Beyond the headlines: how real communities are fighting division

When community leader Sacha Bedding sent me some photographs he’d taken of the Dyke House estate in Hartlepool at first I thought they were of a riot. Union flags hung outside a church, but it was the woman holding a red flare who caught my eye.

I had just returned from reporting on the protests at the Bell Hotel in Epping — 2025 has been the summer of flags and I’d seen enough for one day. Then I noticed the child in the Union flag bowler hat and the trestle tables, and realised Sacha was sending a positive image.

“That was our Jubilee Street Party,” Sacha told me. “More than 300 people having a great time. It was such a good day!”

Sacha had predicted the 2024 riots stemming from misinformation following the terrible murders of three little girls in Southport. “I said if something doesn’t change there will be civil disorder in this country — it’s inevitable,” the Wharton Trust CEO remembers. “I felt we were just waiting for it. A result of the pressures that people are living under, added to a lack of control over their lives.”

But he also wanted to tell me something else. That given some say over their lives and some faith back in society, people in Dyke House just wanted what everyone else wants — safety, security and friendship.

“When people feel ignored, neglected, and shut out, frustration builds — and history shows us the terrible consequences,” Sacha told me. “In order to fix the foundations of our democracy, we must act boldly and do things differently. That means putting real power and real resources in the hands of local people. Not promises. Not gestures. Real power.”

In the summer of flags, many of the protests were driven by far-right groups and people with extreme agendas hijacking genuine community concerns.

They have made people of colour and people from immigrant communities feel understandably afraid, and even unwelcome.

But it’s also true that in the absence of real power putting up flags became a way for people to exercise some control over space they feel they have lost. The antidote to that is real power put back into the hands of communities. And to reclaim our national flags, because they belong to all of us.