Kemi Badenoch today says town halls taking down English flags are fuelling racial division.
After a week that has seen the flag of St George removed from lamp posts, the Tory leader took aim at councils clashing with residents.
She says there is ‘nothing racist about flying the flag of your nation’ and ‘nothing extreme’ about feeling pride for the country.
And she warns that Labour councils trying to stop the campaign of patriotic flag-flying across the country are wrongly sending a message to ethnic minorities that the flag is not for them.
Writing in today’s Daily Mail, Mrs Badenoch attacks the local authorities for their ‘double standards’ after they allowed Palestinian banners to be displayed, as well as marking other countries’ independence days and lighting up buildings for Black Lives Matter.
And she blasts Keir Starmer for using the English flag as a ‘football prop’, claiming other Labour MPs are only posing with it because Downing Street has told them to.
In her exclusive article, Mrs Badenoch writes: ‘The flag of St George predates the Union flag. It is a symbol that has stood for centuries.
‘It should not be controversial to say that we are proud of it. The denigration of anything British in the name of ‘diversity’ is not progressive. It is divisive. It must stop. It shouldn’t be a revolutionary act to fly our own flags in our own country.’
And she urges: ‘We should fly them high – and instil that love and pride in our country in every generation.’
Her defiant comments come amid a growing drive for the St George and Union flags to be displayed across England in the face of opposition from the authorities.
It began when Birmingham City Council announced it would take down hundreds of flags put up on lamp posts in recent weeks by a group who described themselves as ‘proud English men’, but who would not reveal their identities.
The Labour-run authority said it was updating the streetlights and warned that ‘unauthorised items’ could risk pedestrians’ and motorists’ lives, despite being 25ft in the air.
It sparked a furious backlash as critics pointed out that Palestine flags had been allowed to fly in the city for months, while the council had also lit up its library in the colours of Pakistan and India in successive days.
Birmingham council also privately admitted it needed the ‘support of the police’ to remove Palestine flags from lamp posts because of ‘issues that have cropped (up) when we first tried to take them down’.
Then workers for Tower Hamlets council in east London were this week seen taking down St George flags put up by the burgeoning online movement known as ‘Operation Raise The Colours’.
Yet the authority had previously refused to take down unauthorised Palestinian flags ‘because we believe it could destabilise community cohesion’.
Town halls across the country have since condemned the painting of St George’s crosses on mini-roundabouts while West Mercia Police said it was investigating incidents in Bromsgrove as suspected criminal damage.
Mrs Badenoch’s former Tory leadership rival, Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, climbed a ladder to attach three Union flags to lamp posts in his Newark constituency on Wednesday – but Labour council leader Paul Peacock said he would have needed ‘appropriate planning permissions’.
Some creative residents have even taken to painting the St George’s cross on to potholes in the hope that their council will fill them.
Campaigner Ben Thornbury painted the symbol on a crater in his hometown of Malmesbury, Wiltshire, but the local authority warned that it was vandalism and would ‘not bring the repair forward’.
The Prime Minister’s spokesman insisted this week that Sir Keir was ‘absolutely’ supportive of people putting up English flags but other politicians have expressed concerns about the campaign and anti-racist groups have claimed it is being driven by the far-Right.
Labour’s Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham said people painting the red cross on roundabouts were ‘seeking confrontation’, while the Liberal Democrat leader of Dorset Council said some residents had been ‘intimidated’ by the flags.
Councillor Nick Ireland told the BBC: ‘It would be naive to pretend otherwise that the St George flag has been co-opted by certain far-Right groups to promote their agendas.’
In her article for the Mail, Mrs Badenoch says: ‘Councils will say they are enforcing local rules, but the point is they apply those rules selectively.
‘The same officials who tear down an English flag will turn a blind eye to Palestinian flags flown in defiance of local regulations. Their concern is not legality, it is politics.’
The clashes over flags have emerged at the same time as protests have grown over migrants being housed in hotels, with police braced for trouble over the Bank Holiday weekend as dozens more demonstrations are scheduled towns across the UK.
Mrs Badenoch points out that it was Conservative-run Epping council that won a landmark court case this week that threw Labour’s asylum accommodation policy into disarray, when a judge ordered that asylum-seekers be removed from the Bell Hotel.
And she vows to work with Tory councils across the country on the issue of flag-raising, ‘just as I’m working with them to end the scourge of asylum hotels that are causing distress to local communities’.