ON the left, we have a saying: “The people’s flag is the deepest red.” Otherwise known as the scarlet standard, it has flown on barricades from Paris to Petrograd, from Cable Street to Orgreave.

Historically, it was not a single banner but a field of red upon which unions, organisations and political parties inscribed their demands. The banners we raise today continue that lineage, carrying the spirit of the red flag into every strike and demonstration.

Perhaps controversially, I believe that alongside them we should also raise St George’s Cross. While it is true that the far right already rally under it as their unifying emblem, it is also true that if we abandon it to them, we allow them to define Englishness entirely on their own, racialised terms.

The left has long conceded this terrain. We have allowed the far right to monopolise St George’s Cross, to define it as their own, and in doing so, they have associated it with racism, chauvinism, and bigotry. Our refusal to fight on this powerful terrain of national identity has handed them victory in the battle of ideas.

Yet the far right’s use of the St George’s Cross is actually quite recent. In the 1970s and 1980s, the National Front and other far-right parties tended to march under the  Union Flag, the true emblem of the state and the empire. Only later, as the broader meaning of Britishness and the Union Flag itself began to tarnish, did they turn to St George’s Cross.

Their need was for a symbol that could pass as popular, everyday, and rooted in community. They seized upon the cross, already visible on football terraces and in working-class culture, and wrapped themselves in it as a mask for their politics. Their claim is shallow and recent. The cross does not belong to them. Its history is far older, and it is ours to reclaim.

Even today, the Union Flag remains central to the far right. At a counter-demonstration in Peterborough, I saw the majority of those seeking to racially aggravate wrapping themselves in  Union Flags.

Their appropriation of St George’s Cross does not replace this but complements it, giving them two languages of nationalism: empire and state on the one hand, and “ordinary Englishness” on the other. Some of the left’s revulsion toward St George’s Cross is, of course, due to this appropriation, as well as its history.

A thorough reading of capitalist history reveals why it is that the Union Flag is labelled “the butcher’s apron.” It was under this flag of the British state that the empire conquered, colonised, and killed across the world.

In living memory, it was the Union Flag that was flown when Britain bombed Kosovo, rolled tanks into Iraq, destroyed the Afghan people’s way of life, and reduced Libya to a slave economy. And, lest we forget, it was under this flag that Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts marched.

Our ruling class does not fight its wars under St George’s Cross. They never have. They do so under the Union Flag, the true emblem of their state and their empire. To confuse the two is to misdirect our anger. The worst crimes of recent history have been carried out under the Union Flag, and there is a reason for this.

As Communist Party of Great Britain member Michael McCreery pointed out in his essay, The National Question in Britain, Stalin, in his own work on the same subject, was wrong to confuse England with Britain. Britain is not a nation; it is a state formation, the state of the ruling class of several nations, with the Union Flag as its symbol.

England, by contrast, is a nation, and its national emblem, the Cross of St George, has been borne both by kings and by peasants. Which meaning prevails depends on who flies it. Symbols can often have a dual or contested class character to them.

Historical proof of this is found in the fact that the cross was carried by the rebels of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, sworn upon by Jack Cade’s insurgents in 1450, and borne by city guilds and militias composed of artisans, apprentices, and commoners.

In our own times, it has been carried by working-class football supporters, tied to terraces and community identity long before fascists attempted to drape themselves in it. To abandon this people’s history is to abandon part of our own class inheritance.

This is perhaps why Communist Party historian Eric Hobsbawm warned that we should not let the far right and nationalists capture the flag.

Nationalism is too powerful a language of identity to be totally abandoned, and the left digs its own grave if it refuses to engage in this terrain. But we should, of course, be cautious not to fall into the trap of nationalism, and instead engage on the terrain of national identity: there is a distinction.

The cross roots us in our national story, the story of English working people in all their diversity: peasants and artisans, rebels and unionists, as well as the Muslim, Jewish, Asian, African, Caribbean, and all other communities who today continue to shape the struggle for justice and equality.

For the left, St George’s Cross should symbolise the very opposite of the values the far right drapes it in. Where they impose hate, it should stand for solidarity. Where they project racism, it should proclaim equality. Where they defend privilege and oppression, it should be carried forward by the working class as a symbol of democracy, justice, and collective strength.

To reclaim the cross is not to embrace their nationalism, it is to expose it, and to root our own politics in a people’s England. An England of rebels, of radicals, of workers. An England that marches beneath St George’s Cross and the Scarlet Standard side by side. The same must be said of Scotland and Wales.

The Saltire and the Red Dragon, too, should be raised proudly as the flags of working people, not abandoned to reactionaries or reduced to tourist symbols. It is not the British ruling class that rallies under these national emblems; their banner has always been the Union Flag, the flag of empire and state power. It is the far right that has tried to seize the symbols of the nations for itself, and it is the working class that must take them back.

The red flag unites us with workers across the world, linking our struggle to theirs in international solidarity. One speaks the language of England, the other of universal class struggle. Both are necessary, and together they are stronger than apart. We should not see a contradiction between the Cross of St George and the Scarlet Standard. The two belong together.

The far right flies the Cross of St George as a deceptive, cowardly means to cloak hatred in national colours, and to obscure the real problems we face. They do not fly it to symbolise pride in this country.

Rarely have they ever done any positive community work, and what is there to be proud of in a country where the working class owns nothing and is expected to shoulder the burden for everything, including the profits of the ultra-wealthy? Everything we built has been sold off to hedge funds, asset strippers, and foreign oligarchs.

We should also bear in mind that there are millions of ordinary non-racist English people, of all ethnicities and religions, who consider the St George’s Cross their own. To suggest that they embolden the far right is to concede ground to jingoism.

Let the far right have the Union Flag, it suits their ways and values better than ours.

But the left has a choice: to retreat from national identity, or to reclaim it. We either fly St George’s Cross with the Scarlet Standard or we concede the ground entirely to reactionaries.

I say it is time to raise our colours. All of them.