Even a few short years ago, the prospect of the national flag being ripped down on official orders would have been unthinkable.

Yet, that’s exactly what is happening in our two biggest cities, London and Birmingham.

Yesterday, as our pictures show, came the extraordinary spectacle of council workers using extendable shears to remove St George’s Cross flags from lamp posts in the east London borough of Tower Hamlets.

Now, the same battle lines are being drawn in Newcastle, Bradford, Norwich, Swindon and elsewhere – as Britons show their patriotic pride. And town halls threaten to provoke fury in response.

Tensions bubbled over in Tower Hamlets yesterday when, around midday at Marsh Wall on the Isle of Dogs, a two-man team from the council spent several hours cutting down Union and St George flags.

One of the employees, who gave his name only as Tyrone, told the Daily Mail: ‘I was sent here by my managers to take these flags down.

‘I don’t know the significance of these flags but I’ve been taking them down and getting abuse by people who are telling me to “leave it!”.

‘They ask me “what has Britain become?”, and say “don’t take them down” and tell me “the mayor’s a w*****”.

 ‘And they get annoyed because they say the Palestinian flags were left up for weeks and months, but the English flags have been removed straight away.

‘But I’m just doing my job and I’m not going to let them hinder me from what I am doing.’

With his workmate tiring of the abuse and keen to call it a day, Tyrone admitted it might be wiser to ‘come back tomorrow around 6.30am to remove the rest when there aren’t so many people around who will get upset’.

One local, who claimed he was among a group of around 20 responsible for erecting the flags, was seen arguing with a council manager and threatening to report him for ‘theft’.

He said: ‘You’re on the frontline being made to look like a complete and utter idiot after the whole of the Isle of Dogs has paid for these flags to be hung. That’s theft!’

None of it makes for a pretty sight. The council workers are little more than cannon fodder – abused for doing the dirty work of the political classes and the faceless mandarins.

And nor is it easy to dismiss the locals’ dismay and anger at the sight of their national flags being dumped into a refuse lorry.

Adding insult to injury is the contrasting reverence they say has been shown to the Palestinian flag.

Of course, there is no way of avoiding the fact that Tower Hamlets has the highest Muslim population at just under 40 per cent – of all council boroughs in England and Wales.

 The concentration of Muslim residents is high in Birmingham, also, at nearly 30 per cent. And that is where the campaign to fly British and English flags – much of it now organised online – emerged.

For weeks St George’s flags have been flown in areas including Weoley Castle, Northfield and Selly Oak, erected by groups of patriotic locals.

Last week Birmingham City Council announced plans to upgrade street lights with energy efficient LEDs.

It would have been an uncontroversial press release were it not for the line that the works would require the removal of ‘advertising banners and flags’ from lamp posts.

These ‘unauthorised attachments’ could put the lives of passers-by and motorists ‘at risk’, the Labour-run authority claimed, adding that flags could ‘weaken’ the structural integrity of lamp posts ‘potentially leading to collapse’.

But was the timing a coincidence? Many believe the council is using the upgrade as a fig leaf to remove such visible expressions of national identity, expressions that could prove awkward in a multicultural city.

Yet their apparent squeamishness over English and British flags is not applied to the Palestinian standard, which has flown from lamp posts in areas including Sparkhill, since, the Daily Mail understands, the October 7 attack on Israel in 2023.

The black, white, green and red of Palestine is a familiar sight in Sparkhill, an inner-city suburb with a Muslim population of 79 per cent.

The parade of grim-looking shopfronts is an almost endless series of halal food specialists, Islamic dress retailers and immigration lawyers.

Yet the streetscape is the least of its problems. With more than a dozen convicted Islamic terrorists hailing from here, Sparkhill has been seldom off the radar of the police and MI5 in the past 20 years.

In the most notorious case, Irfan Naseer led a plot to detonate up to ten suicide bombs and timed explosives in crowded places.

He received a life sentence in 2013 with a minimum term of 18 years, while two conspirators were also handed lengthy jail terms.

It was also reported in 2020 that extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir – banned as a terrorist group in January 2024 – set up a base to recruit Muslim youths in Sparkhill.

Against that backdrop, it may come as a surprise that several locals who spoke to the Daily Mail believed their fellow Birmingham residents should be allowed to fly their Union and St George flags without any council interference.

One resident, Ibrar Khan, 29, originally from Pakistan, said: ‘If the flags are lawful then they should keep them up.’

Ahmed Haji Khan, 34, also a Pakistani national who has lived in Sparkhill for 15 years, said: ‘It’s their country... They should hang the flag. They have every right. The council should allow it.’

Nazakat Khan, who is of Pakistani origin, moved to the UK just before Brexit. He said: ‘Everyone here supports Palestine, that’s why the flags are here.’

When told about the English and British flags, Mr Khan was more cautious. He said: ‘These two issues are not the same. One is to support a cause where people are dying.’ 

But he added: ‘If putting up the British flags are within the law, then they should put them up. We should all have the same law.’

The support for flag-flying is understandable in areas in which the Palestinian flag has flown for several months.

Three miles away on the main street of the Alum Rock area, where the Muslim population is 83 per cent, a Palestinian flag could be seen about every 100 yards. 

At the Chaiwalla cafe, a waitress said: ‘These flags have been here since October 7 [2023], to be honest.

‘Everyone supports Palestine here. People would get very angry if you took them off.’

So spooked has the council been by the prospect, that an internal email from staff - seen by the Daily Mail - reveals a police presence would be needed.

Birmingham City Council cabinet member Majid Mahmood said of the Palestinian flags hanging from lampposts in February: ‘We are taking these down, but we need the support of the police due to issues that have cropped [up] when we first tried to take them down.’ What those ‘issues’ are remains unclear.

Mr Mahmood did not respond to our calls but a council spokesman said all flags, including Palestinian ones, are routinely taken down.

This is despite locals in Alum Rock and Sparkhill telling the Daily Mail they have been up on lamp posts for months or even years.

The spokesman said: ‘We have removed Palestinian flags along with other attachments.

 ‘Unfortunately, some items are replaced after we have removed them... On some occasions, the council has had to request police assistance when removing a variety of items. This is not limited to Palestinian flags.’

Elsewhere in Birmingham, locals are angry at the prospect of their UK flags being removed. 

With homegrown anti-British sentiment on the rise, the city council announcement was delivered at a particularly sensitive juncture. It also came against growing cultural tensions over mass migration.

Local mothers led protests outside the Bell Hotel in Epping, Essex, which was housing an Ethiopian asylum seeker charged with sexually assaulting a schoolgirl.

Other demonstrations have been held outside migrant accommodation in Newcastle, the Norfolk town of Diss and the right-on north London enclave of Islington.

Back in Birmingham, the flags started springing up last month in Weoley Castle – in the south-west of the city – before spreading to Northfield, Selly Oak, Bartley Green and other districts. It is estimated that around 1,500 have been put up so far.

When the Daily Mail visited the city, feelings were running high over the council warning. ‘I think it’s an absolute disgrace,’ said James Edwards, who lives in the suburb where the renewed show of national pride first emerged.

The 39-year-old added: ‘It’s been lovely to see the flags out and they’ve made a lot of people happy.’

Another Weoley Castle local, Yolanda Nevers, 59, said: ‘I really don’t see what the problem is. The flags aren’t doing any harm at all.’

The largely anonymous group behind the campaign, who call themselves the Weoley Warriors, have posted on social media about their ‘common goal to show Birmingham and the rest of the country how proud we are of our history, freedoms and achievements’.

Their Facebook page states: ‘No matter your background, race or religion we live side-by-side in this country, so when you look up [and] see the flags fly, they fly for you.’

By yesterday evening, its online fundraising tally had reached more than £10,600 to pay for ‘flags, poles and cable ties’. One donor posted a note that read: ‘Symbols of hope everywhere, thanks guys.’

Not everyone has been so complimentary, though. One dissenting voice said: ‘It’s dressed up as pride in the flag but it plays right into the hands of racists who think they can decide who counts as British and who doesn’t.’

But representing the Weoley group, Matt Glover – also a campaigner for justice for the 1974 Birmingham pub bombing victims and their families – told Birmingham Live: ‘We are working class people, not just white people – what we have in common is we are all proud of our flag and country, but people assume that makes us racist.

‘This is the flag flown on government buildings, on Buckingham Palace, everywhere, and it’s the flag our troops fight under, yet somehow we [are made to feel we] should be ashamed of it.’

The father of four continued: ‘We are fed up of illegal immigration, of two-tier policing; of our own people not being able to get homes before foreign nationals.’

Suddenly, the lowering of these flags has become a lightning rod for the febrile debate over immigration. And as long as councils pull them down it’s hard not to see the protests growing ever more vocal.