Bimini: I’m reclaiming the England flag from the far right

There’s a St George’s Cross in my flat. Red on white, the flag of England, and I’ve had it for years. Every time I bring it out, someone clocks it and does a little double take. Like they’ve caught me doing something I shouldn’t. A flicker of “Oh, are you one of those?” across their face before they can stop it.

That reaction tells you everything about where we’ve ended up.

Somewhere along the line, the English flag became a thing you had to explain. A thing that came with a disclaimer attached. You can’t just like it any more. You have to qualify it, justify it, prove you’re not the worst version of the person they’re imagining. And I find that genuinely sad, because it wasn’t always this way. The flag didn’t arrive preloaded with all that baggage. We let it get taken. And the good thing about something being taken is that you’re always allowed to take it back.

I grew up in Great Yarmouth. A place that gets written off a lot. Post-industrial, post-seaside, post-Reform UK, abandoned by London, full of people just getting on with it. My mum ran a business. A hairdresser’s and a clothes shop. She worked hard, my mum. Hardest-working women I’ve ever known and my biggest inspiration in life. We weren’t rich but we were stable.

And the England I knew, the real one, was market stalls and chip shops and people helping their neighbours. Not because they’d been told to, but because that’s what you do. It was playing knock-down ginger and corner shops and Sunday roasts, sometimes on the same street. You’d meet all walks of life. That’s not a watered-down England. That’s the real, full-fat, gloriously beautiful thing.

And then last month, Great Yarmouth voted in Restore Britain. Every one of the ten Great Yarmouth seats on Norfolk County Council, won by Rupert Lowe’s new party, the one he started after Reform wasn’t far-right enough for him. A clean sweep, in my hometown. The flag I want to take back is the flag they’re flying.

So when people like them talk about England, the pure England, the real England, I know exactly what they mean and I know they’re lying. We have always been a country built out of everyone who washed up here and decided to stay.

The thing that actually surprised me, when I started reading about the flag itself, is how recent this bad chapter we’re in actually is. The man on the flag, St George, was born in Cappadocia, in what’s now Turkey, and grew up in what’s now Palestine. He never set foot in England. By any honest measure, he was a young man from the Middle East. The patron saint of England is someone who the people currently waving his flag around would want to be stopped at passport control.

I think that’s brilliant. Not as a gotcha. Just because it’s true.

The flag itself was just… a flag, for most of its life. On churches. On dusty cathedrals. It only became the people’s flag (face paint, replica shirts, all of it) around the time of the Euro ’96 football tournament, when my generation decided it could mean something good. That’s the England I recognise. The flag has been a thousand things to a thousand people, and the recent narrow version is just the loudest tenant it’s ever had.

I’m older now and I’ve stopped being quiet about things. I spent years performing, which I love, but there’s only so long you can separate the person you are from the things you actually believe in before it starts to eat you alive. So this year I went independent. I’m making music that actually sounds like me, that actually is me, the things I think about late at night. Not filtered through anyone else’s idea of what sells.

Because once you start speaking, you can’t really stop. Once you’ve said “this matters”, you have to mean it. You have to show up for it. You have to wear the flag with the words painted on it and deal with people’s first instinct being to assume the worst.

But here’s what I know now. The people assuming the worst about immigrants are scared. They’re scared because they know the flag was never theirs alone. They’re scared because the version of England they’ve invented, pure, unified, uncomplicated, was always a fiction. And the real version, the one that’s actually worth defending, is messy and queer and brown and Muslim and Jewish and weird and loud and ours.

I find that genuinely hopeful.

So I’ll keep my flag. Wonky paint and all. I’ll keep speaking. I’ll keep making music that sounds like what I actually think. Because the thing about reclaiming something is it doesn’t happen quietly. It doesn’t happen politely. It happens when enough of us decide we’re not embarrassed any more, we’re not apologising any more, and we’re not giving it back.

I wore this flag to stand for a version of this country that belongs to all of us. England is built on diversity, community, and solidarity. That’s not a political statement. That’s just facts, bruv.

This week I’ve been…

Cooking… Because my usual Frive delivery did not come. Listen, I might be from Norfolk but I’m not Delia. I can cook decently on a good day. Ten years ago I enjoyed it. Now I look at the prep, the mess, the washing-up, and I think: who genuinely has the hours for any of that? But this week I had no choice, so I walked to the greengrocers on Bermondsey Street and came back with humungous avocados and a bunch of other things that probably won’t get me trusted to bring anything to a Christmas potluck. 

I find that most supermarket fruit tastes of nothing. The greengrocer tastes like a Tuesday in actual Italy. I made a bellissimo rigatoni and remembered that yes, I can boil water for 12 minutes. Gloriously basic. But the reminders are necessary.

Friending… Spending time with my flatmate Kaz Hassan. Bestie. Probably the best person I know and the second-funniest person in my house. Lately being in the same flat hasn’t meant the same room, so we spent the weekend together. Went to Mighty Hoopla festival, and even came home together. I chewed Kaz’s ear about the EHRC (Equality and Human Rights Commission) while working out if he was actually listening. 

Kaz is silly. Hilariously sarcastic. Witty. Politically ept. Will devil’s-advocate me harder than anyone alive, which is what a real friend does. Challenges you. Pulls you up. Calls you out. Backs you. Real friends want to see each other win, and nobody warns you about that as you get older. The ones who don’t want that for you are not your friends. They’re roommates. Kaz is not a roommate.

Existing… Some days it’s just about showing up as myself and not apologising for taking up space. Being queer, being political, being a person with opinions and edges and things I won’t compromise on anymore. It sounds simple but it’s not. There’s always pressure to be smaller, quieter, more palatable. To not make people uncomfortable. I’m done with that. Existing, just being, has become its own kind of act of resistance. It’s the most punk thing I can do.

Bimini’s new single ‘Tank Top Bum Boys’ is out now