I’m putting my hands up here and confessing to struggling a bit right now, so this week’s post might be a lot shorter than usual. Essex – well, the small bit of it I live in and travel through several times a week – is still being used as a excuse for a barrage of racist rhetoric and as a showcase for a vast collection of flags on lamp-posts and random bits of street furniture.
I wrote a lengthy post last Sunday on my Instagram feed, showing some of the flags – that have since been taken down but replaced within hours by people driving slogan-ridden Land Rovers and sporting balaclavas. They presumably claim to be proud Englishmen but aren’t proud enough to show their faces as they clamber up the CCTV poles, belisha beacons and lampposts of Epping and North Weald. It also had images of the steel fences on Bell Common that are used to make sure the protests don’t block the road and to keep the two factions apart. It’s telling that since these measures were put in place the more violent elements of the protests have faded: perhaps being in a contained area and unable to run at police or throw smoke bombs is less appealing when you’re more easily identifiable. Who knows?
The Insta post was written mostly in my head as I stomped through the Forest in a loop from Copped Hall. I couldn’t work out why I was so upset by the flags – I mean, I used to go out with a rabid Cockney who believed the Queen Mother should have been sainted and that St George was a born Englishman (and that the Anglo-Saxons came from Anglesey, but that’s another story). I’ve lived in England since 1997 and from 1991-1994 when I was at uni. My first date was in England – Coleford was the closest cinema to us. My kids are English, apparently. The flags themselves are not the problem.
It came to me in the end that it was because for the first time in the 28 years I’ve lived here I felt unwelcome. The people putting these flags up – and those saying how lovely they look, and why don’t they leave them up till VJ Day, and shouting down anyone who disagrees and abusing anyone who takes them down, and taking scissors out with them to cut down any counters to the flags – are actively using these flags to intimidate. They don’t even care whether they’ve hung them the right way up. And, as I said, they’re too cowardly to show their faces while they do it. There’s also the usual whinges that you’re not allowed to fly the flags in this country, lefties, woke, no one makes the Welsh take their flags down, two-tier policing, blah blah blah. When someone points out that they are perfectly entitled to fly whatever flags they like on their own property they point out that they’re taxpayers and they pay council tax so they pay for the lampposts…. well, I bet they can’t produce the paperwork to prove it. The vitriol and badly-spelled abuse is ongoing – reasoned arguments and statistics fall on deaf ears.
Hello. If you don’t know me in real life, I’m Kirsty. I’m an economic migrant. So are many of my friends.
TL/DR: racist behaviour makes migrant feel unwelcome.
I migrated to London in 1997. I moved to #epping in 2002 and to North Weald in 2013. I speak English very well and Welsh very badly (just ask my sister). I don’t think this makes me any better or worse than any other migrant, except that in the late 1990s the lack of Welsh prevented me from getting a job in Wales so I came over the border instead.
Today I walked through Epping, where we have a hotel housing other migrants. There’s another hotel in North Weald housing families seeking asylum. Some clowns have decided to adorn every lamppost in #epping and several in #northweald with English flags and the Union flag. This isn’t helped by a cadre of local councillors starting inflammatory petitions and doubling down on the old ‘we’re not racist but’ statements, or claiming they ‘just want to protect the women and kids’.
I have no problem with people with flying whichever flag they want on their own property or on their own cars. I have no issue with peaceful protest.
I do have a problem with people weaponising flags and using them to intimidate and ‘reclaim’ a space from people who probably did not have Epping or North Weald in mind as a destination when they escaped from whenever they came from and almost certainly didn’t make a choice to be accommodated here.
Because that’s what’s happening here. This town has become a focal point for the very worst of ignorant English behaviour and attitudes, using the actions of one man to harass and intimidate dozens more.
The result, for me, is that for the first time in the 27 years since I came here to work I feel unwelcome. My nation is not represented by or on these flags. The people who put them up do not represent me or my views, and I don’t know why the council* haven’t removed them as presumably they’ve been put up without permission or a licence which I believe is usually required for putting flags up in public spaces.
*yes, the council led by the councillor who starts inflammatory petitions. There may be a connection.
The council continues to double down on their claims that it’s the asylum seekers who are to blame for community unrest, and not the people descending on the town to spew hatred. They went to the High Court for an injunction this week claiming this – never mind that in the seven years the hotel has been in use only three arrests have been shouted about, yet 18 arrests have been made among the protestors since they started a month ago.
I can’t seem to shake my disappointment in my local town and in some people I know, and it’s affecting me quite badly. I need a break.
(And I’m even more glad I chose Choose Love as the charity I’m fundraising for this year – https://donate.chooselove.org/supporters/raising-money-for-choose-love/1472/)
Things that weren’t so bad this week
A gorgeous cooling-off evening swim on Tuesday with Jill, Sue and Rachel
My clever Thing 1 getting a distinction in her T-levels this week. We’re so very proud of her, as it hasn’t been an easy couple of years. Her tutors from college have been very supportive, too.
Making rainbow toadstool tops for this year’s fairy houses
Next week I will be coming to you live from the Eurotunnel!
Kirsty x
What I’ve been reading:
Midnight & Blue – Ian Rankin
Talk to the Tail – Tom Cox
Foxglove Summer/The Furthest Station- Ben Aaronovitch (Audible)
The Vanderbeekers of 141st St – Karina Yan Glaser
The Saturday Night Sauvignon Sisterhood – Gill Sims
What Kirsty did next 