Two-tier judgments? Yes please. It appears, in the eyes of the far right, there is one rule for mentally unstable brown-skinned Belfast knifemen and quite another for white racist Wallingford paedophiles!
Raise the Colours is a fake grassroots organisation that coordinates the rigging of tatty England flags in areas where they will cause maximum intimidation to minorities, but who are its members? Metro describes Wallingford’s Ben Cullen as a “belonging to a flag activist group”. The Oxford Mail describes him as “a leading figure in Oxfordshire’s Raise the Colours movement”. The Birmingham Mail describes him, slightly incoherently, as “a “prominent member’ connected to a flag campaign organisation”. Raise the Colours themselves say Cullen “was not affiliated with Raise the Colours”, but “from time to time members of the movement may have been present at the same flag-raising activities as him, or may have put up flags alongside him, but this does not mean he represented, was part of, or was affiliated with, Raise the Colours”. What they can all agree on, however, is that Ben Cullen is being charged for making indecent images of children. Protect our women and girls!
In simple terms, it appears that, for Raise the Colours, simply raising the colours alongside the other colours-raisers does not make you an accredited colours-raiser. Raise the Colours’ own statement explains that “Raise the Colours is a broad public movement and we cannot be responsible or accountable for the private actions, conduct, or alleged conduct of individuals who may attend, support, or appear at public activities”. In other words, the wider flag-raising community cannot be held responsible for the activities of one individual flag-raiser. It’s a shame the same clemency wasn’t extended to the 3% of Northern Ireland who are non-white, and saw their children burned out of their beds as a result of the actions of one individual, for whom they were most definitely held responsible in the most drastic way possible. Protect our women and girls!
Is it OK to smuggle people into the country as long as they have a job lined up working as weed-slaves in the windowless basement of a disused council house?
The rightwing press continues to cover the organisation’s actions as if they were the work of some decent patriots who just love England and being English, like cheery Pearly Kings with cherry-picker vans full of St George’s flags and cable ties, and 40,000 or more monetisable followers on Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X). And a button where you can donate up to £500 a pop to help communities feel “connected, energised, and united”. Hopefully the Stirchley man who was run over and hospitalised in May by a Raise the Colours van, after objecting to the group’s intimidating tactics, feels suitably connected, energised and united. Nothing brings communities together more than putting on a Raise the Colours hoodie and live-streaming yourself hitting onlookers in the face. Protect our women and girls!
We know from Raise the Colours’ own statement that Ben Cullen was not a proper Raise the Colours member, even though he regularly raised the colours. But who are the real colours-raisers? Raise the Colours’ Lee Twamley, of Salford, was jailed in 2016 for attempting to smuggle illegal immigrants into the UK. In his defence, he argued that his people-smuggling ring was bringing in the four Vietnamese nationals to work on cannabis farms. Does this loophole reflect generally accepted far-right policy? Is it OK to smuggle people into the country as long as they have a job lined up working as weed-slaves in the windowless basement of a disused council house? Protect our ganja and herb!
Ryan Bridge, arrested during Tommy Robinson’s last Christian gathering in connection with the aforesaid hit-and-run, is a “company director” of Raise the Colours, and is currently being pursued by Spanish hoteliers seeking an eight-year sentence for his part in a scheme that allegedly encouraged British tourists to make fake insurance claims for food poisoning against Spanish hotels. Is Ryan Bridge’s life centred on crowdfunded racist flag-raising and fabricated diarrhoea outbreaks? There could be few better examples of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil”. Protect our paella and churros!
In the meantime, I am sending Raise the Colours’ Elliott Stanley instructions to make a sex doll of Nigel Farage
Raise the Colours’ co-director, the Solihull businessman Elliott Stanley, used to run a company, employing his wife and his then-17-year-old son, called Sex Doll Official, which sold and rented out sex dolls. I think it’s nice that they offered people who couldn’t afford sex dolls the opportunity to rent them out, and I hope this service wasn’t being exploited by people who could have bought a sex doll but were just morally incapable of any form of fidelity, even to a rubber woman. Stanley also offered customers the opportunity to have sex dolls made that resembled dead loved ones. Hopefully this heartfelt service – who are we to question the way that the bereaved deal with grief? – wasn’t abused by men who got Stanley and his family to make dolls of their living wives, whom they just wished were quieter and a bit more cooperative. Protect our willing sex dolls!
In contrast to the community-spirited services offered by Stanley, Raise the Colours founder Andrew Currien, a former bodyguard of the sunbed fraudster and born-again-Christian nightlife enthusiast Tommy Robinson, was jailed for 18 months for affray in 2009, after being part of a gang that shouted racial abuse at a black man who was then crushed to death by a car. But, yes, all lives matter. And Raise the Colours founder member Billy Allison, from Solihull, was recently charged with murder for allegedly punching a popular local pub owner to death in Lichfield. I’m not going to do funny puns at the end of these two.
I’m currently halfway through three nights of standup shows at the Mercury theatre in Colchester, in Reform-dominated Essex. I have loved performing to the funny and forthcoming crowds in Colchester since the late 80s, when I used to be on bills at the arts centre in the church run by a bloke who was in the grindcore band Extreme Noise Terror. But last night, the Colchester audience became one of only two of the 150 crowds – the other being Southend-on-Sea on a sluggish Sunday night – I have performed the show to so far who didn’t applaud a story about my imaginary son preventing the far right setting fire to a local mosque. This was awkward, as that nightly applause gets me into a story that reverses the expectations of virtue created by the original set-up and closes the evening in a self-mocking way, so I just had to abandon the show on a serious note unleavened by my usual comical meta-critique of my own stage persona.
I don’t know why the bit didn’t work. It was a Tuesday. It was hot. And Colchester is a town whose handsome high street is hung with patriotic flags, which once would have just called to mind the set of some Thomas Hardy TV adaptation, but which suddenly read rather differently in the light of the surge of Reform in Essex and the reactionary attitudes it normalises. Maybe I performed the piece defensively, as if I was subconsciously expecting the idea to be rejected, and so created a negative response for myself, in a moment of neurolinguistic deprogramming. Even though my Colchester audience is unlikely to include any Reform voters, a fact which is, in and of itself, an indication of the cultural impasse we face. In the meantime, I am sending Raise the Colours’ Elliott Stanley instructions to make a sex doll of Nigel Farage, which I will bury in the garden with its arse sticking out of the ground, as I can always use somewhere to park my bike.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, with a final November and December London run just announced.
Stewart has programmed, and will be appearing in, Up The Anti, a benefit for North London Hunt Saboteurs, at London’s Leicester Square theatre on 6 July, alongside Daniel Fox, Harry Badger, James Gill, Horn Walsh, Sue Jerkins, Shappi Coarse-Angling, Alasdair Bear-Baiting and Stewart Eel.
There is a recording of Stewart’s new podcast, Joking Apart, at Manchester’s 53Two venue on Saturday 11 July at 1.30pm.
And he appears with the musicians Charlotte Keeffe, Thurston Moore and Mark Wastell in an improvisation based around his forthcoming book, Pea Green Boat, at London’s Wilton’s Music Hall on 22 October