The St. George’s Cross is the national flag of England (Image: Peter Carruthers via Getty Images)
A shocking video has emerged showing a heated confrontation between two men after one of them tore down a Union Jack and St George’s Cross flag from a footbridge.
Pablo O’Hana, 31, decided to remove the flags from a footbridge over the A34 in Manchester, claiming they were being used as ‘messages of intimidation’ to instil fear in people.
The political advisor, who has previously worked on Kamala Harris’s US presidential campaign and for the Liberal Democrats, spotted the flags on Wednesday, August 27.
Without any scissors at hand, he decided to take the flags off the bridge and put them into his bag when he was confronted by a man who claimed to have just put them up.
The video captures the man questioning, “I had the George flag and the British flag up there, you’ve not took them down, have you?”.
Pablo then confesses to the man that he did indeed take them down, stating: “Because that’s not what our country is, mate” when asked why he did it.
The man then demands the return of the flags – but Pablo, who has stashed the flags in his rucksack, tells the man that he left them on top of the footbridge.
He then quickly cycles away after the man, who has started to climb up the stairs, realises the flags aren’t there and starts to run back down.
Reflecting on the incident, Pablo said: “I was cycling to the gym, I saw them and I thought ‘I’ve f***ing had enough of this.
“I’m really just sick to the back teeth of all of this s*** everywhere, I carried my bike up.
“Because I didn’t know they were going to be there, I didn’t have any scissors so I ripped the England flag off, because I don’t really give a s*** about that.
“I’m a big Eurovision fan, I host a huge Eurovision party each year, so I thought a Union Flag could be kind of handy.
“I spent about two minutes trying to untangle the Union Flag really carefully so I didn’t rip it.
“As I was walking down, either the guy had literally just put them up, or he’d put them up and was sitting in the pub watching.
“The bridge is just in front of a pub called The Gateway and there are quite a lot of glass windows, so I don’t know if he was just in there watching.
“He came to confront me, I could see him as I was coming down the stairs, I was going slow as I was carrying my bike.
“I was thinking I could tell what it was going to be, because he looked really angry.”
Following the confrontation, Pablo rushed off on his bicycle to escape from the man who had begun to descend the stairs once more.
He added: “I stopped recording as he started running after me. He started coming back down the stairs.
“I told him the flags were up there, but they were not, they were in my bag.
“The very end of the video where I zoom in on him, he’s half to three-quarters of the way up and I think then he sees the flags are not actually up there.
“At that point I thought ‘I actually can’t be bothered getting in to a physical fight about this’, I’ve done what I think is right.
“I then cycled off and he began running down the stairs.
“I never saw him again because I was focussed on not slamming in to a car.
“He attempted to come after me but it wasn’t particularly successful.
“It was quite wild.”
Pablo, who has previously penned an opinion piece where he claims to be an ‘unashamed patriot’ and has urged the left to ’embrace the flag’, says he removed the flags as they were displayed for the wrong reasons.
He continued: “I was torn – I didn’t want to pull down our country’s flag, but I thought ‘I don’t see myself as pulling down a flag right now’.
“If the World Cup was on, or Eurovision was on, or Russia had only just invaded Ukraine, then those are moments you can say ‘OK, I’m proud of my country.'”.
“There were times when I was living in America, such as when Zelenskyy was in the White House and then he went to meet the Prime Minister and the king, I was tearing up I was so proud of our country.
“Living in America and seeing the way Trump treated Zelenskyy and then seeing our country do the right thing over and over again, that’s a moment you go ‘I’m f***ing proud of my country’, I should be allowed to fly the flag and no-one’s going to accuse me of being racist.
“But right now, you’re not pulling down flags – they’re messages of intimidation.
“They are designed to make people feel scared, to be intimidated, to stoke fear.
“It’s just a prop for that, for bullying and making people feel uncomfortable.
“As I say, I’m very proud of our country and I’ll proudly fly the flag, but not when it’s deliberately designed to make people uncomfortable.
“At that point I just think you can get to f***, our country’s better than that, that isn’t who we are.”