‘Little island of hatred’: the mystery activist who defied anti-migrant protesters

England is wrapped in the flag. They hang from lampposts and motorway bridges. They’re painted on roundabouts and flying outside houses and flats. The Cross of St George and the Union Jack are everywhere you look, from Birmingham to Manchester, York to Portsmouth.

There’s no World Cup or Olympic Games, no royal wedding or jubilee, and Remembrance Day is more than a month away. Instead, thousands of flags appeared across the country during a summer of protests about asylum seekers.

The groups responsible for “Operation Raise the Colours” insist they’re merely promoting love, unity and patriotism. For others, the flags, so often co-opted by far-right groups, are a sign of prejudice, not pride – a clear message that refugees, and minorities in general, are not welcome.

These tensions are nothing new. Successive governments, going back decades, have struggled to accommodate the tens of thousands of people who seek asylum in the UK each year, and to do so in a way that does not provoke public opposition. This summer that hostility has focused on the use of hotels to house asylum seekers, which has increased significantly since the pandemic, and the supposed impact on local communities.

The recent protests, the flags and the Unite the Kingdom rally organised by far-right activist Tommy Robinson earlier this month – which saw 26 police officers injured when around 150,000 people marched through central London – brought back memories of events in my local area 20 years ago.

In the early 2000s, Tony Blair’s Labour government proposed three large accommodation centres for asylum seekers including one in Lee-on-the-Solent, a seaside town in Hampshire. The plan was to use a former naval base to house 400 men for up to six weeks at a time. It met with strong opposition from local residents, including protests and a petition to Downing Street signed by 32,000 people.

At the time Dispatches aired a documentary, Keep Them Out, which revealed the fear, ignorance and bigotry that fueled the campaign. In one scene, a local teacher who led the group’s “research unit” showed off a large binder of newspaper cuttings that described asylum seekers as potential terrorists and “spongers”, and warned that the “migrant influx” posed an “Aids threat”.

“You have the fear of rape,” she said. “You’ve got the fear of HIV and Aids, you’ve got a fear of a lot of sexually transmitted diseases, haven’t you. If just one young girl in the area ended up with Aids, that would be nasty. Very nasty.”

In another scene, a protester simply says of the asylum seekers: “Kill them. Kill them all. Shoot them.”

Lee-on-the-Solent has a high proportion of retirement homes and the campaign against the processing centre was made up largely of the town’s older residents. Like this summer’s protesters they raised flags and banners, with dozens lining the walls and wire fences of the naval base. “Welcome to Lee-on-the-Solent, twinned with Baghdad,” read one. “Both communities under threat of foreign invasion”. Another asked: “Human rights? What about ours?”

Suddenly these banners began to disappear. It soon became clear they were being stolen, and the campaign group organised an undercover surveillance operation to catch the culprit, dubbed “Banner-Man” by the local press. The former solicitor heading the effort warned his team: “The important thing is we shouldn’t try to make a citizen’s arrest [and] we shouldn’t be involved in car chases.”

The result was a group of pensioners, some dressed in camouflage, taking it in shifts to hold overnight stakeouts in the hope of unmasking Banner-Man. The surveillance operation continued for five weeks without success. They never caught Banner-Man and, somehow, he continued to strike. The documentary makers, however, did manage to track down the mysterious figure, who agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity.

Speaking next to dozens of banners laid out on his living room floor, he explained why he’d done it.

“I honestly think the majority of people in Lee-on-the-Solent, their human rights are being pretty well looked after. The people they are protesting about are, by and large, in great jeopardy.

“I was commuting through Lee and I would come up against this barrier of banners. It was like entering a township where no one else was wanted but the members of that township. It was this little island of hatred.”

The government eventually caved to public pressure and scrapped plans to house asylum seekers in Lee-on-the-Solent. The protests stopped. The banners came down. And the mystery of Banner-Man’s identity went unsolved.

But I knew. He was my dad. He would sneak out late at night, cut the banners down and then hide them in the outside toilet. It was full to bursting with them. He kept it locked to prevent any visitors discovering his alter ego.

I’ve been thinking about what he did, and that period of time, a lot recently. This summer’s protests, the anger and hatred directed towards asylum seekers, and the supposedly benign Raise the Colours movement may feel like a worrying new low for the country. But the resentment, the racism, has been around for decades. The difference now, perhaps, is there are fewer voices speaking out against it. Certainly the government, concerned about the threat of Reform, has been too slow to do so.

My dad, who was also an investigative journalist, passed away in 2021. I’d like to think if he were still alive there might be fewer flags on lampposts. There are, in his memory, a few less where I live at least.