Ryan Bridge believes he is fighting the “battle of Stirchley”. The organisation he co-founded in south Birmingham last summer, Raise the Colours (RTC), has spent the past year traversing the Midlands with a cherry picker, hoisting himself to dizzying heights for one aim – to cable-tie nylon Union Jacks and St George’s flags to bridges, lamp-posts and trees.
RTC’s main aim is to “stop illegal immigration”, Bridge tells me over the phone. “We’re highlighting the fact that we’re being invaded every day.” The group has received donations from the far-right group Britain First, and some of its founding members have been linked to Tommy Robinson – though Bridge rejects the idea that his organisation is “far right”.
He tells me RTC isn’t meant to be menacing. “I don’t think it intimidates people, although it might intimidate a minority.” Tying flags to lamp-posts, he says, “has brought a lot of people together”. There’s a problem, however – in suburbs like Stirchley in Birmingham, residents keep trying to take his flags down. He has spent the past year locked in a flag-grappling cat-and-mouse game, diligently trying to replace felled flags. “Let’s make one thing clear,” he tells me. “You only see white people ripping down the flags of their own country… It’s nothing to do with race, or religion: this is to do with the white, middle-class liberal left.”
Bridge posts videos on his Instagram page accusing the “liberal left” of carrying knives, or poles with barbed wire. I ask if he reports these incidents to the police: “100 per cent,” he responds – although he doesn’t provide any evidence, and West Midlands Police are unable to verify that Bridge has reported these allegations.
Bridge says he doesn’t feel safe in some parts of the country, reeling off cities like “Brighton, Bristol, Oxford”, and listing suburbs in his hometown of Birmingham that he claims to be infiltrated by antifa: “Stirchley, Moseley… I want to be able to go to those areas,” he says. “This is our country, aren’t we all welcome? Isn’t everything for everybody?”
It is illegal to tie flags to lamp-posts without permission from the local authority. In June, after a court battle, Oxfordshire County Council secured an injunction against four RTC activists to stop them hanging the flags from public lamp-posts and highways. The council leader, Tim Bearder, recently told the Guardian it was more cost-effective to take RTC to court than to keep taking down their flags.
When councils don’t intervene, some locals remove the flags themselves. In a Stirchley pub – where RTC has been banned after getting into fights – I sit across from two local men, Paul and Arthur*. They’ve spent the past 12 months actively taking down RTC flags and have, begrudgingly, come to know Bridge and his group of RTC volunteers well. “They go everywhere, phones in hand, ready to play up to the outrage economy,” says Arthur.
RTC’s supporters don’t appreciate people removing their flags. According to business owners in Stirchley I speak to, shops that confront RTC are vandalised and doxed online by their fans; residents who took down flags have had their picture slapped on posters proclaiming, “I HATE THE UNION FLAG”. Across their social media platforms supporters jeer RTC on, accusing Stirchley of being infiltrated by a “psyop” of paid “antifa” protestors and “dirty scum bag traitors”.
“It really kicked off in October,” Paul says. At the start of that month, an RTC member filmed an argument between a Stirchley tattoo shop owner and Bridge. In the footage, Bridge applies lip balm while the tattoo shop owner accuses him of “trying to spread stupidity and you’re trying to spread hate”. “The only person angry here is you,” Bridge responds. It went viral – within 48 hours, the video got a combined 700,000 views. The clip raised Bridge’s profile in an instant and triggered a game of algorithm-appeasing, shock-driven content. Overnight, Stirchley became the rage-bait capital of RTC; it was a feeding ground of caught-on-camera confrontations, guaranteed to spark virality.
Paul and Arthur recall a weekend towards the end of October when more than 27 videos filmed in or about Stirchley were posted to RTC’s Instagram over one weekend. In the first clips, Bridge drapes tattered “Lest We Forget” flags across the pavement, accusing “scumbag” residents of tearing them down. Pointing to them he says, “We won’t let people do this, this is what stopped fascism. This is what stopped the Nazis.”
The weekend quickly turned sour, Paul and Arthur recall. “There was genuine fear in the air,” they say. Residents came to protest more flags being erected, leading to confrontations with RTC. In one video, posted by RTC, a woman asks Bridge, “Have you ever made a woman come?” while taping anti-racist messages over his bunting.
In May, RTC members visited the pub I am in, despite their ban. When they were refused entry, a street scuffle broke out. RTC was livestreaming footage of one of their members pulling a facemask off a woman and punching people. The incident culminated in a hit-and-run, which hospitalised a Stirchley resident. Two men have since been arrested.
This is not the only police incident with which the RTC has been associated. Bridge was arrested on suspicion of causing racially and religiously aggravated assault in Oxford in March, and in July he was charged with common assault in Brighton. In April Billy Allison, a co-founder of the group, was charged with the murder of a Lichfield pub landlord, who was punched to death. And Ben Cullen, Oxfordshire’s former RTC leader, has been charged with making and downloading indecent images of children (he denies the charges and his trial has been postponed). Bridge denies any connection to those men, but photos of them together remain on RTC’s social media. In one, Bridge, Allison and Cullen pose with an image captioned “RTC family’s coming together and showing support”.
Bridge tells me he livestreams for his own safety and for legal protection. “As the profile [of RTC] gets bigger, the threat from the liberal left becomes more dangerous.” His activism extends beyond RTC. In December, he and three other members from Raise the Colours travelled to France, one of several trips, for “Operation Overlord”, their vigilante campaign to find and disrupt migrant vessels intended for English Channel crossings. His mission, he said, was to stop the boats and “show everyone the truth of what’s been happening for the past 20 years”.
“Operation Overlord” ended after the group was detained by the French police. In March and again in July, Bridge travelled to Afghanistan because he “needs to go and have a look at why… people leave their own country to come into our country”. He tells me about his findings: “These people coming into our country are from the third world, they haven’t got a passport, they haven’t got documentation, yet they know how to circumnavigate themselves across Africa, across borders, through Europe and into England.” The boats, he claims, are “guided by people from the left”.
[Further reading: The last flags of Faversham]
There’s a lot of “the left” in Stirchley. It’s a former Labour stronghold that turned Green in this year’s local election, which was won by a councillor of Palestinian origin. It’s east London-esque: Michelin bib gourmand small-plate eateries are gushed over by Grace Dent and locals wax lyrical about the family-run Vietnamese. Stirchley has been named as one of the best places to live in the West Midlands. The people who take down the flags are predominantly white and middle class. Paul is heavily tattooed with a mullet, and Arthur wears a pink T-shirt sporting both Pride and Palestine flags.
Nevertheless, a lot of Brummies support Bridge, who’s commute slices through Stirchley. Last year, the flags sprouted up in the southern neighbourhood of Druids Heath, in Kingstanding, in the north-west, and most notoriously, in Walsall, a town on the outskirts of Birmingham where a giant Union Jack was hung from a 40ft statue that honours the town’s mining history. Many flags remain flying. Lining the M6 motorway are factories and industrial sites that churn away in the shadow of Union Jack flags that are larger than studio apartments. Tens of tiny St George’s flags cling on to motorway bridges, fluttering between densely packed pillars. Some of these have popped up independently of the RTC, inspired by its lead, but others are the product of RTC flagging missions – the group’s social media contains many videos of their M42 and M5 quests.
Many residents find the new decorations intimidating. Mus, founder of Brummies United Against Racism and Hate Crime, has been collecting testimonies from ethnic minority groups across the city. “People, especially women, try and avoid areas with lots of flags, for their own safety.” In describing the atmosphere of fear that is affecting Birmingham, she cites how, last October, a Sikh woman was raped in Walsall because her assaulter believed she was Muslim, and a Sikh pensioner from Willenhall was targeted in a racially motivated attack by a group of teenagers. While there is no link between these attacks and RTC she says that “Raise the Colours create tension… People worry that what happened recently in Belfast will be repeated here.”
Mus founded her organisation after leaflets from the fascist group “Patriotic Alternative” landed on her doorstep in 2022. Her poster-based campaign has spread from her street in Moseley to a council-endorsed campaign for city-wide unity. When Raise the Colours came to Moseley “it was clear they weren’t wanted”, she says. “Residents took the flags down and RTC haven’t been back.”
The Patriotic Alternative leaflet, which claimed white people will be a minority in Britain by 2060, is a reminder of the fascism writhing through the city’s history. Birmingham was a rallying ground for the British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, who was Smethwick’s MP in the 1920s. In 1968 Enoch Powell, who was MP for Wolverhampton, delivered his “Rivers of Blood” speech on New Street, where only a couple of weekends ago a (relatively ineffectual) Britain First march paraded.
“Birmingham is diverse, so it’s an easy target for ‘great replacement theory’ narratives,” explains David Stark, a research fellow at Birmingham University. “And there are major problems in the city that it’s easy to blame immigration for.” He points to council bankruptcy and other governance issues plaguing the city: “15 years of austerity, the bin strike, a crippling equal-pay claim, 46 per cent of the children live in poverty. There’s huge investment into the city centre, but the rest of the city is left in a state of abandonment.”
Potholes riddle the roads and instead of tarmac what’s pouring in are “top-down attempts to stir up tensions in the city and create a false culture-war narrative”. Last year, the then Conservative (and now Reform UK) MP Robert Jenrick visited Handsworth, whose population is 91 per cent non-white, and labelled it “one of the worst-integrated places”. Fox News agitated in a similar way in 2015 and was forced to issue an on-air apology after falsely claiming that Birmingham was a “Muslim-only city” containing “no-go areas for white people”.
“Birmingham attracts this kind of attention because it is very diverse,” says Stark. “But that outrage is not organically felt by the majority of residents here… Birmingham isn’t broken, despite manufactured attempts to divide us.”
But Birmingham’s flags will not be lowered any time soon. In Kingstanding, a predominately white, working-class suburb in north Birmingham, “you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t like Raise the Colours”, a business owner tells me.
Kingstanding’s central roundabout has two layers of flags. The inner circle is faded, collapsed in parts. An outer layer of Three Lions specials was freshly staked by Raise the Colours Kingstanding for the World Cup. Tattered “Remember the Troops” flags curl around nearby lamp-posts. A supportive local tells me residents tend to the roundabout like a wayward garden: “They get put back up as soon as the council takes them down.”
*Name has been changed
[Further reading: Burnham’s rough sleeping campaign should begin in Westminster]
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