“I’m incredibly patriotic,” says Ross, “I love our flag.”

He’s pulling a trailer loaded with England flags, otherwise known as the flag of St George, and Union flags, while his friends carry a ladder.

They’re heading out to fly flags from lamp posts in his hometown, Lichfield.

We’re here to spend an evening with them – keen to understand why flags are appearing on streets across England and what people make of it.

As the flags go up, several passing drivers beep and shout their support.

But it isn’t long before a man and woman walk past, visibly annoyed.

“Shameful behaviour,” the woman tells the group.

One of Ross’s group calls back: “Why can’t you be proud?”

“I am proud, but we’re absolutely tripping over from patriotism to an overt display of nationalism,” the man replies.

“There have been many occasions throughout history where the British flag has been adopted by groups that I don’t agree with”.

It’s a tense moment.

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I ask Ross, 27, if the flying of the flags is timed to coincide with concerns about immigration.

“Yes,” he replies. “My personal stance on it is, yes, this is us saying ‘you’re in our country’, right?

“This is what we stand for, you bow to this flag how we do, right, and you shouldn’t be doing illegal things, and for example, raping the women and committing crimes, which we don’t agree with.”

He tells me some of the handful of people he’s with went to the same school as him. But Octavia, the only woman in their group, only met them recently.

“She bumped into us the other day, and now she’s a full-fledged flagger,” Ross says.

Octavia, 27, lifts her jumper to reveal she’s wearing an England flag dress.

“I saw him putting up the flags and I genuinely wondered why,” she says.

“He kind of explained to me, like, we’re protecting people of Britain, we are spreading awareness, that is literally all, and I was really happy to get involved”.

As the next flag is being put up, a man walks past and breaks into song.

“No surrender, no surrender, no surrender to the boats coming over,” he sings.

Ross, filming him, thanks him for his “performance”.

Many opinions but few solutions for debate that crosses dividing lines

Becky Johnson

Social Affairs correspondent

@BeckyJohnsonSky

Over the course of an evening in Lichfield, we struggled to find anyone who didn’t have an opinion on the flags appearing around the town.

Yet we did find people who were reticent to speak on camera, particularly those opposed to the flags being there.

This is a town where around 93% of residents were born in England, according to the census in 2021.

Unlike many British towns and cities, there is little visible evidence of the mass migration this country has experienced in recent decades.

Octavia, the newest recruit to the group of “flaggers” we met, grew up in Leicester, where just under 58% of people were born in England.

After meeting people opposed to the flags in Lichfield, she told me “they’re wealthy, they live in a nice area, they don’t actually have to go through the struggles that everybody else does”.

She then revealed her opposition to migrant hotels is in part because she was once at risk of homelessness and didn’t get state support.

But from what we saw, it would be wrong to conclude that there are obvious dividing lines in this debate.

On both sides, there were people from a range of different backgrounds, young and old.

Some see a display of pure patriotism. To others, it’s blatant nationalism that has to stop.

But in these uneasy times, the removal of any flags has been seized on as a political act that has sparked anger in communities.

A woman sees it all happen and tells us her husband has written to the council to ask for the flags to be removed.

She’s unhappy about how it may make the town feel for some people.

But she doesn’t want to go on camera – or even have her words recorded.

I ask Ross about his political views.

He says he doesn’t belong to any party, but he tells me he supports Tommy Robinson – and had been with him the previous evening.

He got the flags they’re putting up from him.

Further down the street, we meet Bob. He’s just out for dinner. We get talking about the flags.

“It’s not a racist thing just to be wanting to look after your people,” Ross tells him.

Bob agrees, but is concerned about why flags are going up now.

Tap here to see the full line-up for Sky News’ The Immigration Debate

“It’s become quite extreme,” he says. I ask if he thinks the flag is being used as a racist symbol. “100% yeah, I do,” he says.

But an elderly couple over the road completely disagrees with him. “Of course, we support St George’s flag, we’re British,” the woman says.

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“There’s nothing wrong with showing the English flag,” her husband agrees.

It’s hard to find anyone who doesn’t have a view on the flags appearing around the town. We leave Lichfield with a sense that they’re provoking strong feelings on both sides of a very live national debate.

A rape victim was arrested by police as she desperately tried to track down her Tinder attacker who faked his own death and fled the UK, Sky News can reveal.

Warning: This article contains details that some readers may find distressing.

“Elle”, who is retaining her legal right to anonymity, was molested within 15 minutes of meeting James Clacher for the first time.

Speaking exclusively to Sky News, Elle told of how she came “face-to-face with evil” as she described Clacher as a “monster”.

Clacher, 57, was last week – with help from a tip-off to Sky News – found guilty of the violent rape of Elle in 2019 and a second woman in 2020.

In May 2022, while waiting to stand trial, the former gym boss staged his own death and fled from Scotland to Spain in a bid to evade justice.

Five months later, Elle was arrested at her family home by uniformed officers and later charged in connection with offences under the Communications Act 2003.

The mother was detained in custody for several hours and appeared in court the following month, accused of harassing Clacher’s family.

When questioned by Sky News whether she did harass Clacher’s family, Elle denied the allegation, saying she was “absolutely desperate” for justice.

She said: “I was trying to find where my rapist was.

“I was trying to find where he was, and so I was contacting anybody that I thought might have an awareness of where he could be.”

During Clacher’s trial at the High Court in Glasgow, jurors heard how Elle had posted messages on Facebook and contacted his family and friends, accusing him of being a “rapist” and them of “supporting a rapist”.

It is understood the messages went as far back as November 2020, before he disappeared. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) later dropped the case.

Speaking about her treatment by Police Scotland, Elle said: “I think it is an utter disgrace what they did to me.”

Elle is now considering lodging a complaint.

She said: “I have something ongoing.”

When asked about Elle’s arrest in October 2022, Police Scotland confirmed she was charged in connection with offences under the Communications Act 2003 and a report was submitted to the procurator fiscal.

Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay, the MSP for West Scotland, provided support to Elle after she was arrested.

He told Sky News: “For a rape victim to be arrested, charged and threatened with criminal prosecution in connection with the fake disappearance of her attacker is shocking and concerning.

“When I first spoke with Elle, she was understandably worried and confused about the risk of prosecution.

“Having been proven to be entirely correct about this rapist’s disappearing act, she has shown incredible resilience to secure justice.

“I was happy to provide the Crown Office with these critical background details and was relieved when common sense prevailed, with the threat of prosecution being dropped.

“Her horrific ordeal is further evidence of how crime victims are so often badly treated by the Scottish justice system, contrary to the frequent PR platitudes of SNP politicians.”

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Clacher raped Elle at her home in Troon, South Ayrshire, on 24 August 2019.

Elle said moments after telling her Tinder date to “make himself comfortable” while she finished getting ready for their night out, she was pushed against a wall and brutally assaulted.

She was then further abused after being pushed upstairs while in a state of “shock”.

Elle said: “I don’t even know what was going through my mind – everything just left. I just remember shaking and crying and saying, ‘I don’t want to do this and I don’t like this’.

“And he just ignored me.”

Elle spoke to police following her attack, but did not make an official complaint until she discovered he had raped a second woman he had met on dating app Bumble in Glasgow in 2020.

Elle said she was forced to accept that Clacher was a “monster” who was “choosing to hurt women”.

She said: “Oh, he’s an absolute fiend. He’s a monster. I came face-to-face with evil that day, but it took me a long time to realise it.

“It wasn’t until I’d heard that he had done it to someone else that I really had to confront it.”

Clacher disappeared while facing the two rape charges. He vanished on the day he was due to be interviewed by police over two new historical sex offence allegations.

He abandoned his Suzuki Swift at the Loch Long car park and picnic area in Argyll and Bute, and left a suicide note intimating he intended to take his own life.

Clacher blamed Elle, stating that she “will never stop until I’m dead, or I’m in prison”.

Elle said: “It’s true, yes. I didn’t want him dead – I wanted him caught.”

In November 2023, Sky News received a tip-off from a reader in response to a Police Scotland appeal in the hunt for Clacher.

The information passed on to the force pinpointed the fugitive’s location to the southern Spanish town of Nerja, right down to the Time Sport gym he frequented.

Six months later, and almost two years to the day he vanished, Clacher was arrested by the Spanish Civil Guard while working out on a beach in the Costa del Sol town.

He reportedly told a police officer on his extradition flight back to Scotland that he “survived on berries and puddle water” in the wild while initially on the run.

On his fake suicide, Elle said: “I didn’t believe that he was dead at all.

“I just believe that he was too arrogant and too cocky to think that he would ever be caught.”

Sky News visited Nerja ahead of Clacher’s trial.

Clacher, who went by the alias “Johnny Wilson”, was said to have been in a relationship with a local woman, was employed as a gardener at a residential complex, and earned extra cash by running yoga classes on the beach.

Elle said she “wasn’t really surprised” Clacher managed to embed himself in the Nerja community “because he does have that charm”.

On his arrest abroad, Elle said: “It was a huge relief because those two years he was missing all I could think was, ‘who else has he hurt?’

“That was one of the strongest motivations for me to have him found.”

Discussing how the attack has changed her life, Elle said: “It’s affected my life in so many ways.”

The anxious mother has erected a 6ft fence and gate around her house and has installed CCTV. She also remains on medication to help stave off panic attacks.

She added: “I barely leave my house. And it’s made some relationships difficult.”

While giving evidence at Clacher’s trial, Elle told jurors that she did not flee from her home following the rape attack in fear her “son might not have a mother right now”.

She told Sky News there was a “possibility” she could have been murdered.

Elle does not believe she is Clacher’s first victim and suspects there are others out there.

She said: “It was so quick, it was something that I knew that this was something he was extremely proficient in.”

When asked about how she can move on from the brutal attack, Elle said: “I don’t know yet. I’m still trying to work through that.”

Clacher is due to be sentenced next month.

Britain has “fallen out of love with the future” and is “out of whack” on free speech, former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has warned.

The ex-Liberal Democrat leader, who was David Cameron’s second-in-command during the coalition of 2010-2015, said the country was suffering from a sense of “underlying grumpiness”.

Following last summer’s riots, the implementation of the Online Safety Act, and this year’s protests outside asylum hotels and in support of the now-banned group Palestine Action, the government has been accused of cracking down on freedom of speech.

Speaking to Sky’s Wilfred Frost on his The Master Investor Podcast, Mr Clegg said the UK needed to “think long and hard” about “whether we’ve overdone it”.

“When I’ve looked at some of the examples, I thought to myself, ‘yeah, that’s really unpleasant speech or egregious speech’,” he said.

“But really, surely part of the definition of being in a free society is people say ghastly things, offensive things, awful things, ugly things, and we don’t sweep them under the carpet.”

He added: “I do think the balance [on free speech] is out of whack here.”

It comes as the police watchdog called for a more “common sense” approach to policing, telling Sky News there should be a clear difference between “what is offensive and what is criminal”.

Sir Andy Cooke hit out after the wide condemnation of comedy writer Graham Linehan’s arrest, publicly, by five armed officers for tweeting messages about trans issues, which allegedly incited violence.

Mr Clegg lost his seat at the 2015 general election and went on to join Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, where he became largely responsible for efforts to enhance moderation standards and improve the company’s image.

He quit as head of global affairs in January ahead of Donald Trump’s return as US president.

Defending the austerity policies pursued by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, Mr Clegg claimed Britain’s recovery from the 2008 financial crisis had been “messed up” by Brexit – and that, compared to the US, the economy had struggled to bounce back from the pandemic.

But America won’t have things all its own way in the years ahead, he suggested, as he makes China the favourites to win the artificial intelligence race.

“I don’t believe that America is going to beat China in this AI race in the way that they appear to imagine they might. I think China is far, far too powerful and technologically gifted and adept to be sort of treated like that,” he said.

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Mr Clegg’s former employer is just one of several US tech giants investing massively in AI. Others include OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, and Google, which is behind the Gemini chatbot.

China’s DeepSeek made headlines in the West earlier this year after releasing a ChatGPT-like AI model that performed faster – and more cheaply – than its rivals.

Mr Clegg said while he was “a little sceptical about some of the hype” around so-called artificial general intelligence, which experts say could match or surpass humans, competition between the US and China would be intense.

Nick Clegg was speaking on The Master Investor Podcast with Wilfred Frost, available to watch in full here and listen here.