It was close. In the end, there were actually more “yes” votes than “no” votes with “not bothered” holding the balance of power.
Below are a couple of charts. The first one shows the distribution of votes and the second shows the country distribution as entered by respondents.
Under the charts you’ll find all the comments that were supplied.
In light of the close result, I won’t be implementing the change. Thanks to all who took part in the survey.
Comments
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Why on earth??? Completely unnecessary!
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To elaborate, I probably won’t be using the feature–for various reasons, putting an American flag next to my name just doesn’t feel quite “me,” if you catch my drift–but I’m not actually opposed to the change if others seem to like it.
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Please no England flags, we’ve got them everywhere, on every lamppost as the “Patriot brigades” keep covering Epping (Bell Hotel) in the damn things. Yes the protests are still happening. I’m half Scottish and can’t see what’s so great about Chinese flags celebrating a Roman Soldier born in what is now Turkey, of Greek parentage, adopted as a saint by Crusaders in 1400s and supplanting the homegrown Saint Edmund.
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“I like 15 squared’s international community where people are equal, wherever they come from or are living. When people disclose those things voluntarily it’s usually in the context of vocabulary in the crossword, and it does add some extra little thrill to learn something new either about the commenter, or the word. It’s more personal and interactive.
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Óne of the problems with this is there are many expats living in many countries. Do you identify where you were born, what citizenship you have, or where you are living?
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I don’t like identifying with flags at any time. I don’t like the nationalism, and some of us don’t identify with our nation’s flags. “
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I like the idea.
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I don’t see the point. Posters can already make it clear of they want to.
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Personally, I think it will make the page messier and the headings more crowded. And it could create more opportunity for disagreement, even on a largely civilised site. If you have had hordes beating at your door requesting this, fair enough, but if it’s just one person, can’t we stick with ‘if it ain’t broke …’
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If you’d asked me a year ago, I might have thought it quite a fun idea, but the immigrant haters have recently and regrettably turned the Union flag into something rather toxic.
“The context of FifteenSquared is wordplay. Pictures may be distracting and do not add much information. If it’s important to some posters, they already can (and do) refer to their location as part of their username. This need not be national.
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Imagine the politicisation – how many Ukrainian flags would be flying ‘in suppot’, or Israeli, or European Union?”
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This is unnecessary. Please don’t do it.
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One flag only
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No
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I think I’ve seen enough flags recently. Especially English ones!
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Too much unnecessary nationalistic identification these days
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Perhaps there is some confusion here between nationality and country of residence? My nationality, British, isn’t even listed. And why are England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales listed? These are not self-governing states, but constituent parts of the United Kingdom. What is the purpose of having a country designation? If it is to indicate where the posting in question is being made, what has nationality to do with it? If it is to provide an excuse for unfamiliarity with the meanings of some of the words used in the crossword because they are British, will that put a stop to the frequent complaints of that nature which appear from some commentators? I very much doubt it, although I do wish that comments of that sort could be banned, given that the crosswords in question are British.
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Could be a bit contentious…
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I’m really not fussed either way about this, as long as it’s voluntary. I don’t want to be forced to scroll through a drop-down menu each time I want to make a comment.
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The site works perfectly well without any extra bells and whistles.
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Please no! I don’t think any possible benefits outweigh the possible downsides. 15squared is generally very civil. Nationality on social media is part of the rage and ranting. Please save us from that. I have seen it destroy other forums. Eternal vigilance 🙂
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The flags add bit of color to the page, that’s nice.
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I don’t like patriotism and flags just invite division. Plus you judge even if you don’t mean to. If people feel a strong need they can add their flag in their avatar.
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Too much emphasis on flags in our world.
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I think it would be fun to see how global this community is.
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no
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I like this idea very much.
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Because it’s optional, I strongly support the proposal.
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Flags are poisoning political discourse all over the world. No more flags please.
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In favour as long as it’s optional
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thanks for the maintaining blog and keep up the good work!
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I think if nationality is relevant to problems with a clue people usually mention it. I wouldn’t like this site to get too political e.g. people on opposite sides in a war – and there are plenty going on atm – might get into a slanging match.
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Include St Piran’s flag please.
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What on earth is the relevance of our country to comments on a crossword? None.
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I would have thought location was more appropriate than nationality. I would have answered Wales to location.
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I think it adds nothing to the person’s comments, and only opens a new route for potential insults.
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I’m only 60:40 against. I like the current state, that this group is defined by its love of crosswords and doesn’t need categorising by nation. Nationalism can be very divisive, though I believe our community would rise above such pettiness. Not sure there are many positives to be gained though, most will be UK or one of its nations. Would I be able to identify as Yorkshire? I know it’s not a country, although it is God’s own country, but it does have its own flag
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Wasn’t clear from the examples if Cymru/Wales would be an option. I’m happy if it is, not if it isn’t.
Thanks kenmac. I think that’s a good decision. Flags are yet another way to divide us
I really appreciate your dedication to this wonderful site
At the risk of reopening old divisions, this is more decisive than the Brexit result. So congratulations for keeping the status quo. The balance of the comments doesn’t seem to reflect the actual result, which is interesting even if I can’t pinpoint exactly why
Flag poll? What flag poll? I totally missed seeing an announcement of that!
Flag Poll
A good idea, and well done for the hard work on the outcome.
The naysayers, as so often, are more vehement than the ayes, so they get their way. The quiet majority, don’t.
Sigh.
An interesting idea, and I did vote in favour, but it does have the potential to cause unnecessary trouble and I won’t be heartbroken if it doesn’t happen. Thanks for asking us.
E.N.Boll& @5 – you probably aren’t living in the middle of at least twice weekly demonstrations accompanied by much waving of Union Jacks and England flags, as I am (and others from the comments above). We have Union Jacks and English flags flying from most lampposts, some with two flags, with regular “patriot” patrols to install them across more and more streets and to make sure the tattered Chinese-made nylon statements of “nationalism” remain there. The same patrols rip down anything they see as “unpatriotic” or left-wing and threaten anyone they see as being against this whole performance.
There is a local group trying to say that the town isn’t so unwelcoming with various efforts, all of which have been ripped down, but we are not allowed to remove the Union Jacks and England flags. The welcoming group had a banner made saying that the town is for everyone, blessed and hung on the church wall with some ceremony. The (not particularly local) “patriots” marched from their regular demonstration to rip the banner down and burn it that same night.
I may have been fairly neutral about flags a year ago. I’m not now. But I didn’t vote against, I was in the not bothered.
On a site dedicated to cryptic crosswords, it’d be a shame not to post this, and I’m kind of amazed I’m the first:
Staff sounded out opinions on standards (8)
Not my finest work, I admit.
I was in the “not bothered” group at first, so I didn’t vote.
However, on reading the comments I’m persuaded quite decidedly against the idea.
Thanks kenmac for all the work.
Shanne @7. And I wonder how many of your patriots have hung the flag upside down, as quite a few are round here.
mrpenney #.8. I like your clue, and the riff on Ken Mac’s headline. Clever.
Top marks for the flag poll pun 🙂
Nice one, mrpenney @8 🙂
I was going to try to incorporate “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it”
The right decision for many reasons. I also feel this would have added more visual clutter to the overall detriment of the site’s look and feel.
I support the decision, as I’m from a place (NI) where flags have been divisive long before the current spate of protests in England.
I found the breakdown of voters by nationality (or location) interesting in the context of arguments about non-rhotic homophones. It’s a self-selecting sample of course, but still …
Like Etu@9 I was vehemently not bothered so didn’t vote, but now I’ve read the comments above I’m persuaded it would not have been a good idea.
Well done for coming to the right decision.
Shanne @7: Gordon Bennett… I thought it was bad enough round here (Oxford outskirts) with flags on lampposts, but they seem to have been just put up and left. Your experiences of ongoing vigilante patrols and especially the tearing down of the church’s flag are… Well, I don’t really know what to say, apart from how horrible it is that things have come to this.
Let us hope for, and work towards if we can, better times.
Given where we are, “no” to flags on the site is the sensible choice.
Well said, DTS@19, I wholeheartedly concur.
As the author of this proposal I think it’s time for me to weigh in. I’ve occasionally thought how interesting it would be see at a glance the geographic spread of those contributing to this forum and so, being a programmer, I coded up a live demo for Ken to review. He was gracious enough to entertain the idea, and to put it before the community for appraisal. A denizen of the western US, I have a less-than-comprehensive understanding of the UK political and social scene, but my eyes have been opened by the comments, epitomized, I think, by Shanne’s. I would never wish Brexit redux on anyone, so I heartily concur with the decision made by Ken, to whom many thanks.
Shanne@7
I had not really been concerned one way or another on this issue but read your post this morning in horror! That his could be happening anywhere in the UK is terrifying but – in Oxford? The home of one of not just the UK’s but the world’s top universities?! Unbelievable and scarily reminiscent of another movement some 90 years ago.
Hi Coloradan @21 – I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that it was a misconceived idea. This is a global community and I always find it interesting to know where people are either coming from or have settled themselves – it enriches my enjoyment of the site – so I hope you won’t take the negative reaction as any kind of criticism of the motivation behind the proposal. Indeed, thank you for providing not just the idea but a means to implement it using your professional expertise. Seems to me that that was a great kindness. It’s just that here in the UK right now we find ourselves in a moment of particularly flag-based political angst, which is in fact a proxy for far deeper and far more unpleasant social divisions. Which of course it’s up to us as citizens to try to resolve as best we can, but I hope that might help to explain the sensitivities.
Caymancanuk @22: don’t panic (yet…)! It’s me who lives in Oxford, not Shanne. My little patch of the UK is getting just a feeble echo of the full-on grinding awfulness that is happening in Shanne’s neck of the woods and elsewhere.
Apologies Derek@#24 and Shanne@#7 I didn’t read carefully enough. I don’t know where Shanne is from but it’s still pretty horrific behaviour anywhere!
How can you have a pie chart where UK votes form one slice, but you have ALSO got England Scotland and Wales in there! so those votes are being counted twice???
The vote allowed people to select any one of UK or its four countries but not both
Coloradan @21, this suggestion just fell at a bad time. Sorry, I’m in Epping, of Bell Hotel fame.
The Bell Hotel/Motel (it’s changed names over the years) is a failing hotel that has been used to house asylum seekers waiting to be assessed on and off over the last 5 years. Families were placed there over the Covid lockdowns, single men have since been placed there from November 2022 to April 2024, and then again from April 2025. The hotel isn’t providing any support to the asylum seekers housed there, nor is the town. That support is coming from the charity, Care for Calais, church collections and support. The guys who
liveare incarcerated there used to be seen about the town occasionally, playing football on the cricket pitch opposite or wandering down to the shops, some have found their ways to the local churches. They are now fenced in and it looks like a prison. It’s situated some way out of the town and was not well used. I suspect the original building was a toll inn – when roads were privately run and financed by the tolls charged to travel on them. Currently, the old inn frontage can be seen, surrounded by more recent extensions, providing lots of motel style rooms – it’s licensed to take 138 men. There’s also private housing around the hotel either side and across Bell Common, where the protests convene – what was a very smart part of town. There were attempts to turn the use of the hotel to house asylum-seekers into a protested issue earlier, which didn’t go anywhere.What triggered these protests, and the other protests near hotels housing asylum seekers across the country, was an Ethiopian asylum seeker, Hadush Kebatu, sexually assaulting two women in the High Street of Epping on the 7th & 8th July 2025. One was a 14-year-old girl who offered him some pizza because he looked hungry. The other woman offered to help him with his CV and he touched and spoke to her inappropriately. The assaults on the teenage girl were mainly suggestive comments and putting a hand on a thigh, which meant the teenage girl put her male friend between them. But it was enough of a flashpoint to set everything off.
Since mid July we have had planned protests every Thursday and Sunday, plus extra flash protests. This week we’ve had protests on Monday and Tuesday nights so far – I suspect the extras have been a result of the District Council’s most recent attempt to appeal their case to prevent placement of migrants in this hotel through various courts. We had extra protests when Hadush Kebatu was released from Chelmsford Prison by mistake – he has since been rearrested and deported. These protests do not necessarily stay outside the hotel but often march into the town, also protesting outside the Council offices regularly. Monday’s protest saw one of the banners for the Carols on the Green, placed near the council offices, taken down – an annual event run on Christmas Eve by the Rotary Club to raise money for music provision in the local schools. The rationale I saw was that it was seen as linked to the churches and they are encouraging migrants.
Many of the protesters are coming from outside the area, very few are local – we had a group from Portsmouth recently. Another group protests outside a hotel in Cheshunt on Fridays and Epping on Thursdays and Sundays. When the police were arresting and charging protesters in July/August, about one third were from Epping, two thirds were from elsewhere. (And one of the local Epping lads was also up for viciously assaulting a neighbour who’d objected to him dealing drugs in the carpark.) In theory, the protesters are not allowed to use flares or megaphones – but I can hear the loudspeakers from where I live and what is being said is reminiscent of Enoch Powell at his most inflammatory.
The flags appeared in August, as a new phenomenon, both here and across the country, including painted red crosses on the mini-roundabouts and zebra crossings. I’m not going to link to any flag raising groups, but they exist. Our local “patriot” patrols are the Essex Spartans and the Epping Pink Ladies. But we also have self-appointed characters who have been praised in some of the local Facebook groups for taking it upon themselves to remove any “left wing” material. The Epping for Everyone group had an initiative of ribbons tied to the railings in the centre of town for months, cut down every protest, retied the next day. The local haberdashery shop was doing a roaring trade in selling ribbons for a while. There was also an Epping for Everyone banner on the church wall in the centre of town, hung on 2 November, taken down that night. (It said “Epping for Everyone” with links to social media.)
It’s affecting other things – I’m one of the adults with a Rainbow Unit that meets on Thursday nights, and we would normally have planned a walk to look at the blue plaques in town for a challenge. Currently we cannot safely risk-assess anything outside in case we walk into a protest with a dozen 5-7 year olds. It’s a multicultural unit.
miserableoldhack@23, Shanne@28: Thanks for sharpening my perspective on this. I wish godspeed to groups like Epping for Everyone, and to all those standing for tolerance and against fear-based reaction.
Thanks for taking the time to share that, Shanne. A truly appalling state of affairs.
#5 I am one of the quiet majority.. I didn’t vote at all as I rarely comment so it didn’t seem appropriate to do so . However, had I done so I would’ve voted against.
I’m in Wolverhampton and for those who know the town’s connection with Enoch Powell, I probably don’t need to say more. I live a very multicultural part of the city and there are no flags. However, as soon as I drive onto the main roads out of the town, they are everywhere. I hate them and I am ashamed of them… and unfortunately, even if they are put up with good intentions that is not the way it appears…
Shanne@#28 Thank you for sharing this – having grown up in the UK, but now living in Canada, I read of protests in this paper but had no sense of the invasive nature of the ongoing protests in Epping – and also, I believe elsewhere, believing the protests to be localized and “one-offs”. Not sure what law enforcement is doing to combat such behaviour but it sounds like not that much. It’s appalling for innocent citizens to be afraid of walking their own streets.
I enjoy your crossword blogs and send warm wishes across the Atlantic in the hope things improve – for you and others -soon – as Christine@31 says – it is truly shameful.
I have a bolthole in West Yorkshire, not all that far from where Jo Cox, the Labour MP, was murdered by a British nationalist, around the time of the utterly ineptly thought through referendum.
I did toy with the idea of putting up a European Union flag in my front garden, as a light-hearted counter to all the St George crosses, Union Jacks, and, yes, Yorkshire roses around the place, but levity – like everything else of an enlightened nature – is clearly not the weakness of today’s nationalists, and my flag would probably have been seen as an admission that a brick through my window – or perhaps just as likely – petrol through my letter box and being set ablaze would have been deserved.
So my gesture was suppressed, as I expect many, many others’ are too.
I bet all the England flags adorning lampposts were made in China!
Shanne@28 – Thank you for posting this. It’s not now really being reported in papers and the beeb. I suspect that is because what you report is awful but not now newsworthy because it’s becoming a new normal. It takes an outbreak of exceptionally nasty behaviour to make news. If stuff even remotely ike what you report being everyday in Epping were to happen here in Oxford or other quieter parts of the UK, it would be front page news.
The creeping upwards of normalised levels of nastiness is happening everywhere, I think, but you happen to have the horrible misfortune to be in a salient. I am so sorry for you, your town, and what it might come to for you and for all of us.
A Union Flag has been put up (by an outsider linked to one of the “patriot” groups) in the last few days on a lamp-post by the little green and playground here. FB posts in the local group show that nobody here wants it. FB posts in groups where the Flag-hoister is a member are (a) egging on more of the same and (b) just horrible.
What is really awful is that while I think (hope) that this little corner of a website devoted to a gentle minority hobby is a safe space to discuss this, I would think twice about expressing my opinions anywhere very public in a way that meant I could be identified.