Manchester’s chief flag-raiser has put his people smuggling days behind him

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I’m outside Marks & Spencer on Market Street, standing beneath a newly-hoisted Union Jack in a moment of quiet reflection. For a few days, I’ve been trying to get hold of the people who hung this flag and the others that have sprung up around the city centre. A man approaches me, and we look up at the flag together. He describes its presence as an act of “quiet revolution” that reminds him of the peaceful protest of Mahatma Gandhi, a parallel that hadn’t yet occurred to me.

On Wednesday evening at around 6pm, a group of about a dozen men and at least one woman made their way into the city centre, armed with ladders and flags, some of them wearing balaclavas. They were there to participate in a nationwide project which has seen roundabouts in Wigan and residential streets in Blackley festooned in British colours. 

The group spent about two hours in the city centre, during which time complaints were made to the police. The Manchester Evening News spoke to a woman who said one of the men shouted “Oh my god, look at them tits” at her as he hoisted the flags. The woman said she reported the incident because “it felt like [the men] were trying to start something and get my attention.” She also alleged the men had verbally harassed an Asian family with young children.

By the time they had left, Piccadilly Gardens, New Cathedral Street and the surrounding areas were draped in flags. In the morning, acts of counter-protest began to appear. On one lamppost, a sign had been attached beneath the new flag: “And here we see Reform voters hanging flags half mast. To pay tribute to the death of common fucking sense”.

Some expected Manchester City Council would act swiftly to remove the flags, igniting a local culture war. Nick Buckley, who ran for Reform UK against Andy Burnham in 2021, then as an independent in 2024, was sure of it. “They will cut them down as fast as they come up,” Buckley told me on Thursday morning, reasoning that “many” in the council chamber are “Communists and Islamists” who would be triggered by the appearance of patriotic flags.

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But that didn’t happen. Within hours, Labour councillor Pat Karney told BBC Radio Manchester that the flags would remain. 

That may have been a deft move. Two Labour councillors told me the council didn’t want to play into the hands of the flag-raisers, who might have been looking for a chance to brand the authorities unpatriotic. One insider says the council was keen to avoid the backlash in Birmingham which followed local leaders announcing they were taking the flags down.

So who are the flag-raisers? Is this a project being driven by anti-immigrant groups or does it simply represent an outpouring of feeling from patriotic Brits who feel let down by their government? That’s the national talking point. So when I saw flags hanging from lampposts, bus stops and scaffolding on my way to Mill HQ earlier this week, I decided to find out who had put them there.

I began by calling some local figures who might be supportive of the flag-raising. “People have just had enough of the nonsense of the past 20 years really and it's got infinitely worse with the current government,” says Trafford’s Conservative leader Nathan Evans, who has been vocal about the presence of asylum seekers at Cresta Court in Altrincham. He thinks the ongoing flag protests are a far better option than rioting and describes these small acts of defiance as “quite heartwarming”. To him, raising flags is a sign of our civilisation. “We’re not French, we don’t stop lorries at Calais and burn sheep”.

Evans describes a situation in Trafford where ordinary people feel “under siege” by the ruling authorities. He alleges that he and his wife Laura Evans, the Tory mayoral candidate who came second to Andy Burnham last year, had to go out with tins of paint and personally paint over swastikas that had appeared in the borough because the council had failed to do so swiftly, but says a St George’s flag that recently appeared on a roundabout was gotten rid of in under 24 hours. “[This is] the little bit of rebellion we have had and Trafford go: ‘stamp it out, stamp it out’” he says. 

Asked who he thinks is responsible for all the new flags, Evans is clear: it’s ordinary, fed-up people. “It’s white van man, it’s Mondeo man” he says. “Who else has a ladder?”

Meet Salford T-Bone

A couple of days ago, The Mill received a tip as to who might have put up the city centre flags. We were told that one of the people leading the effort was a man who calls himself Salford T-Bone. On his recently-created TikTok channel, a series of videos show him and a group of other men on ladders putting up the flags. Some of them are accompanied by AI-generated background music with lyrics such as: “we came to England through the tunnel last night… we claim asylum now they’re treating us right” (to the tune of The Wurzel’s The Combine Harvester).

T-Bone is part of a 16-person group calling themselves Churchill’s Lions, who claim to be responsible for the majority of the flags that have gone up around Greater Manchester. On his YouTube channel, T-Bone positions himself as a kind of citizen journalist, “highlighting the shit this city puts up with”. More recently, though, flag-raising has become his focus.

A picture posted by T-Bone of Churchill’s Lions posing with their ladder by the Queen Victoria statue in Piccadilly Gardens, was shared by Britain First’s co-leader Ashlea Simon, who heaped praise on the group, describing them generically as “Salford Lads”. Other recent T-Bone videos include this one, in which he appears to slap a woman across the face in Piccadilly Gardens following the recent Britain First march. A family member recently described T-Bone as a “woman beating, child beating rat” in a post on Facebook.

So who is Salford T-Bone? When I found his Facebook account, it was ‘friends’ with a man called ‘Lee Twamle’. This appears to be a misspelling of Lee Twamley, who was recently spotted by the campaign group Hope Not Hate at the front of the Britain First march in the city centre. When I found pictures of Twamley, he looked remarkably similar to T-Bone’s appearance in his TikTok videos: not a million miles from Stephen Graham’s Combo in This is England with his shaven head.

Nine years ago, Twamley was conducting a very different covert operation, as Hope Not Hate revealed. Rather than putting up flags across Manchester to protest unacceptably high levels of illegal immigration into Britain, he was sneaking around at the border in Coquelles, France, attempting to bring immigrants into Britain illegally. 

In 2016, Twamley was stopped at the border. In the back of his Ford Connect van were four Vietnamese people he was attempting to smuggle into the country. He was later convicted for being part of a five-person illegal immigration operation and sentenced to 20 months in prison. At the time, Ben Thomas, of Immigration Enforcement’s crime team for the North West, said: “This shameless gang plotted to bring desperate people into the UK illegally purely for their own financial gain.”

Could T-Bone really be Twamley? I needed to contact him to find out. 

‘The next stage is violence’

In Salford I encountered plenty of flags but not a huge amount of public feeling about them. On an estate opposite Frederick Road, which has flags running all the way along it, I asked a man called Ian Weller, in his 60s, what he thought of them. “I haven’t much, really,” he replied. A while later, an elderly man on a mobility scooter near Salford Shopping Centre said he’d heard a rumour that the flags were being put up as a protest because Sir Keir Starmer wants to get rid of the British flag altogether (I can’t find any confirmation of this rumour). 

I got a bit more from Pauline, who said it “seemed fair enough” if people wanted to hang flags in their communities. When asked if she was concerned about the far-right groups reported to be involved, she said there was always “going to be some of that”, and that it wouldn’t surprise her if “racists were jumping on the bandwagon”.

Sam Wheeler, the Labour councillor for Piccadilly, had deeper thoughts. “Given George is the patron saint because the French teenager ruling over us at the time thought he was more dashing than St Edward,” he told me, “I suppose it says something about his enduring appeal that we have groups of young men putting up St George’s flags 700 years later.” 

“I think it's rather romantic,” Wheeler went on. “I do wish they’d buy ones made in this country rather than cheap plastic imports though”.

Wheeler’s point is that he doesn’t think any political point is actually being “articulated” by the flag raisers. “We have a national flag flying over the town hall and the Central Library all year round,” he says, pointing to other flags outside Piccadilly Station, the churches and Cathedral and the annual St George’s Day parade “which myself and council colleagues march in”.

Nick Buckley, meanwhile, has a question: “Why are we sending money to the Beijing Lesbian Opera company?” he asks me down the phone. What does he mean by this? Buckley explains that the current protests are inevitable — that the UK has been sending money to foreign causes, and allowing unfettered migration, for too long. He thinks we’re reaching breaking point. “Once people get to the stage where they think democracy doesn’t work anymore, the next stage is violence.”

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While the likes of Buckley and Evans insist this is a heartwarming, non-racist protest, one Labour councillor — who asks to remain anonymous — is less sure, pointing out that the flags being raised in residential areas are of greater concern than those in the city centre. “There’s one that’s gone up on a street in Moston which just so happens to be opposite the only West African family on the street,” he says. “I’m sure that’s entirely a coincidence”. 

A message from Lee Twamley

With no word from Twamley, I headed to his house in Eccles yesterday afternoon. I wanted to meet the Salford Gandhi, and find out about his transformation from people smuggler to anti-immigration crusader. Unfortunately, he wasn’t home. I spoke briefly with a neighbour, who confirmed I had the right address, but all the blinds were drawn and no answer came. 

A little deflated as I made my way back, I finally received a call from a woman called Emma Boyd, who had started an online fundraiser to buy more flags. As it turned out, Boyd was a member of Churchill’s Lions and she was more than willing to chat. 

Boyd explained a group of 16 of them had started the Lions as they all want “to protect our children” from “illegal immigrants, from rapists”. Boyd recently started the fundraiser as they were running low on flags: she did a big order of 500 yesterday, sadly not all of which were manufactured in the UK. The flag-distributing efforts have been supported by a cafe in Blackley, which has become one of the hotspots for local flag-raising. 

Churchill’s Lions includes Boyd, Twamley, Britain First co-founder Ashlea Simon (who once claimed black people cannot be English) and several others. Boyd had been in Piccadilly Gardens as the flags went up but said she just filmed what was happening and “held the bags”. She added that 60-70 people had approached them with messages of support and that the claims in the MEN about men shouting abuse at women were untrue. 

When I ask her about Twamley’s criminal convictions, Boyd tells me she’s aware of incidents in his past, which she calls “irrelevant”. When I suggest that the relevance might be that there is a possible contradiction between his anti-immigration activism and the fact he attempted to smuggle a group of immigrants into the UK in a van for financial gain, she says: “I don’t know about that so I can’t comment on that”. 

Next, I ask Boyd about the video of Twamley slapping a woman in the face in Piccadilly Gardens after the recent Britain First march. She is again defiant. “He’s not slapped any woman in Piccadilly Gardens,” she replies. “Yeah he has,” I suggest. “No he hasn’t, someone slapped a phone out of his hand,” she comes back. The incident can be seen in the video below.

Finally, I shift the conversation into safer territory, asking her what she thinks of the far-right leader Tommy Robinson, whose online popularity has been central to a recent upsurge in anti-immigration activism. “I love him,” she says. “He talks so much sense”.

Moments after the call with Boyd, a text comes through. After two days of silence, Twamley has finally made contact. To my disappointment though, he isn’t willing to talk. Twamley isn’t happy about my lines of enquiry. “You never asked [Emma] about flags just all about me,” he says of my conversation with Boyd. 

Undeterred, I send a list of three questions — about the smuggling conviction, the apparent slapping of a woman in Piccadilly Gardens and the alleged harassment of women as the flags went up — to which Twamley responds bluntly: “old news”.

When I remind him the slapping incident was actually a few weeks ago, he responds with a thumbs-up emoji. And that’s the end of my efforts to speak to Manchester’s flag-raiser-in-chief, Lee Twamley.

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