Michael Lavalette spoke to long-time Birmingham activist Salman Mirza who has gained national prominence recently for taking down flags from lampposts

Could you tell us a little bit about your political background?

I was born and brought up in Birmingham. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and we regularly faced racism at school and across the city. I grew up as a community activist: working in campaigns against racism, the wars in the Middle East and, of course, the campaign for Palestinian rights.

Recently you decided to go around your area taking down Union Jack flags, why?

Look, I’m not against flags, to be honest I don’t care about them. No one cares that the Union Jack or the St George’s flag fly during football tournaments, or fly from the council or government buildings.

During football tournaments, or whatever, many friends and family members fly the flag from their cars for example. The idea that ‘you’re not allowed to fly these flags’ is fanciful.

But there is nothing positive in the present campaign. This is not about making people feel welcome or sharing ‘common values’. 

Putting up these flags won’t help people make ends meet, or mean we no longer have to have food banks, or that rents will come down or schools and hospitals suddenly have appropriate and adequate funding.

The flag campaign ignores these real needs that ordinary people have. Instead they are being put up in a context that says ‘migrants and refugees are the cause of your problems’, and that is demonstrably not true.

The flags campaign is about sowing division. It is about asserting that some people are ‘not really British’ and ‘not really welcome’. And of course, the people who ‘aren’t really British’ are black and brown people and, at present, particularly Muslims. This is about stoking racism.

And we have seen an increase in racism and racist violence in recent months. Young Muslim men have been beaten up, two young women were raped, a Mosque has been set ablaze and a young refugee from Syria was murdered.

To be honest, when they first went up, I thought they would be there for a few days and then people would get bored.

But in one of the WhatsApp groups I was in, a young woman said they made her feel scared and she said she felt like she was being driven away. At that point I thought, ‘that’s it, I’m taking them down’.

So the flags are an obvious example of a campaign of fear and intimidation. And for that reason, they need to come down.

I was accused of being a hypocrite because I’m not taking down Palestinian flags! But this is completely different. The Union Jacks are going up to sow division and stoke racism; Palestinian flags are going up to show solidarity with people facing a genocide carried out by Israel with the support of the Western powers.

At present, the Union Jack flags are about ‘punching down’ and targeting minorities, the Palestinian flags are about identifying with the oppressed against a violent oppressor, they are about ‘punching up’ and targeting the establishment and the Western powers.

You mentioned the importance of setting the appropriate context within which the ‘flag raising’ is taking place, would you like to tell us a little more about this?

You have to put the recent campaign to ‘fly the flag’ in its appropriate context.

Nigel Farage is never off the television and he has been allowed to set the political agenda on the migration issue. The media commentators really need to have a good look at themselves and what they have enabled.

Instead of confronting this, Keir Starmer and Labour have chased after Farage. They have mirrored Reform’s talk of ‘patriotism’ and ‘nationalism’. Every time he is on television, Starmer stands in front of a Union Jack!

Labour has tried to outflank them on the right, playing to Farage’s tune. Labour and the Tories have chased each other to show who can be harsher and more brutal on migrants, who can promise to be even tougher on refugees.

But this hasn’t stopped Reform, it’s fed them and bolstered them and, even more worryingly, it has fuelled the growth of the street-fighting movement around Tommy Robinson.

It’s a perfect storm: a Labour government failing to meet people’s needs, cutting services, and increasingly distant from working-class communities and a racist right blaming migrants and minority communities for all our problems (and Labour legitimising these nonsense claims).

What we are missing is a really large, broad national campaign against the right, and we also, alongside this, need to think about real political representation for the working class.

So what do we need to do?

Well I think there are things we can do locally and nationally.

If the flags go up, they are there to sow division. So we need to take them down. If mini-roundabouts are painted, we need to paint them over. Small, locally organised actions like this are important for building our side and pushing the far right back.

We need to assert that we remain the vast majority. We need a really broad campaign involving people from all communities, faiths, trade unions and local campaign groups. And here we need to concentrate on the common ground we have. We also need to think dynamically, we need to make anti-fascism something that is embedded in the cultural life of all our communities.

We need try to drive a wedge between the hardcore fascists and the softer elements who may be attracted to bits of their message because their lives are so awful.

And that means we also need to get to work in our communities, get onto the abandoned estates and work with local activists. We need to show unity in action against poverty, cuts, austerity and racism.

The question of political representation is an interesting one. Starmer and Labour are really hopeless and offer nothing in the way of hope for the future.

I chaired a Birmingham Your Party meeting, but I’m watching this carefully! There is potential, but it needs to move more quickly, be more dynamic and throw itself into the various campaigns that we need and not just get reduced to an electoral project.