From Roundabouts to Lampposts, St. George’s Flag Becomes Symbol of Britain’s Coming ‘Civil War’
Birmingham residents paint the St George’s Cross on mini-roundabouts. Descriptive footage of the street-level flag campaign.
“Operation Raise the Colours” footage: flags painted and flown in Birmingham neighbourhoods.
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The flag, above all, has become central to this story. Across towns and cities, the red cross of St. George is being daubed on roundabouts, zebra crossings, and lampposts. Images spread rapidly across social media, where the flag’s resurgence is presented as a grassroots rebellion. In this telling, the English flag is no longer a symbol of identity alone; it has become a banner of defiance against the state itself.
These arguments were set out on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast this morning, where Britain’s street symbolism and protest politics were cast as an early warning for the United States.
England, some now argue, is “heading to a civil war.” The language is stark, but the warning is framed as a cultural struggle rather than a 17th-century replay. The conflict envisaged is not fought with muskets but with symbols, protests, and the policing of speech.
The backdrop is a shift in protest. Last year’s unrest was dismissed as “underclass disorder” — drunken rioting, repeat offenders, chaos without purpose. This year looks very different. The crowds are described as “pretty normal people,” not extremists or criminals. That change matters: a rally attended only by “thugs and fascists” will remain marginal, but once ordinary citizens join in, the stigma weakens and momentum builds.
At the heart of this lies the gulf between public and private opinion. Out of politeness or social pressure, people say they embrace diversity and rapid social change. But their “revealed preferences” — the neighborhoods they move to, the schools they select for their children — tell another story. No society, the argument goes, can endure indefinitely when there is such a gap between public conformity and private skepticism.
Social media has accelerated the rupture. When elites controlled television, newspapers, and cultural institutions, dissenters felt isolated. They repeated the approved mantra at school or work while privately disbelieving it. Social media shattered that illusion. A single post can reach millions in hours, revealing to individuals that they are not alone. That recognition emboldens them to protest, confident they will not be mistaken for extremists.
‘Asymmetric Multiculturalism’
The analysis then turned to a phrase drawn from Eric Kaufmann’s book Whiteshift: “asymmetric multiculturalism.” It describes the rules by which modern diverse states are held together — rules that demand minority identities be celebrated, while majority nationalism is suppressed. In Britain, this manifests as what critics call “two-tier justice” or “two-tier care.” Prejudice expressed by minority groups is treated differently from prejudice voiced by the majority.
The precedent, Kaufmann argues, lies in the Soviet Union. There, Russian national identity was deliberately suppressed while minority identities were cultivated as counterweights. Britain’s anti-extremism framework operates in a similar pattern: official scrutiny is directed heavily toward “young white men,” while Islamist extremism, often acknowledged as the sharper security threat, receives comparatively less attention. Defenders of the system argue such caution is justified. Its critics insist it is untenable. “You cannot treat two communities in a different way forever,” runs the argument. “It just doesn’t work as an idea or a principle.”
Britain as ‘Canary in the Coal Mine’
Steve Bannon has made this argument his own, weaving Kaufmann’s thesis into his populist narrative. On his War Room broadcast, he praised Nigel Farage as “heroic” in his attempts to reclaim Britain, casting the Brexit leader’s resurgence as proof that cultural rebellion is not only possible but contagious.
For Bannon, Britain is “the canary in the coal mine.” What unfolds there — the flags painted on roundabouts, the clampdown on speech, the asymmetric treatment of identity — is not an isolated story but a warning of what lies ahead for America. He recalls that without Breitbart London, Farage himself admitted Brexit might never have happened, and he draws a straight line from that referendum victory to Donald Trump’s triumph in 2016.
To illustrate his point, Bannon cited the case of a British writer — a left-wing journalist who had spoken critically of transgender politics at a TED-style talk in the United States. On his return to London, police met him at Heathrow and jailed him over three tweets. For Bannon, the episode encapsulated the “opposite extreme” into which Britain has fallen: a country where majority nationalism is suppressed, yet even dissent from progressive orthodoxy is now punished.
The message is unambiguous. Britain’s turmoil is presented as a preview of America’s. The red cross of St. George, once a simple national symbol, is recast as a banner of defiance against elites — a warning that populist revolt is spreading westward.
