Of Flags and Families
Helen Charman
The new home secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said in May (in an interview with Michael Gove for the Spectator) that she has a ‘natural affinity for the faith, flag and family element of Blue Labour’. Her predecessor, Yvette Cooper, now foreign secretary, told Times Radio last week that she has Union Jack bunting hanging up in her garden shed. ‘People should be coming together around our flags,’ she said. When asked if people should be putting them up on motorway gantries, she replied: ‘I would put them up anywhere.’ The flags that have been appearing on motorway gantries, lampposts and roundabouts across the country are part of a campaign, ‘Operation Raise the Colours’, organised by known far-right extremists. The BBC asked Keir Starmer if this was racist or patriotic. ‘I’m a supporter of flags,’ the prime minister said.
Flags are prominently displayed at the demonstrations outside hotels in which asylum seekers are being housed by the private companies Serco, Clearsprings and Mears, along with signs declaring ‘protect our girls’, ‘protect children from rape gangs’ and ‘we stand together for our children’.
Mahmoud is said to be considering using military barracks to house asylum seekers. Starmer told the BBC last week that he intends to ‘empty’ asylum hotels. When asked if he would be comfortable with his daughter having to ‘walk past’ a hotel, he responded that he ‘completely’ understands people’s ‘concerns’.
Robert Jenrick, the former Conservative immigration minister, joined crowds outside a hotel in Epping in July, announcing his belief that his daughters, aged ten, twelve and fourteen, were at risk from ‘men from backward countries who broke into Britain illegally’. This fear, he went on to suggest, is easily ‘sneered at by the metropolitan elite, safely ensconced in their ivory towers’ (Jenrick was privately educated and studied at the universities of Cambridge and Pennsylvania before embarking on a pre-politics career as a corporate lawyer and a director of Christie’s auction house). Nigel Farage has repeatedly claimed, without any evidence, that a rise in reported sexual assault is linked to immigration.
Invoking ‘our girls’ is a familiar tactic. Childhood is a canvas onto which fantasies of vulnerability, goodness and citizenship are easily projected; daughterhood allows these fantasies to be gendered, too. Fatherhood assumes a kind of virtue by association: I must be right, because I’m trying to protect these innocent girls. ‘As the father of a daughter …’ is a familiar refrain from men in positions of power. Starmer’s evasive response endorses the narrative that the mere presence of asylum-seeker hotels in a community endangers women and children. According to this account, racially motivated violence, both at the hands of the state and of the kind that characterised last summer’s riots, can be committed without being named as harm, since it claims to be a defensive – and therefore morally defensible – act. Gavin Stephens, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, has criticised politicians for stoking ‘a climate of increasing tension and polarity’.
All this has little to do with the realities of the sexual exploitation of children or with violence against women and girls. ‘There is no evidence that people seeking refuge are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence,’ as a recent open letter from Women against the Far Right points out. ‘Many are themselves survivors of violence, war and persecution. Blaming them distracts from tackling the deep-rooted causes of abuse and from holding those truly responsible to account.’ A Guardian investigation published in July, on the other hand, found that two-fifths of those arrested after taking part in last summer’s anti-immigration riots had been previously reported to the police for domestic abuse.
The protesters’ claims also have little to do with the realities of life in the asylum hotels, where many women and children are housed. The conditions in the hotels are very bad: most residents share rooms with complete strangers, have no laundry or cooking facilities, no choice about when or what they eat, with any visits strictly policed by security. (The companies responsible for these conditions turn a tidy profit from public money: £383 million between them over five years. In 2019, Serco had its contract renewed by the Home Office despite having been fined £6.8 million for its various failings in housing asylum seekers).
In Glasgow, where I live, I volunteer as a birth companion, which involves spending time in these hotels. I have accompanied new mothers, often recovering from major abdominal surgery, when they leave hospital with their babies to return to small, hot rooms that haven’t been cleaned, windows that can’t be fully opened, with no fridge, no kettle, no microwave, no capacity to sterilise bottles, nowhere to unpack, nowhere to put the baby bath. Organisations such as Amma Birth Companions (the charity I work with), the Scottish Refugee Council and the Children and Young People’s Commissioner Scotland have been saying for years that housing mothers and babies in such unsuitable conditions breaches their human rights, including the right to adequate housing: the right, in other words, to safety.
One slogan used to promote the hotel protests on social media, often emblazoned over a Union Jack or St George’s Cross, is ‘Safety of Women and Children before Foreigners’. There is a clear distinction being made here between British women and children and ‘foreign’ women and children. The category of the vulnerable always already excludes the marginalised group being targeted.
The figure of the single man, meanwhile, is demonised. As Starmer was joining the chorus of concerned fathers, Cooper announced the suspension of all new family reunion applications for refugees. Enver Solomon, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, condemned this punitive measure, pointing out – as Cooper herself has said in the past – that ‘these changes will only push more desperate people into the arms of smugglers.’ In response to the ‘concerns’ about young men crossing the channel and entering the country without the allegedly ameliorating influence of a family, the government has removed the possibility of these men, who often undertake the dangerous journey alone, being reunited with their loved ones, including their own daughters.
Comments
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10 September 2025
at
5:42am
Podge
says:
Thank you
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10 September 2025
at
6:13pm
Don Flynn
says:
The news today that two children died crossing the Channel underscores the point that the new policy against family reunion for refugees will increase risk to vulnerable people. A shameful measure on the part of this government.
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10 September 2025
at
6:44pm
Marina Warner
says:
Thank you for a blazing , eloquent piece, which exposes the horror of the brutality and mendacity of both the government and the opposition (not much difference between them).
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10 September 2025
at
7:03pm
Beryl Wall
says:
I have visited an asylum seeker in a hotel. It was a very nice hotel but the asylum seekers were not living in great conditions. I would be happy for my daughters and my granddaughters to visit, let alone walk past. What’s the matter with people?
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10 September 2025
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7:14pm
enfieldian
says:
If you don’t like the idea of desperate refugees coming here, then it would be a good idea to stop invading other people’s countries. A very high proportion of the people who arrive by small boat and live in these hotels, come from Iraq and Afghanistan - reduced to poverty and chaos courtesy of T.Blair; Syria and Libya, whose destruction was aided and abetted by D.Cameron, Iran, whose descent into chaos has been kick-started by Israel and the USA, with kneejerk British support. They will no doubt soon be joined by Gazans. The tabloid Press, which shouts loudest against refugees, was shouting enthusiastically a few years ago in support of “Our Boys.” The political/media class in general cannot think of anything much to do about this aspect of a world in chaos, which they all, not least the Labour Party, have worked so hard to bring about.
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10 September 2025
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7:23pm
Sylvia Taylor
says:
An excellent piece.
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11 September 2025
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4:26pm
Tom May
says:
Excellent piece. As Enfield Ian argues, there is a total lack of medium, let alone long-term joined-up thinking about the impacts of our governments' foreign policy decisions.
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12 September 2025
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7:23am
bentoth
says:
In this horrible situation I think of Michel Foucault's analysis of modern racism in Society must be defended .
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12 September 2025
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7:25am
sandra griffin
says:
Asylum hotels, though exploitive, seem to be a necessity. Why doesn't anyone question this fact?
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12 September 2025
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10:43am
Rosalind Patching
says:
Thank you for this controlled, clear-eyed and vital piece. I live in a tiny village in the Welsh Marches. I regularly hear anti- migrant comments from people who are my neighbours, in the shop, pub, hairdressers... There are increasing numbers of Reform posters appearing on farm gates, plus a few extra St George's flags. At the same time, most of the carers attending the old and sick are brown-skinned and career along the lanes in tiny cars too fast, because they come from a big town over an hour away, and have many people to see. The older person I visit as part of a befriending scheme is from a farming family, but loves all of her 'Indian' carers as they are so kind and gentle. One is driven here by her husband, with their small son in the back seat. The abattoir 9 miles away is staffed mainly by Muslims (it's a Halal establishment), who are largely invisible but hold an occasional temple open day.
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12 September 2025
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12:05pm
MattG
says:
Where you live, in Glasgow, flying the national flag has been a divise, party-political statement for a very long time. In 2014 it was appropriated by the nationalist Yes campaign with the implication that members of the majority are not true Sctos.
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12 September 2025
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3:34pm
Steve Judson
says:
Our enemies don't arrive in small boats: like most of the politicians mentioned, they arrive in chauffeur driven limousines.
Read moreIt is beyond risible that a Labour Government is scared to deviate barely one inch from the duplicitous rhetoric of the organised far-right (centring on Yaxley-Lennon in particular) and much of the British press on this issue. They ought to be doing the right thing and offering more truthful counter-narratives, providing the public with democratic political choice and greater representation. Instead, they are party to a frankly evil demonisation and stereotyping of a group of distinct human beings.
Otherwise we do not see or hear from any immigrants, except for an annual 'day in the countryside' for refugees who live in Wolverhampton, 'City of Sanctuary', which is a joyous thing organised by Quakers. But no one from the 'established by birth' rural community participates.
I feel like printing out this piece and marching around the streets here, ringing a bell, reading it out: 'Here is some truth, please hear it'. Because the truth in this mixed-up, angry, misinformed but still persuadable country is apparently very hard to come by, and every mealy-mouthed, stumbling or belligerent statement on the matter of migration by politicians sends it even further away from us, here.