Description
Beginning in August 2025, a grassroots movement known as Operation Raise the Colours spread rapidly across the United Kingdom. Activists and participants continue to tie St George's Cross and Union Jack flags to lampposts, painted them on roundabouts, ultimately saturating public spaces with nationalist symbols. When councils began removing flags citing safety concerns, many participants framed this as an example of elite betrayal. They responded by intensifying their flag-raising activities and spreading the movement to dozens of towns and cities. This paper examines Operation Raise the Colours as mobilisation of, and responses to, ontological insecurity. Drawing on ontological security theory (Giddens 1991; Steele 2008; Kirke and Steele, 2023) and populism scholarship (Moffitt 2016; Mudde 2004, Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017), I analyse how the movement both exploits and reflects anxieties about British identity, immigration, and national belonging through material-performative practices. The analysis begins to outline three dynamics. First, the lamppost flags function as material 'ontological anchors' (Rumelili 2015) that help to transform abstract anxiety into tangible collective action. Second, the movement's viral spread demonstrates how ontological insecurity becomes socially contagious through processual means as continuously networked communication. Third, this form of ontological security-seeking attempts to be zero-sum: flags that provide security for "the people" simultaneously create insecurity for minorities and immigrants who often experience flag saturation as a social threat. The paper contributes to understanding how populist movements mobilise anxiety through everyday vernacular material practices, and illuminates plausible conflictual dynamics of ontological security in increasingly polarised societies.
