Between Two Flags: What the St George’s Cross Taught Me About Belonging

Flags are meant to unite nations, yet they often expose their fractures. What can England’s struggle with the St George’s Cross teach us about belonging in a diverse society?

Over the past year, England’s flag has returned to public life in striking and sometimes unsettling ways. Once confined to football tournaments and pub windows, the St George’s Cross now appears in more charged contexts - waved at protests, draped across houses, or used to stake claims about what it means to be “truly” English. Its visibility has revived an old question: what does this flag actually represent, and who feels seen beneath it?

I’ve thought about that question often, perhaps because I’ve grown up between two very different relationships to the flag. In Türkiye, the red flag with its white crescent and star is omnipresent - hanging from balconies, classrooms, and mountain roads. It is treated almost as sacred, bound to collective memory and national pride. The flag is not simply a symbol of the state, but of belonging itself.

England’s relationship to its own flag could not be more different. The St George’s Cross has long carried a tension between inclusion and exclusion, pride and unease. It has been both a unifying emblem and a vessel for resentment. For some, it evokes solidarity and sport; for others, it recalls exclusionary nationalism or colonial nostalgia. The flag does not just represent a nation - it reveals the fractures within it.

In times of uncertainty, people often turn to symbols to anchor identity. Flags become mirrors for collective emotion - not inherently dangerous, but susceptible to manipulation. When the St George’s Cross is used to draw boundaries rather than build bridges, it reflects a deeper anxiety about belonging in a rapidly changing society. Scapegoating others becomes easier than confronting inequality or political disillusionment.

Yet flags can also be reimagined. They are not fixed in meaning, but living symbols, capable of renewal. Türkiye’s flag, for instance, represents unity in diversity - at least in theory - even if that unity has not always been equally felt. It embodies an aspiration toward collective purpose. In England, perhaps the challenge is precisely that: to imagine a flag that reflects who the nation is now, rather than who it once was.

To fly a flag should not mean to exclude. It should mean to participate - to affirm a shared stake in the society we inhabit together. But this requires confidence, not fear; inclusion, not insecurity. The St George’s Cross will only lose its divisive charge when it is no longer wielded as a test of loyalty but recognised as a symbol that belongs to everyone who calls England home.

A flag is, in the end, a language - one that speaks through colour and form rather than words. What it says depends on who is speaking through it. If England’s flag has become contested, perhaps that is not a sign of weakness but of self-examination. In debating its meaning, England is asking itself what kind of country it wants to be.

When I see the St George’s Cross , I try to see possibility rather than possession - the idea that national symbols can unite through honesty rather than myth, through shared hope rather than fear. A flag should not be about who stands apart, but who stands together beneath it.