As winter set in across the UK, the flags strung up during 2025’s controversial Operation Raise the Colours were becoming tatty and grey. Yet, they continue to send an important message: despite increasingly digitally connected lives, neighbourhoods still matter when it comes to political views.

The strength of feeling among those putting up flags since summer 2025 and those who objected to them is proof that people filter big political issues through the places where they live and work. People measure their lives through local heritage, memories and a sense of home. So these areas are also battlegrounds for competing visions of what it means to belong.

Reform UK has clearly recognised this. It has worked hard to win council elections in England, appealing to concerns held across the political spectrum about the character and decline of neighbourhoods. But such tactics tend to to push people’s buttons on sensitive issues such as immigration and encourage resentment.

Historically, local civic institutions – pubs, working men’s clubs, trade union halls, church halls – came into their own when communities faced hard times. They acted as emergency shelters and dining halls, information points and advice services, they gave emotional and practical support, as well as being spaces for enjoyment and celebration. Some such spaces still exist, but today, much of this social infrastructure has declined or been dismantled.

Into this vacuum steps populist right and far-right parties. They generate support by offering some residents a renewed sense of community, security or hope. In Epping, a recent site of major anti-immigrant protests, some residents have established Essex Spartans, a vigilante patrol group to “protect women, children and the elderly”.

Offering help to vulnerable residents in a spirit of community and care is laudable but these groups risk exaggerating local feelings of “stranger danger” towards migrants and minorities. And with alleged connections to both Reform UK and other rightwing groups, Essex Spartans and initiatives like them could create pathways to more extreme perspectives.

Far-right groups such as Homeland are also actively seeking to enter the mainstream civic life of communities. This has included joining parish councils, church congregations and sports clubs, distributing food to homeless people, and establishing litter-picking groups.

Communities pushing back

But it is a common mistake to assume that the political winds are blowing only in the favour of the right and far right, and that working-class white communities are hotbeds of racism or xenophobia. The research I’ve conducted in two of Bristol’s poorest suburbs has revealed the huge efforts made by neighbourhood groups to show that communities targeted by far-right messaging can be inclusive, imaginative and progressive.

These communities fit the profile for an area at risk of far-right influence: working-class, peripheral, declining and predominantly white. Far-right and anti-immigrant sentiments are shared openly on local social media groups, as stickers and graffiti on walls and lampposts, and in conversations in the few pubs and cafes that remain.

So they are not unusual communities, but they are also home to impressive levels of hidden work being done by community activists who want to turn the tide.

In one community that abuts a major logistics zone, British-born and migrant job-seekers and low-waged workers are crammed into overcrowded and low-quality homes. They are drawn there by a promise of plentiful work which does not always materialise.

Instead of simply blaming immigration for negative side effects, several community groups are working together to support the residents, challenge the council and landlords to improve their conditions, and clean up the neighbourhood’s streets.

Flags became significant symbols in the summer of 2025 – but meant different things to different people. Alamy/Martin Anderson

Monica, manager of the community hall, explains her approach: “Just work on the ground, and person by person.” This is how she helped a longstanding older people’s club and the migrant women learning English down the hallway to start sharing lunch together. Now this semi-regular lunch date has become an unthreatening way for these very different groups to mingle.

In a neighbourhood on the other side of Bristol, decades of neglect, disinvestment and stigma have left the area in decline. But rather than blaming immigration, networks of residents and organisations are leading the charge on neighbourhood renewal.

By pooling resources, skills, and ingenuity, finding workarounds to divert resources where they are needed, they are rebuilding dignity and agency from below. This isn’t dramatic transformation but small changes that benefit everyone, such as reintroducing bins in the park.

Community groups are also safer spaces for difficult conversations about local identity and sense of place that acknowledge residents’ feelings of loss or injustice. Darren, a youth worker, explains that well-loved community spaces are “vital” for keeping conversations respectful.

Bristol’s identity – a vibrant and exciting city with a troubled colonial past – rarely fits their own experience of growing up at its forgotten peripheries. Instead of becoming mired in these citywide “culture wars”, groups in both areas celebrate their neighbourhood’s unique heritage in response to this desire for pride and belonging.

Looking to the future

Community activists nationwide are defying assumptions about working-class neighbourhoods as being “on benefits, uneducated, having loads of kids, racist”, as Trish, a tenants’ group member told me.

With elections around the UK in 2026, the future of the country’s neighbourhoods is up for grabs. But trust in any politician is at rock bottom in these Bristolian communities and elsewhere. One resident told me, if any party set up a stall outside the local shops, “that table’s getting flipped”.

Reform UK doesn’t have a foothold like Labour here, but its candidates could still be in contention here if they can ride their national party’s wave. For now, the hard work of community activists appears to be having some effect.

This fight won’t just play out in the halls of power or the ballot box – it will unfold in streets, parks, and community halls.