Media Storm - Patriotism: Whose flag is it anyway?

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Care about independent and ethical news? Support Media Storm on⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠! Since August 2025, thousands of St George's Crosses and Union flags have appeared on lampposts, roundabouts and motorway bridges across Britain. The far-right movement dubbed "Operation Raise the Colours" was sold as a patriotic outpouring. But the reality for migrants and ethnic minorities was vastly different. Racist riots are in their third summer. And now the far-right claim to be marching "under God". So what is patriotism for? Can you love your country without envisioning an enemy? When does pride become prejudice? And if the far-right uses the flag to recruit lonely, left-behind young men, should the rest of us fight to take it back? This week, Mathilda & Helena are joined by two guests. Firstly, Imam Adam Kelwick, who was filmed in 2024 talking with and embracing far-right protestors outside his mosque. His words at the time, "they just want to be heard", travelled around the world. And secondly, we are joined by the National Organiser of Black Lives Matter UK, Kojo Kyerewaa. We also revisit firsthand testimonies from Media Storm's 2023 investigation into Far-Right radicalisation, with reformed neo-Nazi recruiter Nigel Bromage and EDL co-founder (and uncle of Tommy Robinson) Darren Carroll. This episode is hosted and produced by Mathilda Mallinson (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@mathildamall⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) and Helena Wadia (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@helenawadia⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠)  It was edited by⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠Christy Callaway-Gale⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ The music is by⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ @soundofsamfire⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠@mediastormpod⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you in partnership with Open Britain. A grassroots campaign group making democracy work for everyone, not just the rich and powerful. Hello, hello, hello. Hello, Matilda. Okay, I have wanted to make this episode for years and today we are finally doing it. We're talking about patriotism. Okay, I'll be honest with you, Tilda, this is a very tricky one for me. Tell me why. I guess because of what patriotism has looked like on our street.

for the past year. Listeners will remember that in August last year, St. George's crosses and union flags started going up on lamp posts, roundabouts and motorway bridges, thousands of them. It was called Operation Raise the Colours. It started in Birmingham and it spread across England and then into Scotland and Wales. And it was sold, including by a good chunk of the news media, as a patriotic outpouring.

Which I would say proves patriotism, is often just a way of whitewashing racism because researchers at Hope Not Hate traced some of the early organisers to far-right groups like Britain First and the EDL. Hotels, housing asylum seekers and migrant neighbourhoods were targeted, people of colour threatened and people seeking safety were terrified. But because it was the national flag,

it was given this symbol of protection. When councils in Birmingham and Tower Hamlets took some of the flags down, there was political fury. Council workers were abused and threatened. In Sturchley in Birmingham, a man was hit by a van while residents were taking flags down and ended up in hospital with a broken leg. And look, a lot of people read the message the same way you did. UGov did a survey.

Half the public said the Lampost flags were mainly about anti-migrant or anti-minority sentiment. Only a quarter said they were mainly about pride. and 52% of ethnic minority adults now say the England flag has become a racist symbol. Among people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, it's 68%. For me, as a British Asian, it has been scary. For a lot of the time when the flags were first going up, I was in my hackney bubble, right, where there weren't any flags.

But then when I went to visit my mum or my in-in-laws, who are in further out zones of London, every lamp post had a flag on it. And seeing it for the first time, not just in pictures on the news, made me feel really scared because it made me realise in very stark terms just how many people there must be who have these Britain for the British views, but who define British as white. And I really feel that the flag pinning has shifted the window of casual racism again, allowing it to thrive.

Soon after the flags went up, myself and my husband, also British Asian, were verbally racially abused by a white man. My mother-in-law was texting the family group chat when far-right marches were going on to tell us not to leave the house. Like, that is the consequences of flag-pinning that people just don't see. And it's not happening in a vacuum. This is the third summer in a row of racist disorder. In 2024, the riots after the murder of three little girls in Southport.

Not riots in anger over male violence, of course. but riots over false allegation that the perpetrator was a migrant. In 2025, the protests outside asylum hotels and then the flags. And this summer, a bus set a light in Belfast marches outside asylum housing in Southampton and over 100 far-right protests in just three months, 166 and counting, according to Hope Not Hate. So when someone says, patriotism, I don't feel pride. I feel... and also kind of embarrassment. I completely hear that.

And actually, I think that's exactly why we need to have this conversation. Because for me, the idea for this episode went back further than Raise the Colors. It has been brewing in my mind since 2003 when we did a media storm investigation into far-right radicalisation. We spoke to people who had been radicalised and to people who had been recruiters themselves and who had since reformed. By the way, I think that's one of our most important episodes ever. Me too. And this episode presented patriotism as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, and in keeping Helena with exactly your observations,

we learned that patriotism is used as an active recruitment tool by the far right, essentially like a gateway drug, a seemingly harmless entryway into gradually more radical and violent ideology. Here's the first-hand testimony given to. to us by one young man who he called John, who had been successfully groomed by the far right at the age of 14. One of my friends at the time in school, he was already involved in the far right. One day when he showed me a post on his phone, he said, if you think British soldiers, shouldn't be on the streets share this post. I had an uncle at the time that was struggling, really bad mentally. He used to be a soldier. And that was sort of my ticket into this online

group. Now, of course, the group didn't immediately. start sending me pictures and people doing Nazi salutes or anything like that. They know if they give you too much too quickly, it's going to scare you off. So it started off very, very slowly. It started off with people messaging me,

saying, John, the only reason your uncle is struggling so much right now is because we send billions off in foreign aid. You definitely was a stage where the propaganda started to take a turn where it did start to become much more violent. So, yes, patriotism can be a weapon of hate.

But the reason the far right use it this way, is because they recognise something that I think progressive and counter-movements are in danger of missing. People need community desperately. And one of the key things driving people into the hands of vicious recruiters was a sense of isolation, loneliness, community loss, identity loss. People particularly from former mining and industrial towns seeing their local areas be gutted out. We heard this again and again, including from Tommy Robinson, own uncle Darren Carroll, who was, with Robinson, a co-founder of the EDL or English Defence League, which he also told us was one of his greatest ever mistakes.

Well, my dad died when I was 12. My mum died very shortly after. So at the time I was 13, I started playing up at school when I was getting into a lot of fights. So I got expelled. And then, you know, I've done a big long, lonely walk home. And I got home and I just sat there for weeks on end, really, trying to think of something to do. I've always been a very passionate person and my passion in life was my football. I'd be down to my local football club, which is Luton Town Football Club. There was a lot of social, economic issues going on in the town. People leave in town. And that brings in its own fears as well. So if I'm

going to stay, what's going to become of my future? If we recognise the relevance of this need for belonging and we harness it positively, we may be far more effective at bringing people back from the brink of extremism, then if we shame patriotic pride. At least that's what our studio guest in the episode firmly believed and had committed his life to doing. Nigel Bromage was once a neo-Nazi recruiter, but he repented and set up a charity, a network of ex-members of the extreme right wing who use their intimate understanding of radicalization to de-radicalize other members. And how do they do this? They use patriotism. They rewire it in people's minds. as something inclusive, not exclusive, something peaceful, not violent.

Listen to this from Nigel. We'll go out into the communities and talk about, well, actually, patriotism, real patriotism, is about place, not race. And it doesn't matter, you know, where you come from, whether you were born in the UK or have come from another country. You know, you can embrace things like St George, because St George was the patron saint of not just England, but Palestine, Syria, Ethiopia.

you are. So if we do it properly, we can challenge the far right. You know, if you look back to 1939, if you were a patriot, you stood against the far right. They didn't like stand with it. You know, many, many servicemen come from lots of different ethnicities and religion. Now you look at things like the lionesses, things like that. That is something to be really proud of. That's the way, one of the ways we destroy the far right. And if we are, you know, giving the far right the flag, then we're actually failing them. on that. To Nigel, surrendering the flag to the far right is a failure and a dangerous one. And it's a failure, progressives have been accused of for a long time. The left's instinct often

has been to step back from national symbols altogether. And not without cause. Raise the colours was not new. From the national front in the 1970s to the BNP to the EDL, those flags were carried by people who were also attacking black and Asian communities. But Kirstama went the opposite. direction last year with his whole never surrender our flags speech at last year's Labour conference. His words were, let's fly all our flags, they belong to all

of us and we will never surrender them. So there is a wing of the left trying to reclaim the flag, but also that feels a lot like trying to beat the far right at their own game, like his Island of Strangers speech, which totally failed in deterring another summer of racist riots.

True, true, but look what they're up again. Reform won more than 1,400 council seats in May and they're campaigning on the national pledge of a patriotic curriculum with a union flag and a portrait of the king in every school. Not already far removed from the history lessons we already have in schools, but okay. So before we get to the big questions, let's just run through the vocab. Patriotism, nationalism. Are they the same thing? That's a great question. In theory, no.

George Orwell drew the classic line in 1945. He said patriotism is devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. He says it's defensive by nature, unlike nationalism, which he called inseparable from the desire for power. So patriotism is loving your home. Nationalism is wanting to dominate someone else's. Roughly, yes.

And then there's the difference between civic nationalism, where you belong by taking part in shared institutions, laws and public life. That means anyone can join. And ethnic nationalism or ethno-nationalism, where you belong by blood and ancestry. So the door is shut. And now there's Christian nationalism too. Tommy Robinson's rally in May was called Four Nations One Kingdom Under God. Which is the idea that being Christian and belonging to the nation are. are basically the same thing. We'll get into that. And of course, we'll get into the media,

in which the flag row is covered as a clash between two camps, patriotic revival on one side, far-right surge on the other. What often gets lost is the question underneath. What is patriotism actually for? So today we'll ask, can you love your country without needing an enemy? When does pride become prejudice? Who gets to decide what the St. George's Cross means? And should we be fighting to take the flag back or just letting it go. Are you ready for the Battle of Britain? If you're an FN minority or anyone who looks at a St George's flag or the Union Jack and feels intimidated, I would argue that it's more likely that you're not integrated.

It reminds me of Germany before the First World War. Welcome to Media Storm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Malinson and I'm Helen O'Owadia. This week's Media Storm, Patriotism. Whose flag is it anyway? Welcome to Media Storm. Our first guest is a South Yorkshire-born Imam at the Abdullah-Kiliam Mosque, one of Britain's oldest mosques, founded in 1889.

He has delivered humanitarian aid in Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Somalia and Calais. And in August, 24, when a hostile crowd gathered outside his mosque, He and his fellow worshippers walked out with food and drink and were filmed talking with and embracing the protesters. His words at the time, they just want to be heard, travelled around the world. Welcome to Media Storm, Imam Adam Kelwick. Thank you. Our second guest is the national organiser of Black Lives Matter UK,

part of a transnational movement for black liberation and civil rights. He organises with communities on the front lines of racism in Britain, from policing to the far-right riots of recent. Summers, and he has written and spoken widely on how national symbols like flags can be used to draw lines around who belongs. A very warm welcome to Media Storm, Kodjo Chiroa. Hello, it's pleasure to be here. We're going to start with the big picture. What is patriotism and what, if any, good does it do? Adam, you told me that you are a fan of patriotism. What importance does patriotism hold for you and what good does it do? If we're to get into the technical

definition of it. It's supposed to be affection, unity and this feeling and a desire to improve one's country. These are all good traits. These are all positive characteristics to have. I think it's a beautiful thing when people can be proud of themselves and they can celebrate themselves and their identity. I think it's amazing when people celebrate their ethnicity. I think it's amazing when people celebrate their culture, their language, their religion, whatever it is within them and their identity, that people can have a deep sense of pride in it. But there's one condition attached. And that is it not be at the expense of anybody else because then you go into the field of arrogance and superiority. These are things which are patriotism is free-fond.

Kodjo, perhaps you might come at this differently. When you hear the word patriotism in Britain in 26, what do you think of? Yeah, well, when I hear the word patriotism, I think of a phrase that Malcolm X once said. He said that you're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it. So I think that's the danger when we talk about patriotism. how elites those in power can use the love of country or place into a loyal defence of whatever that country does. And when Malcolm X said that, he wasn't talking just generally.

He was specifically talking about what happened in Vietnam. It was 1965. And Americans were being told to support an unjust war and that was their patriotic duty. So there is a danger of how patriotism is used as a blindfold to judge. justify vicious acts of oppression on behalf of a nation or a state. And Britain has its own history of this. Between 2001 and 2023, the British Army has committed numerous acts of war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. There is a former senior Special Forces officer known as N-1-466,

who has alleged on record that there's been lots of unlawful killings by an SAS unit, and that's an open secret within special forces. And yet, according to his testimony, senior commanders have not referred those allegations to military police. Maybe they think they're doing their patriotic duty by not turning out war crimes or reporting war crimes. And we also know Tony Blair himself when he was prime minister has only come out last year

that he personally intervened to prevent these cases to go outside military tribunals. So, yeah, these systematic allegations were on, or killing, cover up. This ensures that no senior army official is ever held accountable. So when I hear about patriotism, I think about how it's mobilised in those ways. Thank you. And there's certainly a good chunk of the media that sees any kind of prosecution of the British military as unpatriotic.

Thank you both so much for those overviews. I'm going to take us a little bit into the theory of patriotism. Forgive me, I'm a history grad. One of the core thinkers is Benedict Anderson. He said, nations are imagined communities, meaning we'll never, actually meet most of our fellow citizens, we therefore need symbols and stories to imagine a bond with them and function positively as a collective. But another historian, Linda Colley, argued that Britishness as an identity was forged not as a positive collective, but a negative collective based on what or rather

who it was not. She said Britishness was first formed in the 18th century in opposition to the other, namely at this time Catholic France. So it's inherently inherently, us and them. But there is a counter argument. In 1999, the psychologist Marilyn Brewer asked, is prejudice about in-group love or out-group hate? She concluded they're not the same thing. You can love your group without hating anyone else. But hostility comes in only under particular conditions, like when people feel threatened, or when groups compete for scarce resources, or when your group is told it's morally superior to other groups. Distinguish blind patriotism, Kodjo like you described, where my country can do no wrong,

from constructive patriotism where I criticise my country because I care about it. Kodjo is there logically any way to define a we and us that doesn't inherently depend on a then? Is exclusion baked into patriotism? Well, I think to answer your question, there is ways of defining we that is inclusive, that isn't inherently exclusionary, absolutely. Can patriotism be used in that way? It's an open question. I think that even though there are the constructive patriotism that you've talked about, and I think it's a useful concept, that isn't how it's often mobilized, right? And it is often mobilized to say actually there are people who belong and there are people who don't. And when we talk about acts of patriotism, there are

these positive ways that you talk about people who do whistleblower. who do talk about what is going wrong and criticising their country. But those people are often not, they don't get celebrated at the time that they say it, right? Those people are often castigated and cast out. And the things that it would be more interesting or positive is to look at looking after your neighbours as a patriotic duty. Those sort of things I think can be built, but we shouldn't be naive to how in the media and in politics how patriotism is weaponised. Adam, this goes back to what you told us before, that it's fine to take pride in your identity as long as it's never at the expense of anyone else. I guess I would ask, where's the line? You know, would you call what the British far right is advocating for patriotism? I'd call it far from patriotism. I'd call it toxic nationalism, some of that ethno-nationalism. And it's about division, isn't it? We've already affirmed that patriotism, should be about unity. So if you find people who claim to be patriotic and they're causing nothing

but division in society, then you know something is wrong. When it's at the expense of other communities, often minorities, whether they be ethnic minorities, religious minorities, this is when patriotism is abused and this is when the flag is abused, not used. So I agree with Kojo. Unfortunately, in the we're in, we don't really experience patriotism in a way which is necessarily positive. But I think we should claim patriotism back from those who are abusing it. Kodjo, you have spoken previously about how nationalism can be seductive, even to people it's historically been used against. You said last year that white supremacy is being pushed by black and Asian.

faces. Some of the most heinous hostile environment policies of the past half decade have been fronted by politicians like Priti Patel, Suella Braviman, Sajid Javid, Shabana Mahmoud, even. How do you make sense of this? So yeah, when I see Shabana Mahmood or Pretty Patel using their Britishness as a weapon to say, actually, things are okay in this country, there isn't racism, look at me, what I see is that they are actually playing the role of a token, right? They are saying that actually, because I, because white people have accepted me, you, the masses of black and brown people who are living in temporary accommodation, who are facing physical threats on the street, who are not able to feed their children

or who are being criminalized for crossing the water, you should accept it. You should accept that violence. feeling is that and our analysis is that we live in the world where we've won, as in our communities, people who have travelled to Britain because of the colonisation that Britain did across the world. People who've come to this country often invited by the British state to help rebuild this country. Those people have won things. They have won dignity. They have won rights that were denied to them. And rather than celebrating that, we've seen. the right or the British state co-opt some of our community to justify new forms of racism,

new forms of violence. And so what we should make of the likes of Priti Patel or Suella Braveman or Auntie Chemie is that they're not for us. They're not for us. They're for continuing the white supremacist violence that the British state was founded on. There's this certain type of immigrant that pulls the ladder up behind them. Because of the, scarcity mindset that they have had growing up. And because there's something very welcoming about a right wing saying you've come here, like maybe you've managed to make your money and that left wing, they want to take all your money. They want to take it away from you. And I do think that some of them, like you say, the Priti Patels of this world absolutely are advancing the language of

white supremacy and maybe some other black and brown people are perhaps doing it without even realizing because of their upbringing and their mindset and almost this feeling that they should be grateful to be here. Quite often I find that they're the most extreme in advancing it as well, more extreme than their white counterparts in many circumstances. Adam, I think your mosque carries quite an interesting story here. Its founder, Abdullah Killiam was born, William. Quillium in Liverpool in 1856, converted to Islam and opened the Liverpool Muslim Institute in 1889. The Ottoman Sultan named him Sheikh al-Islam of the British Isles. And the story goes that Queen Victoria asked for copies of his book on Islam. You've described him as a symbol of harmony

between British culture and Islam. But he also said in 1896 that Muslims should not fight other Muslims for the British Empire in Sudan, and so some called him a traitor. Was Quillium a patriot? And what does his balancing act teach us about holding more than one loyalty? I think 100% he was a patriot with all the positive connotations we mentioned before. And I think not just that, but he was an established. He was a very privileged member of society. When it came to the crunch, his first religious ruling or his it's often known as a fatwa was to prevent any Muslim from supporting the British army in Sudan and he said it's forbidden according to the rules of Islam even if you're to support them by giving them a drink of water so it's a very very harsh very direct fatwa

but he was making a point and ultimately was from his love, not only for his Muslim brothers and sisters in Sudan, and if they weren't his brothers and sisters in Islam, they would have been his brothers and sisters in humanity if they were from a different religion. It wasn't just for those, it was for the sake of his countrymen here in Britain as well. He didn't want the British army to be perpetrating things which were not good.

And I think that's one of the highest forms of patriotism, when you can enjoy what is good and when you can forbid what is evil, it's almost as if your love for the country so much that you don't want your fellow countryman to be taking part in anything which is in its essence, negative and evil and oppressive and all the rest of it. But I think it's interesting because as far as Sheikh Abdullah Qwilliam is concerned, there was no contradiction in being loyal to his religious community,

whether that was nationally or internationally and between the civic leadership in the country. But the issue was from people within our society hurling the accusation at him that he was a traitor, that he wasn't a true Brit. And I think that's really interesting. And I think a lot of these people who point the fingers up members of the Muslim community today

and accusers of not integrating, I don't think they want us to integrate. So they say you're not integrating, but if you were to scratch beneath the surface, they don't want us to integrate anyway. Let's talk about the flag now, and the lamp post flag pinning dubbed Operation Raise the Colors last year. People's right to raise the flag was, of course, fiercely protected by the right-wing media. When some councils started taking flags down, GB News ranted, council splurged thousands of your cash, removing national banners. On Fox News, citizens pushed back against awoke policies reshaping Britain. A far-right US site called PJ Media ran the headline,

First, it was the women and girls, now they're coming for the flags. The article blamed the anti-flag movement on Muslims, appealing to the worst stereotypes about them. And Elon Musk shared a story about a woman supposedly arrested for flying a union flag with the caption, Two-tier Kier. But police say she wasn't arrested, for the flag. Even ITV's headline was England flags banned from lamp posts, which is actually not what happened. Injunctions were requested by councils to stop people putting flags on

lamp posts without permission and harassing council workers. They did not ban flags. Kojo, from your insights personally and with the Black Lives Matter movement, how have people of colour, born and raised in England, experienced the sudden appearance of these flags? experienced it, how many people experienced it, was as a menacing threat. These flag did not come as in a pride of place. They were initiated by Tommy Robinson and Daniel Thomas, who is his side man. Tommy Robinson, for people who are not aware, he started his political career as a British National Party activist, right? We were a similar age. He then formed the English Defence League, essentially a anti-Muslim race preacher.

That's been his career. He's spread lots of lies and myths about Muslims and people of colour. If he says let's raise the colours together, if he's wanting to weaponise the British flag, I know he's not doing it for the pride of place, but to intimidate people that he's always been intimidating. One thing that Tommy Robinson did not too long ago, around the time of Operation Raised the Colors,

was share a social media story where he suggested that a black granddad with his white passing grandchildren, he suggested that granddad was a paedophile. And that man was in hiding. I couldn't go outside because people believe that he was a sexual predator and his only crime was going to the playground

with his own grandchildren. So this using of the flag to intimidate, It isn't something that Tommy Robinson has invented. It's something that the British National Party has history of doing. But even older than that, it is what the British state did in taking territory, in building its empire. The flag was a symbol of dominance, white supremacy over the subjugated black and brown people. And so when Tommy Robinson and others used this flag, they are going back to a deep rooted tradition, which makes the flag problematic. in the first place. It can be changed. Symbols and meanings can change over time. But when it's

been re-invote in this way, people of colour, whether they know it consciously or not, through their family histories, they know the history of British domination and violence, of colonial violence. And so, you know, I see this flag and I know people who've experienced it, they've been terrified and it's not happened in exclusion to the riots that we've seen. recent years, where black and brown people in hotels have been burned out of those hotels as a result of far right violence. So I think we have to be very careful when we talk about what does patriotic resurgence mean. It can mean black and brown people being under threat of white violence. Thank you, Cojo. Now, Adam, before we did this episode, you told me that the flag in

itself is not harmful. And you'll wave St. George's flag, for example, that England football matches. You also pointed out that St. George is associated with Palestine and venerated by both Christians and Muslims. Tradition places his birth in Capadocia, now Turkey, with family roots and a tomb in historic Palestine. My question is, does it really matter? Why do we need symbols and stories about flags or St George, and why do you find this history important? So I think for whatever reason, flags have always been important to people. It does sound silly, doesn't it really? Flags have always been important.

Black Lives Matter, they have their flag and they have their symbol, and all movements and all nation states and all countries and all peoples and all communities, they have flags. Okay, so they have flags. I think the issue with the raise the flag movement, when they were putting those flags up, they knew they were intimidating people from minority communities, but you couldn't prove it.

You see, so this was the weapon they were using. I remember during the time when it was taking over, I just, I created a meme on social media, and that might be backwards, but it's the English flag, and it says, St. George was Turkish, just saying, and it kicked off, and every, the far right were angry, and they were arguing and I thought, okay, let's have some more nuance.

Let's look into this a little bit more, the same flag which you're so proud of. And then I did the next one. St. George never visited England, but if he did, he would have had to have traveled here on a boat without a passport. Oh, and his Palestinian mother called him Jerjiz, not George, when he was born in Turkey. Just saying. And then that whole other discussion. Well, the discussion seemed to be from one side, from the other side. It was just curse words and deport them all.

And then I did another one. For all those saying, St. George wasn't born in Turkey and his mother wasn't Palestinian because those countries didn't exist back then. Well, neither did Britain nor England, just saying. So I just thought I'd take people on a journey of reflection and think about things. But if we want to delve into the origins of the, English flag and the British flag, then we can even find common ground in them between the same people you're trying to marginalise today, whether they be ethnically different to you or whether

they be religiously different to you. Can I ask, do you think that those memes changed anybody's minds? I hope so. I hope so. And this is the thing with me, because a lot of people, they think my approach is very soft and very cum by R and all the rest of it. I actually find it. I actually find harder. It needs more strength, the approach which I have, where you suppress your anger, and rather than debate to prove the other person wrong and to prove myself, right, I'd much rather have a discussion, which means that we can both kind of go on a journey together. Since the riots and since the protest outside the mosque, I can genuinely say I've made friends with some of the key far-right people here in Liverpool.

to the extent that they're not involved in the movement anymore. And I was just really, I've been thinking about Malcolm X a lot. And Malcolm X is somebody who I really look up to, and he's inspired so many people. But when it comes to ideas of patriotism and ethno-nationalism and these things, so we know his journey started off in the nation of Islam, not to be confused with mainstream Islam. And they were kind of like a black nationalistic movement.

Apparently, this is how the story goes. When he went on his Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, and he came across the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad that there is no virtue of a white person over a black person. There is no virtue of a black person over a white person, except in piety. In other words, except by being a good person. And so that's what influenced him,

and he went on to be one of the greats of our time. You know, when we think about saints, we think about nuns, and we think about old men with crucifixes. But I consider Malcolm X to be one of the saints of our time. And this is where I come from when I say it's a beautiful thing to have pride in who you are, in your people and your nation, but it should never be at the expense of anybody else. Unfortunately, when their politicians get their hands on this kind of proudness and patriotism,

that's when it becomes toxic and that's when it becomes a tool to. marginalise and oppress people. There is also an overlap of religion and patriotism that we have seen turned pretty toxic in this time. The far right in Britain has taken a very visible Christian turn. Tommy Robinson's rally in May was branded four nations, one kingdom, under God. There were wooden crosses, Christ on flags. He held a carol concert last Christmas to put Christ back into Christmas. Robinson claimed millions came. Actually, police said about 60,000 did. the Archbishop of Canterbury or the former Archbishop of Canterbury condemned it.

And now a majority of Brits do not identify as Christian. However, that is a relatively new phenomenon that is only as of the 2021 census. Kojo, what do you make of the rise of Christian nationalism? And is it about religion at all? No, it's not about religion. I think Christian nationalism is a contradiction in terms. I grew up in a church. and the Jesus I read about was anything but a nationalist.

I don't remember reading in the Bible any sermons against immigrants stealing jobs. No, Jesus talked about the parable of the Good Samaritan. That's a story about the unexpected kindness of those who are seen as foreigners, how they too are your neighbour and how they can care for you and actually how we should also care for them. and that was essentially an anti-racist story. And I also questioned this idea of there is a rise of like Christian nationalism. I think it's a sort of astroturf movement, really.

This is not something that's organic. That's not something that's genuinely come through religious further amongst the grassroots. And I've seen some research by Theos, which is a Christian think tank. And they found that around 1% of the people that they surveyed, for British people think that Christianity is a core feature of actually being British. So what I think is happening here is that it's being mobilised. Christianity is being mobilised as a marker of cultural identity. And a great author, Octavia Butler, wrote the parable of the Soa and the Parable of the Talents.

She wrote it in the 1990s and she imagined Christian nationalism being used in America to create a sort of theocratic state. And in the 1990, she imagined that this US president would use the phrase, make America great again. You may have heard that elsewhere. But she wrote this in the 90s, imagining that this is the sort of phrase Christian nationalism would come under. And what Christianity is being used is a shorthand for white and ethnic nationalism, right? It's something that we see Tommy Robinson using Christianity as a, shorthand to say this is who British people really are. They are white and they belong to this white

Christian culture and mobilise that against his favourite story of white Britain's being siege, being under threat of immigration and multiculturalism. So why we're seeing the likes of Tommy Robinson use it is because he wants to define who belongs and who is an outsider. And while, yes, I've heard a little bit about the Bible now being bought in rising numbers. We have to really name this for what it is. It's a rebranding of far-right white supremacist politics as supposed religion and it's been imposed from the top by racist leaders and it's not really coming from the religious converts or faithful. Thank you so much. Let's take a quick break. Welcome back to Media Storm. Before the break, we looked at some of the pros and cons of patriotism. Now,

ask whether it could or should be reclaimed and what role the media has to play. In the introduction to this episode, we heard from John, who was groomed by the far right at the age of 14 using a Facebook post about homeless veterans. We also heard from Darren Carroll, one of the EDL's co-founders, who described his lonely walk home after being orphaned and expelled from school in a town that people were leaving in droves. And we heard from Nigel Bromage, the former neo-Nazi recruits, the former neo-Nazi recruits, who now uses patriotism as a tool to de-radicalize people, teaching them it's about place, not race.

We urgently need to understand how to de-radicalize people. In the UK last year, we saw 16 far-right terror convictions and record numbers of referrals to the government's counter-extremism program, Prevent for extreme right-wing ideology. Prevent, by the way, was originally founded with Islamic extremism in mind, now far-right referrals by far outnumber alleged Islamist ones. Adam, you're a fierce advocate for building bridges. We've touched on this. In 2024, you were filmed bringing food and drink out to a hostile crowd protesting outside your mosque. You explained your reasons for broadcasters saying

they just want to be heard. What do you think they were asking to be heard about? What do you think is really driving people to these movements? Thanks. It's a really interesting question because when I went over the police lines and I went over to the other side, first couple of people I tried to speak with and offer food to, they just looked straight through me or just point blank said no. But I continued and I knew I'd be able to break through to somebody's heart. And then fortunately, one man probably hadn't had breakfast that morning. And they were out there for a good three hours. I asked a few people why they were here. and nobody gave me a clear answer. The one answer I was given, which was clear, was a gentleman who seemed to be the loudest protester there. I actually took him into the mosque against the police's advice at the end of the night to show him around,

and we, yeah, we made friends, but I asked him, why are you here? And he was the only person who gave me any kind of clear answer, and he said, because we're fed up of two-tier policing. to which I responded. So why don't you protest outside the police station then? What brings you to the mosque? But what I found is when these people come to the protests,

I think there's a danger upon us. And when I say us, I'm talking about maybe the kind of targets of these protesters. I think there's a danger for us to make wrong assumptions and have stereotypes about them in the same way that they do to us. And what do I mean by that? What I mean by that is the vast majority of the people at these protests. They have been manipulated. Their emotions, emotional strings, heartstrings have been bold.

They've been gathered under a righteous slogan like save our children. Who doesn't want to save our children? And they've had a local influence of somebody who they look up to, who's been targeted online, putting pressure on them to call their communities to come along to these. And then when they've arrived there, they don't like the feel of the atmosphere. They don't like the attacks and the violence against the police. They don't like the racist chants and Islamophobic slogans which they're witnessing. And I think it's really, really important to remind ourselves that they are the bulk of these crowds.

The way I see there are ideologues at the top and there are funders and pushers and promoters. Their numbers are very, very small. There are the violent hooligans who don't really care about the cause. They just want to fight with the police and smash shops up and steal sausage rolls. In the middle, there are regular people. And that's what I like to remind people. And that's what I've experienced many, many times.

Because they're constantly being told that you, are being hard done by. You are losing your houses and you are losing your health care and you are losing your school places and you are losing your country. You are losing everything to these people. And that creates fear. That creates ignorance. And when you give a person a chance to get whatever is on their chest, off their chest,

and by the way, it does take a specific kind of person to do this because much of the time, what is on their chest is a load of rubbish. It's all based in ignorance and it's all based in, yeah, you have to be a very patient person. You have to be willing to take some abuse, verbal abuse. This is what I tell people in my community. You have to sit there and allow a person to curse you, to curse your family, to curse your community, to curse your religion, to curse your God, to curse your prophet, all the things which are dearest to you and all the buttons on you which they could possibly press to trigger you, you have to be in a state where let them get it all out. And in my experience, the ones who are spewing the most hate are the ones who hate

themselves the most. Yeah, you know, Adam, I really want to pick up on that because while I agree with everything that you're saying, and I agree that we do need to have this deep understanding of how the far right operates, and we do need to understand those. across the divide. I do think it is really frustrating that the labour of unity always falls on minority groups. And I wonder, Kodjo, isn't there a risk that however beautiful this sentiment of empathy is, it puts the burden on the community being targeted, on the community being subjected to hate and bigotry and racism, to reassure the very people who came to intimidate them. And I wonder if by saying, you know, they need to be heard, which is true,

but I wonder if by saying that it risks treating racism as some kind of like misunderstood grievance. Yeah. No, I absolutely agree with your fears there. I don't know. I think while Adam does great and laudable work, racism is not a misunderstood grievance. Racism is a system of power. It mobilizes grievances to scapegoat communities, to justify violent oppression of others. And while there are contexts where you can be that good Samaritan, you can be the person who turns the other cheek, that wasn't a philosophy of Malcolm X's, but that is something that, while it might work in particular cases, it's a dangerous thing to broadly say this is how you fix the problems that we face in society.

Because the problems that we face in society is of power and of who controls the wealth in this country, who decides what voices matter and which ones do not. And I think what Adam's work points us to, the constructive thing we can take about it is that people do need to be validated, they need to be heard. And sometimes, actually often,

people need to feel that they belong before you can change their beliefs. That's absolutely right, but if we are going to organise and transform this world or this Britain, then we need to be clear on actually the dignity of all matters. The dignity of everyone has to be uplifted and those who seek to diminish or destroy the dignity of individuals is not something that we can accept. It's actually something that we have to be quite strong in rejecting and looking after those who are the most vulnerable, supporting those who are,

are not given the defences that the state affords. That's what Black Lives Matter organises to uphold and to expand in Britain and beyond. Yeah, I agree. And just to round this section off, you know, I am also trying to remember that the flag can be a symbol of inclusiveness and a symbol of joy rather than one of exclusiveness

and of hate. And I do think that those who stand against the far right, we can jump on that symbolism and change that symbolism and we can adopt the flag as a welcoming symbol and we can create this shared British identity that is actually based on rectifying non-partisan issues. So everybody wants workers' rights, everybody wants to stop being complicit in war crimes,

everybody wants better schools and better healthcare. And those are the human issues that the vast majority of people can agree on and maybe we can create this new narrative where we are saying that that is Britishness. And as Codjo, you pointed out, it's not people that arrive by small boat that threaten equality, but those who are flying on private jets.

That's the Britishness I want to promote. Finally, let's look abroad, because Britain is not the only country in the world working this out, and maybe we can learn something. Germany is an example that really interests me. Because they lost the Second World War, they were forced to remember their historic crimes rather than their achievements,

unlike victors like Britain, which exclusively commemorate our historic achievements. We learn about how we built railways and colonies, not how we massacred indigenous populations. That's different in Germany. You have to study the Holocaust. and after the Second World War, waving a flag in Germany was almost a taboo. There's like clubs and bars you won't be allowed into if you have any national memorabilia on you.

And for decades, it was widely considered inconceivable that Nazism would return to Germany because of these efforts. However, that has very recently changed. We've just seen the AFD win the largest share of votes in Saxony-Anhalt. That's the first state won by the far right since World War II. and their leader campaigned on reforming the curriculum to place more emphasis on national pride and less on the Holocaust. So even a country built on a memory of shame can't be inoculated against this nationalistic pride. One other example I'll just share is Canada, which has had multiculturalism as an official state policy since 1971. We saw this materialized very positively recently when Donald Trump started calling Canada the 51st state.

Canadians responded with an elbows up patriotism, boycotting American goods, flying the maple leaf. Many around the world saw this as a rare instance of a country standing up to Trump's bullying, so patriotism as a force for good. However, a lot of indigenous Canadians pointed out that Canada's history saw hundreds of thousands of indigenous children assimilated by force. And so they asked whose Canada is actually being celebrated. Adam, you've traveled to nearly 100 countries. You said your view is based on wisdom that you've picked up from teachers around the world. Where have you seen a healthy relationship with patriotism and what could Britain learn? So I'm on 101 countries at the moment. I've had some very interesting experiences when it comes to patriotism.

Very few are going to be true to the theoretical or the technical positive patriotism, which we talked about at the start of this podcast. I find very tacky examples of it. in several Middle Eastern countries, you can't go into a shop or you can't go into a barbers or you can't go anywhere except you see the pictures, the portraits of the kings or the presidents and the family and all the rest of it in each shop.

And I used to think back in the early days, these people really love their leaders, don't they? And then I'd ask them, what, do you have to have these up? And they'll be like, no, you don't have to have them up. But if you don't, somebody might come and ask you why you don't have them up. However, the types of patriotism which I have experienced, and again, they do tend to be in what are known as developing countries, but it's not a top-down patriotism. It's a bottom-up patriotism where the people themselves are proud of themselves.

And again, the most important thing, it's not at the expense of others. So they'll celebrate national figures of the past who were not war criminals, but who were people of genuine contribution. And so it does exist out there. So a truly grassroots patriotism. And Kojo, Black Lives Matter is a transnational movement. How do your counterparts in other countries relate to national identity? And is there a model that you'd hold up?

Yeah, thank you. I mean, yes, we are a transnational movement. We don't speak so much with the US in terms of our transnationalism or our organising. We speak much more with organisers in France and Spain across Europe, the Caribbean, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, which is a particular case in point. Our loyalty is not to any flag.

It's to each other. It's to our shared humanity. We reject any symbol that obscures our ability to see our shared humanity. And why South Africa is a particularly interesting case is because they don't call themselves Black Lives Matter there, but there is a movement called Abakhali-based Mission Dollar, which is the people of the shacks,

that have been organising working class people who live in very basic accommodation for dignity, for land, for public services. And they have seen a rise of xenophobia in South Africa, where actually politicians very similar to the situations we're seeing in Europe, but it's black politicians, scapegoating other black African immigrants. And Abkhali Bismish and Dolo, they work against this.

They say that the problem isn't our brothers from other parts of Africa. The problem is the ultra-rich that withhold and hoard their wealth from us all, right? Or the wealth that actually we generate, that they take it from us all. And when people raise the Palestinian flag or other flags of people who are oppressed, people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, those flags are not the same as the flags that are being used by Tommy Robinson and others, or even by the British Prime Minister. The flags that are being used in this context is about defending people from violence, rather than excusing, apologising, or exporting further violence.

I think that's something that's really important. In terms of a model that works, there's actually a Jewish term, which is called, I might pronounce this wrong, but it's doy cat, which means hyrness. And there's a slogan that goes along with it, saying where we live, this is our country. It's talking about that we have the right, wherever we are, to organize, to live with dignity and respect, to improve our situation, to organize for a better tomorrow. That is the thing that I think is important, not a loyalty to a state, but really a loyalty to each other. And that is what Black Lives Matter is about. Thank you both so much. This has been, honestly, such an enriching conversation.

Before we lose you, I just want to ask, where can people follow your work and do you have anything to plug? Coggio, let's start with you. Yeah, you can find us in several places. I've got a, as embarrassing to say, a substack. called Codjo Struggles. But you can find Black Lives Matter on our website, UKBLM.org, also on Instagram on BLMUK. And for those people who want to get involved, but don't identify as black, we are also part of something that is called the anti-racist movement. And you can find that on anti-racist movement, all one word, dot org. Thank you. And Adam.

You want to look into the amazing heritage and history of the first mosque in Britain and Abdulah William, the founder who we talked about from Victorian Times, you can go to the Abdulah William Society website. In terms of following me on social media, take everything I do on social media with a pinch of salt. Adam Kellick, they're my handles all throughout social media. Thank you for listening. If you missed our 2023 episodes on far right radicalisation,

where we heard from John, Darren and Nigel, they're in our back catalogue. Just scroll back on our feed. Coming up next week, we'll be asking why the women most at risk of violence are often the least likely to be heard and how the recent murder of two sex workers threw that into the spotlight again. If you want to support Media Storm, you can do so on Patreon for less than a cup of coffee a month. The link is in the show notes and a special shout out to everyone in our Patreon community already. We appreciate you so much.

If you enjoyed this episode, please send it to someone. Word of mouth is still the best way to grow a podcast, so please do tell your friends. and obviously leave us a five-star rating and a review. You can follow us on social media at Matilda Mal at Helena Wadia and follow the show at MediaStorm Pod. MediaStorm is an award-winning podcast produced by Helena Wadia and Matilda Mallinson. It was edited by Christy Calloway Gale. The music is by Samfire.