The Union Jack Belongs to All of Us — Sarah Sackman Should Know Better

There are moments in public life when a politician reveals, almost accidentally, the assumptions through which they see their own community. Sarah Sackman’s intervention over the flags displayed in Temple Fortune and Golders Green is one such moment.

Sackman is not a fringe councillor or a careless activist with no responsibility for her words. She is the Labour MP for Finchley and Golders Green, she is herself Jewish, elected in July 2024, and since July 2026 a Minister of State in the Ministry of Justice. She previously served as Solicitor General and as Minister of State for Courts and Legal Services. Before Parliament she practiced for many years as a barrister — she is a KC — in public, election, planning and environmental law. In other words, she knows the difference between a legal issue, a community issue and a political insinuation.

Let me start by conceding what should be conceded. The flags in question — Union Jacks and St George’s crosses — were put up on council lamp posts without permission, and by Sackman’s account have been there since well before the World Cup. Whether unauthorised objects should hang from public property is a perfectly legitimate question for a local authority, and it is one that can be handled through normal local government procedures.

Barnet Council, for its part, has been notably measured. Its spokesperson said the council “celebrates with pride our nation’s flag, flying the Union flag outside the council’s offices in Colindale and above Hendon Town Hall every day”, that lamp posts “are not designed to hold them safely”, and that the council will not “direct scarce public resources towards removing Union or English flags from lamp posts unless required to do so for health and safety reasons”. A Labour-run council, in other words, looked at the same streets as its Labour MP and reached a calmer conclusion. As of the end of July, the flags are still up.

That is the administrative case, and it is a narrow one. Sackman went much further. In her Barnet Post article she wrote that “for many members of our community, these flags do not feel like a symbol of national pride, they are a source of division and intimidation”, and that messages she had received described them as “unsettling, intimidating and othering”. She then placed the local display in a national frame: since August 2025, she wrote, far-right groups have been raising flags around the country, “coordinated by Operation Raise the Colours”, a campaign she described as having the support of Britain First and Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, who goes by the name Tommy Robinson. She was careful to note that “Raise the Colours has not at all expressly claimed responsibility for the raising the flags in Barnet” — and then argued the point anyway, calling on the council “to hand our streets back to the tolerant and inclusive majority of the community by removing the flags”.

That was the mistake. And it was not a small one.

Finchley and Golders Green is not just any constituency. It contains one of the most significant Jewish communities in Britain. Figures from the 2021 Census, as presented by the Henry Jackson Society on pre-2024 constituency boundaries, put the Jewish share of Finchley and Golders Green at around 22.8%, with Golders Green ward itself at 56.7%. Barnet as a borough remains the local authority with the largest Jewish population in the country: 56,616 Jewish residents at the 2021 Census, up from 54,084 a decade earlier.

This context matters because the people displaying these flags were not—as Sackman’s framing risked implying—an outside far-right force descending on a vulnerable minority area. Besides, even if that were the case, a British flag, why should a national flag especially now cause division? The Jewish Chronicle named Jack Miller, who happens to be my brother-in-law, as someone who helped hoist several of the flags in Golders Green and Temple Fortune. A local shopkeeper and self-described “proud British Jew, proud family man,” Miller stated: “Sarah Sackman does not speak for me. There is nothing divisive about the British flag.” He is also reported to be a member of Stop The Hate, a Jewish campaign group that has been particularly active in Golders Green following a spate of antisemitic attacks in the area earlier this year.

No one has established who put up every single flag, and I do not claim to know. But the public record establishes the essential point: at least one of the people (at least) who raised them is a Jewish resident who says so openly, and he belongs to a Jewish group formed in response to attacks on this very community. British Jews were not merely passive observers of this activity. That alone should have caused Sackman to pause before implying that the flags are naturally understood through the prism of far-right intimidation.

This is what makes her intervention so politically tone-deaf. A local Jewish resident places the Union Jack in a heavily Jewish part of north-west London as an expression of British belonging. A Jewish Labour MP, representing that very constituency, responds by associating the display with a national far-right mood. Whatever her intention, the effect is extraordinary: a patriotic gesture by British Jews is treated with suspicion by the very politician who should understand its meaning.

Sackman, of all people, should know better. Her own history in the Labour movement has been bound up with Jewish communal politics and anti-fascist memory. In 2016, the Jewish Labour Movement described her as its vice-chair when she spoke at the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street. In that speech she said: “My father’s family were East End Jews. They came to this country at the turn of the century fleeing pogroms.” She spoke of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and the antisemitic agenda it echoed. She has long presented herself as someone rooted in the Jewish Labour tradition: anti-fascist, civic-minded, socially conscious and deeply aware of Jewish vulnerability.

Precisely for that reason, her response to the flags is so revealing. The Battle of Cable Street was not a lesson that British Jews must retreat from British national symbols. It was a lesson that British Jews have every right to stand in the public square and claim their place in the country. The Union Jack does not belong to Mosley’s heirs, to Britain First, to Tommy Robinson, or to any extremist who tries to wrap prejudice in patriotism. It belongs just as much to the Jewish shopkeeper in Golders Green, the Cypriot immigrant like myself who became British and also is a Jew, the Muslim doctor, the Hindu business owner, the Christian pensioner, the secular student and the refugee who became a citizen.

When politicians treat the national flag as suspicious by default, they do not defeat extremism. They surrender the symbol to extremists. They tell minorities that Britishness is something to fear rather than something to shape. That is a disastrous message, especially in a constituency where many families came to this country because Britain offered legal protection, civic freedom and the possibility of religious life without state persecution.

I moved to the United Kingdom from Cyprus 16 years ago. It was here that I was able to embrace my Jewish identity and heritage more fully. I became British nearly seven years ago. I live openly as a committed religious Jew. Those two identities are not in conflict. They reinforce each other. My Jewish life in Britain is possible because of the civic order, legal protections and freedoms symbolised by the flag that Sackman now appears so anxious to problematise.

That does not mean every flag should remain forever on every lamp post. It does not mean councils have no role in regulating public property. It does not mean residents’ concerns should be mocked or ignored. But it does mean elected representatives have a duty to distinguish between practical administration and cultural accusation. Sackman blurred that line.

She could have said: “These flags went up on council property without permission, and that has to be dealt with properly. But I understand why many residents are proud to see them, including Jewish residents whose families found safety and freedom in Britain, and I will not pretend that flying our own flag is in itself a threat.” That would have been balanced, responsible and unifying.

Instead, she chose a framing that made proud British Jews feel as though their patriotism was being misread as menace.

That is not leadership. It is a failure of local understanding.

The Union Jack in Temple Fortune and Golders Green should not intimidate British Jews. Many British Jews helped build the Britain it represents. They pray every week for the monarch in synagogue. They served in its armed forces. They built businesses, schools, charities and communities. They contributed to law, medicine, culture, politics and public service. For a Jewish community under real pressure from antisemitism, public disorder and imported hatred, the flag can be a statement of belonging: we are Jews, we are British, and we are not guests in our own country.

The criticism of Sackman has not come only from one direction. David Wolfson KC, the shadow attorney general, said he found it “rather unsettling” that a British justice minister should say it was no surprise people found the Union Jack “unsettling, intimidating and othering”; Barnet’s Conservative group has called her intervention “political theatre”. At the time of writing, at the end of July, she has neither withdrawn nor clarified the implication, and the flags remain where they are.

She should withdraw it. She should speak to the Jewish residents who put the flags up. She should listen before lecturing. And she should remember that inclusive Britishness is not defended by taking down the flag, but by insisting that it belongs to every law-abiding citizen and every loyal community.

The Union Jack belongs to all of us. That includes the British Jews of Golders Green.