The streets of this town are festooned with union flags. Lampposts drip with them in the early autumn drizzle like the deranged outpourings of some Nazi yarn-bomber.

They've been hung there anonymously and unlawfully, by racist bullies who dare not show their faces or reveal their names.

The council regularly remove them, but these petty racists, hiding under a guise of patriotism, return to replace them under the cover of night.

A local businessman has even launched an online Crowdfunder to raise cash for his company to supply his fellow citizens with even more of these banners of red, white and blue.

A modicum of research finds that his own Facebook page shows his support for the leader of an extremist group, a notorious xenophobe convicted of multiple criminal offences.

The local social media groups are filled with posts celebrating the hoisting of these symbols of nationhood and calling for the closure of asylum hotels and the mass deportation of asylum seekers.

A few dissenting voices – including those proposing that true Britishness should be about tolerance and multiculturalism – are quickly shouted down.

The loudest commentators – those, for example, who demand the deportation of anyone with an imperfect command of the English language – tend to demonstrate levels of grammar, syntax, diction and spelling that would leave their word-perfect migrant neighbours squirming with sympathetic embarrassment and have the nearest adult education professionals and jobseekers' advisors diving for cover and considering a change of career.

They don't even know the name of the proper flag they profess to so admire, forever calling it the Union Jack, its correct name only when flown at sea.

But then, those hoisting these flags don't seem to know much about them either. They often fly them upside-down or at half-mast – brave patriots apparently scared to climb any higher than a couple of metres up a lamppost – a fitting emblem and proof of the demise of the national ideal.

In other towns, this rag-tag army of street warriors, with nothing better to fill their days than an early morning pint of bitter at the nearest chain pub (and unending hours of burgeoning bitterness), have taken to daubing roundabouts with the English flag – or (when it seems they haven't had access to the correct knowledge of flag colours, or colours of paint) the Swiss, Danish, Finnish or Cornish flags. Abandoned or half-hearted efforts may appear to have been offered in tribute to the work of the Red Cross.

The English flag is the Cross of St George – the patron saint of England – a legendary hero said to have killed a dragon, a Greek soldier supposed to have joined the ancient Roman army and eventually martyred for his Christian beliefs. He has also been claimed by Christians to be the patron saint of Beirut, Moscow, parts of Spain, Bulgaria, Bosnia, Malta, Ethiopia and Ukraine. His mortal remains are believed by many to be held in the city of Lidd, not far from Jerusalem.

As such, this Christian icon – who has also garnered some recognition among certain Druze and Muslim peoples – might be considered of less pertinence as a saint of England and of greater interest as a figure of internationalism, and a hope of international convergence, a coming-together of the commonalities of the world's monotheistic faiths.

That was not, however, the most immediate reason why Sir Keir Starmer this month announced that he has a flag of St George in his own home – though, even as he extended this sop to the ultra-nationalists he'll never appease, he hastened to caution them against devaluing what the flag should stand for when flown for "purely divisive purposes".

A year on from cracking down hard against a series of racist riots which rocked UK cities shortly after his own arrival in Downing Street, the British Prime Minister may be relieved that the peace of the nation this summer has, for the most part (with the exception of a few racist protests which turned ugly), only been blighted by this plague of flags.

But, with Reform UK riding high in the opinion polls, he will also see this movement as a dire warning of the ideological direction which much of the UK – and in particular the hosts of the dispossessed, believing themselves betrayed by the promises of successive Conservative and Labour governments (and unwilling to accept that many of their economic woes are the result of the Brexit they once so craved) – seems determined to take.

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Indeed, one poll at the end of August saw Reform 15 percentage points ahead of the ruling Labour party, and more than doubling the Tories' score.

That polling coincided with a keynote speech on immigration delivered by that party's leader, the beer-supping, chain-smoking, Trump-loving Nigel Farage, the bigot's bigot and the wealthy champion of the interests of working people, and of all freedoms and truths which don't diverge from his own narrow perspective on the world.

Mr Farage chose at this point to ramp his inflammatory rhetoric up a notch, by declaring that "major civil disorder" will be provoked by an "invasion" of men "of fighting age" travelling across the English Channel unlawfully, in small boats and in search of asylum and a better life.

Launching a plan which he's dubbed 'Operation Restoring Justice', the purveyor of pound-shop pogroms pledged to deport 600,000 migrants over the course of five years if he wins power at the UK's next general election, currently scheduled for 2029.

His party is now also promising to repeal the UK's Human Rights Act and take the country out of the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as international conventions on refugees, human trafficking and torture.

The frog-faced fascist is additionally saying he'd spend billions on paying overseas nations – including Afghanistan – to take back their refugees. It's unclear how well his lifestyle choices would resonate with the perspectives of the Taliban.

This latest madness comes against a backdrop of legal battles between the government and local councils (including those run not only by Reform but also by the Conservatives and even Labour) over whether the use of empty hotels across the country to house (reportedly) tens of thousands of asylum-seekers contravenes the planning designations of those properties.

The Conservatives have been calling for the closure of those very same 'asylum-hotels' which they had themselves opened while in power. Reform is also demanding their immediate closure. Neither has been able to say what it would do with their many thousands of residents if, as they are seeking, all those hotels were to be closed down overnight.

The Labour government has said it intends to close them all before the next general election, and is therefore developing ways to fast-track decisions on asylum appeals.

A shift towards the Far Right, which has gripped the UK over the past decade – to a large part orchestrated by the Mephistophelian Nigel and his allies, masters and minions – has turned the feverishly heated discussion of immigration from a taboo topic into an acceptable – in fact, a core – aspect of mainstream political debate.

Irrational it may be, but, like the post-truth reality of Trump's America, it is painfully powerful. A recent article in the right-wing journal The Spectator observed that "the driver of Britain’s very high net migration is not illegal arrivals in dinghies" – whose numbers are dwarfed by those, for example, of international students coming to study in the UK who often overstay the durations of their visas.

But that subject rarely prompts violent disorder on city streets and incitements to arson and murder. (Though it has prompted the Home Office this month to send bluntly worded text messages to those students.)

As we all know, there's something atavistically appalling in how the radical right appeals to our baser instincts through the optics of small boats crossing the Channel – our island nation's last line of protection, Shakespeare's "silver sea, which serves it in the office of a wall or as a moat defensive to a house". It's like the spirit of Dunkirk turned back on itself.

Gone, for the most part, is the compassion for all those lives lost in these perilous crossings. The outrage against the people-smugglers has been transformed, through the exploitation and manipulation by political (and press) opportunities of a handful of accounts of serious criminality on the part of a small minority of those refugees, into a hatred of every one of these victims of oppression, famine and war.

Their stories, their names, and their faces have been ripped away from them by an unfeeling national narrative. They have been turned, in the minds of their denigrators, into the semblance of a monstrous inhuman mass.

It's perhaps easier to be generous when you have it good. But now, battered down by years of economic and fiscal woes, by a cost-of-living crisis and fears of increased taxes, large and vocal swathes of the UK electorate are showing definite signs of compassion fatigue.

Our humanity is flagging, and the real monsters – the flag-waving, hate-filled monsters – are taking every advantage of that.