A Nottinghamshire welder has delivered the ultimate response to the people who treat Britain’s national symbols as hate speech.
Simon Brocklehurst, a 41-year-old father of three from Sutton-in-Ashfield, watched someone rip down the flag flying outside his home and run off shouting “racist.” His answer was direct and sinple: he spent days covering the entire front of his four-bedroom house in a giant Union Flag.
They cannot rip this one down.
Deranged lib rips down a patriots' flag and calls him "racist".
— Tommy Robinson ?? (@TRobinsonNewEra) August 7, 2026
So he painted his full house in the Union Flag ??
Legend. pic.twitter.com/khEV6d1rNx
Brocklehurst has lived in the house since he was five. He has always flown the flag as a sign of respect and hope, the same flag his grandfather fought under in the Second World War.
When locals tore down his St George’s Cross and labelled him a racist, he went bigger. First he painted a massive England flag across the façade. Then he turned the whole thing into the Union Jack.
“Somebody decided to rip it down and run down the street with it, shouting ‘racist’, so I thought, I’m going to paint my house. They can’t rip that one down!” he told GB News.
He has described the online reaction as vicious keyboard warriors threatening to smash his windows, while in real life most neighbours have been supportive. “I’m public enemy number one online,” he said. “But without this flag you wouldn’t have freedom of speech, so I respect their right to say what they want about it.”
He has no plans to paint over it and says if the council ever ordered him to, he would “drag my feet all the way and keep it on as long as possible.”
The move sits squarely inside the wider Raise the Colours movement that exploded across England from summer 2025. What began with a handful of men in South Birmingham tying St George’s and Union flags to lampposts quickly spread suburb by suburb, city by city.
Ordinary people, many of them working-class and tired of watching their country change without consent, started covering streets, roundabouts and bridges in the colours of the nation. The stated aim was simple: visible patriotism and a reminder of shared identity.
The response from local authorities has been pure institutional hostility. Councils have spent tens of thousands of pounds of public money hiring contractors to tear the flags down. Medway alone blew nearly £11,600 removing more than 700 of them.
Some Labour councillors openly called the expenditure “money well spent” against what they branded far-right agitators.
Essex County Council went further, offering emotional support to staff who felt “discomforted” by the sight of the national flag, particularly “colleagues of colour” who associated it with anti-immigration rhetoric.
Oxfordshire’s Liberal Democrat-run council issued a formal stop notice declaring the widespread flying of the St George’s Cross and Union Flag an “act of intimidation and division.”
Council leader Liz Leffman claimed residents felt “distressed, unwelcome and unsafe.”
In June 2026 the same council secured a High Court injunction banning the unauthorised display of those flags on lampposts and highways.
Justice Dexter Dias granted the order after hearing that maintenance teams had been “working in fear.”
Council leader Tim Bearder celebrated the ruling as a precedent that would deter “criminal activity” across the country and described the flag-raisers as “very challenging people, not patriots.”
A leaked government social cohesion strategy went further still, branding the Union Flag a potential “tool of hate” that the extreme right had turned from a symbol of pride into something used “to exclude or intimidate.”
This is the climate in which a man painting his own house the national colours becomes an act of resistance. The same authorities that treat the Union Flag and St George’s Cross as threats have shown no comparable energy against other flags or murals.
A London fish-and-chip shop owner was ordered to paint over a British flag mural because the council decided it was “inappropriate” for a conservation area.
The phenomenon has a name: vexillophobia – the irrational fear and loathing of one’s own national flags. In Britain it has become a marker of progressive virtue.
Simon Brocklehurst did not shrink away from confrontation over his national pride, instead he bought litres of paint from the hardware store and turned his house into a permanent statement that the flag of his country is not hate speech.
In a nation where councils spend public money to erase the national colours and the government itself has floated the idea that those colours can be tools of hate, one ordinary dad decided the only rational response was to go bigger.
What a fucking legend.
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