People are hanging the St George's cross up not to stoke division, but because they feel like they're being treated like second-class citizens in their own country, says GB News presenter Patrick Christys

This article is a transcript of a speech delivered at the Oxford Union on January 29, 2026

All right, thank you very much. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to defend our great flag. I would also like to thank the president (of the Oxford Union). I believe when we're given the opportunity now, quickly, as is custom, to roast the opposition, this is something I'm supposed to do. It is always a pleasure to debate Femi (Oluwole). I appreciate you. You're right. When I see you in that shirt, I don't see a symbol of division; I see an audition for the Village People. And it's a very, very good job that you didn't strip down to the underwear, because it is quite cold in here.

You also made a point, didn't you, about, "Oh, only 5 per cent of people who waved the Palestinian flag" — which, by the way, I'm not going to get into this issue tonight because it's not the night for supporting Hamas — we're not going to admit to it, are you? They're a banned terrorist organisation. I mean, completely nuts. But anyway, thank you very much for coming tonight, Femi. It's a night out for you; it's a night off for everyone you live with.

And we've also got two serving members of the House of Lords here, haven't we (Baron Bilimoria and Woolley)? Not content with being able to shape the laws of our great country in that giant, taxpayer-funded red leather care home there in Westminster, they also want to come here — they also want to come here now and slag off our flag. I think we'll have our money back, please, chaps.

Anyway, it never ceases to amaze me how many people are desperate to come to Britain, study at British institutions like this, live in quintessentially British places like Oxford, maybe even dare I say it, claim a student loan paid for by the British taxpayer in British pound sterling with the face of the British monarch on it, and then turn around and tell us that our flag's s***. Seriously, I mean, come on.

If the St George's flag has become a symbol of racism and division, why is it that millions of people want to come and live in England every single year? Surely by now, word would have got out to their mates back home, and they would have said, "Actually lads, don't bother." You know, if you really are silly enough to believe that hanging the St George's flag from lamp posts or bedroom windows is a symbol of division, let me tell you why they're really doing it.

And a part of it is migrant hotels. They've been popping up in towns and villages across the country. Did you know that one in every 100 illegal migrants living in these hotels has been charged with, found guilty, or is currently wanted for a crime? A schoolgirl was raped in a park by an Afghan migrant not far from here. A schoolgirl was sexually assaulted by an Ethiopian migrant in Essex four days after he arrived in Britain. An elderly man out walking his dog was murdered by a Moroccan asylum seeker who traveled through 13 different countries before he made it to a taxpayer-funded house in Hartlepool.

People no longer feel safe in their own towns, their villages, and their homes because successive governments have told British citizens that their rights matter less than the rights of illegal young men. The Labour Government literally argued this in court recently and won, and they know that more is on the way.

Now, I have done something that I don't know if anyone else in this room has done: I have been to Northern France to look at the migrant crisis, to track down personally human traffickers myself, and speak to people who are on their way to Britain. Do you know what that exposed? Many of them are linked to ISIS. Many of them are linked to the Taliban. Many are armed.

And if you go and ask some of these young men what their views are about gay rights, about trans rights, about women's rights, about the age of consent — and I'm addressing here particularly people on the left in this room — you ask yourself whether or not they match your own views on those subjects, and then you tell me whether or not you would like them really to be living in your area. Because they're about to be.

People aren't hanging up the St George's flag for division. It is a desperate attempt at a benign protest against an unrelenting tidal wave of cultural, societal, and criminal change in their beloved areas. People are hanging these flags up not to stoke division, but because they feel like they're being treated like second-class citizens in their own country, and they are sick and tired of having their hard-earned money spent on things they don't consent to.

We've got the highest tax burden since World War II, energy bills going up, the elderly had their winter fuel payment cut, and there is a sense now in this country that instead of prioritising English or British people — and also people who've come here legally, by the way, right, which should be the first duty of any country — that's not the case. It's going to people like this.

Two hundred councils in the UK have signed up to take part in a government pilot scheme to build new homes for asylum seekers. Not for Brits, not for the thousands of homeless military veterans that line our streets, not for the young single mother who's just fled domestic abuse and doesn't have a place to stay — no, for people like the 40,000 Afghans who were secretly brought to Britain under a scheme the public were never supposed to find out about.

The Government went to the High Court to get a super-injunction to stop journalists like me being able to tell you that 40,000 Afghans — some of whom are related to Taliban commanders, some are now on terror watchlists, some have been found guilty of heinous crimes, and some have been back to Afghanistan on holiday having been granted asylum. So yes, when the British public finds out about stuff like this, they do raise the St George's Cross — not to stoke division but crucially to remind our politicians who they are supposed to be representing, because I think they've forgotten.

Let me just tell you why people are hanging these flags as well: because our politicians are constantly telling us that we have to praise the flag and the culture of every single other country other than our own. "What even is British culture?" they say. "Oh, your national dish is chicken tikka masala. Yay, great, okay, fantastic." You know, they say we need more change, more, more, more. They feel offended, these people, that Britain — a country that so many people fought and died for — is viewed by our ruling elites as nothing more than a plot of land in the sea open to anyone who wants it.

And when people spoke up about this about 20-odd years ago, right, and they were saying things that had nothing to do with race or ethnicity or anything, they were just saying things like, "I don't really think we've got the infrastructure for this," right? They were called racist (and) xenophobic; they were shouted down, they were demonised, and they were gaslit.

And then now, my friends, we actually have some of these stats, don't we? In 2024 in London, about 47 per cent of people charged with sex offenses were foreign nationals. We've had the Pakistani rape gang scandal — thousands and thousands of predominantly working-class white girls in at least 55 towns and cities across the UK abused, and the police forces on record saying they didn't investigate this because they didn't want to stoke racial tensions.

We have a housing crisis as well, of course. We also are having to let violent prisoners out of prison because we don't have capacity, whilst 12 per cent of prisoners are foreign nationals. Councils won't clean graffiti off trains, but they'll paint over a red cross on a roundabout.

And now, after all this evidence, after 20 years of being shouted down, how do you think those people feel now? Well, they feel annoyed; they feel helpless, and that St George's Cross is not a symbol of division. For them is a symbol of patriotic resistance. These flag-hoisters were demonised and gaslit for years, and now for my good friends on this side of the debate to say that they are stoking division is just your latest attempt to try to shut them down again, and they will not be silenced this time.

People are sick of not being in control of our own laws, all right? They see cases where every British court says that we should be deporting this man because he's a paedophile, and then the ECHR, a foreign court with foreign judges in a foreign country, tells us, "No, that paedophile must stay in Britain." And people are angry about that.

People raise our great flag because they are sick of seeing people unlawfully discriminated against: British people. The RAF in 2023 was found to have unlawfully discriminated against white British men. The worst-performing kids at school are working-class white boys, and yet two of Britain's most prestigious schools, Westminster College and Dulwich College, refused the donation of £1 million to provide scholarships specifically for white British boys from disadvantaged backgrounds — when scholarships, obviously rightly so by the way, exist for loads of other people. People are sick of feeling like they're at the back of the queue in their own country, right? So they raise their own country's flag. That's not a symbol of division; if anything, it's actually quite sad when you really think about it.

And I want to make something very clear because I mentioned a couple of things there about specifically discrimination against white people. Now, I'm not saying at all that only white people can be truly English or British — far from it. In fact, 18 per cent of the British Army are ethnic minorities. About 10 per cent of the British military are from places like Fiji and Nigeria, and let me tell you what: they find it absolutely hilarious that we have debates like this about our own flag, because they bloody love it and they're willing to fight and die for it. They think it's mental that we do this.

And I invite anyone in this room, any one of you, to follow me around for a day. Just walk with me, and you'll see the different nationalities and ethnicities of people who come up to me in the street and say, "We love your show, we love GB News, and we love our flag."

My friends on the opposite side of this debate might point to things like the disorder after the Southport massacre, where idiots with the Union Jack burnt down migrant hotels, and they'll say, "Oh, there you go, there you go, your flag is a symbol of division and hate." Well, these are very often the same people, aren't they, that after we see yet another Islamist terror attack, will be the first to say, "Well, it's not all Muslims, don't generalise." And they're right about that, of course! But I'm sorry chaps, you can't have it both ways. A few idiots doing bad things whilst waving the British flag does not make the flag itself a symbol of division.

Now, the people who claim the flag is divisive and racist are the same people who see division everywhere. Let me tell you some things that have been accused of being divisive or racist in recent years based on academic reports. Are you ready?

• The entire British countryside. (I lived in the Lake District for a couple of years; my ethnic minority mates up there will be terrified to find out they've been living in racism!)

• Gardening. (Gardening is divisive because horticulture has a diversity problem.)

• Rolling your eyes in the workplace. (Civil servants were advised that rolling their eyes was a form of racism.)

• Cutlery. (When we were having our dinner tonight, we were actually holding tiny symbols of racial apartheid!)

This is my point: the people who see the division of our flag are the same people who see division and grievance in absolutely everything they ever see, right? Do you really want to be on their side?

And I will finish by saying this: when my immigrant grandparents came to England, the Irish ones were greeted not by St George's crosses on lamp posts; they were greeted by signs above boarding houses that said, "No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs." That was divisive. That was racist. But do you know what they did? They got over it. They worked hard, they abided by the law of the land, they integrated into British culture, they gave to this great country, and this great country gave to them. And that is what our flag represents: opportunity and fair play.

And when I see that St George's flag, do you know what I see? I see the faces of the young men storming the beaches on D-Day. I see the Beatles, Oasis, the Rolling Stones. I see Wordsworth, Keats, and Shakespeare. I see Magna Carta. I see Alan Turing cracking the Enigma code. I see the beautiful Lake District, the Cotswolds. I see England actually winning a penalty shootout, and I see Luke Littler hitting yet another 180.

Every one of you in this room, this is your England. This is our England. And we can hang our flag wherever we bloody well want to! Thank you.