.

Unless this changes, the media-backed populist coup will succeed.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.