After Friday prayers last week, Mahmooda Syedain and her husband went shopping for flags, specifically the national flag of Scotland, the blue and white cross of St Andrew.

The community activist lives in Falkirk, a former iron and steel town midway between Glasgow and Edinburgh where unemployment is rising, and where an anonymous two-floor building tucked behind the local Lidl store has become the focus of the largest asylum hotel protests in Scotland.

In recent weeks the blue and white Saltire has appeared flying high on lamp-posts around Falkirk and elsewhere across Scotland, from Maryhill and Tollcross in Glasgow to Peterhead and Aberdeen in the north-east.

In a direct parallel with the Operation Raise the Colours movement which has co-opted the St George’s cross in England, ownership of the saltire has become a new cultural and political battleground in Scotland.

This sudden appropriation of Scotland’s national flag to promote anti-immigration activism has shocked politicians, particularly Scottish nationalists. Until now, the saltire was associated with pro-independence marches through city centres where billowing saltires were carried aloft, or the national football and rugby teams.

And so last Saturday, Syedain draped the saltires she had bought over some crowd barriers as she joined counter-protesters outside the Cladhan hotel, which houses about 90 asylum seekers.

“We were doing it to reclaim our flag,” she says. “In England the St George’s flag has always been associated with the far right. In Scotland it’s more complicated.

“Some people thought it was about the women’s rugby, and others thought it was to do with the independence movement. The conversation we need to have as a community is: what is your motivation for flying the saltire in Falkirk right now?”

John Swinney, Scotland’s nationalist first minister, was quick to challenge the flag’s use by the right in a pro-independence speech on Thursday. “Our saltire is a flag of welcome – and refugees are welcome here,” he said. “The saltire belongs to the people of Scotland,” he told reporters afterwards, “and it’s always been perceived as a flag of welcome, of solidarity and sanctuary”.

But the meaning of the saltire is contested.

When Bob Doris, a Scottish National party MSP for Maryhill in Glasgow, where the flags appeared overnight on lamp-posts, accused the far right of “hi-jacking” the saltire, a community group responded: “The flags were not put up by far right – it was some of your own supporters and friends.”

“The truth is that the flags were put up as a signal to politicians, like you, to start listening to concerns in your constituency,” wrote the organiser of the local Facebook group No1seems2care.

“You have wrongly linked the saltire flags in your area with the far right and in doing so you have attached a perception of shame to those who display it. You didn’t do that in [the independence referendum of] 2014 or at your elections Bob.”

The guerilla flag-flying is endorsed by a loose network of Facebook groups such as this one, which highlight failing public services and escalating household bills. Another, the Tartan Team, which raised flags overnight in a handful of north Glasgow suburbs, said: “Immigration isn’t a problem with us. That’s why it’s a saltire – to let the SNP know it’s our flag not theirs.” The anger of those protesting outside hotels should instead “be directed at politicians and councillors who have dodged the main issues this country faces for too long”.

As in England, for many the flag signifies their demands to put local people first. But council workers tasked with removing them have faced abuse, with officials in one local authority, Aberdeenshire, asking for police protection.

The group coordinating protests against the Cladhan, Save our Futures and Our Kids’ Futures, say they were galvanised by the rape of a local teenager by an Afghan asylum seeker.

Sadeq Nikzad, 29, was jailed for nine years in June after attacking a 15-year-old girl in Falkirk town centre in October 2023. The group, which also raises concerns about wider public safety, lack of council transparency and digital ID, has been supported by a local Reform councillor while a number of far-right activists have been identified at their protests.

An investigation by the Ferret website found that far-right groups such as the Homeland party, Britain First and Patriotic Alternative have attended similar demonstrations across Scotland this summer, prompting claims they are exploiting concerns over asylum seeker housing to stoke racial tensions.

John Swinney argues that public anger is fuelled by the poverty and social damage caused by the economic austerity introduced by the Conservative UK government more than a decade ago, and then Brexit. “Far too many people are struggling to get by,” he said on Thursday. “Years of flat-lining living standards have taken their toll.”

Yet the “utterly chilling” anti-immigration language being widely used by politicians at Westminster was energising those behind the surge in protests, he said. “Politicians calling for mass deportations. They demand that we pull out of international human rights treaties.

“No one seems to be ringing the alarm bell. Well I am.”

Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar faced personal racist attacks by Nigel Farage in the Hamilton byelection earlier this year, in which his party triumph over the SNP in Reform’s most significant electoral showing thus far in Scotland with 26% of the vote.

Earlier this week he dismissed Farage as “a chancer who doesn’t understand Scotland”, adding he could “understand those Scots, that are considering Reform, often feel a genuine sense of hopelessness” and promising to build support “based on like-minded individuals who want to challenge those noisy minorities, whether it’s the SNP or Reform and Farage”.

Last summer, people of colour living in Scotland warned against complacency after the country escaped the chain reaction of racist violence across England and Northern Ireland set off by the horrific Southport killings last July.

They suggested a combination of inhibiting factors, including there being proportionally fewer black and ethnic minority citizens living there and, until recently, the broad political and media consensus that migration was of benefit given Scotland’s significant demographic challenges.

A year later, the landscape is very different, with recent polling for More in Common suggesting that Reform was neck and neck with Scottish Labour in voting intention for next May’s Scottish parliament election. Immigration appears to be a top concern for Scottish voters for the first time and the Scottish government is facing a refugee crisis in Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city.

Last week, Farage described Glasgow as the “asylum capital” of the UK – it has the highest number of asylum seekers measured by local authority – and tried to link this with an increase in reports of sexual assault in the city. Rape Crisis Scotland immediately responded that there is “absolutely no evidence” to substantiate this correlation.

But the city council has been warning for months that homeless refugees are putting “unprecedented pressure” on services.

Stronger housing rights brought in by the Scottish government, such as a statutory duty to accommodate single adult males, has seen a sharp increase in those applying to homelessness services coming from elsewhere in Scotland and the UK. Combined with the UK government’s accelerated asylum processing, which has left many newly recognised refugees homeless, the cost to the city has soared to tens of millions. This week Susan Aitken, Glasgow’s council leader, said things were at “breaking point”.

Colin Macfarlane, of the Scottish Refugee Council, disputes the narrative that Glasgow is considered a “soft touch” by refugees. “There are many reasons a person may choose to live here, such as finding established communities, having family already settled here or access to resources.

“It is incorrect to suggest homelessness provision in Glasgow is ‘better’ or ‘softer’ than anywhere else in Scotland. In fact, it currently takes on average two weeks for a person who has become street homeless to enter accommodation.”

Glasgow has a strong tradition of welcoming refugees. For supporters of immigration, this was encapsulated by the protests on Kenmure Street in Glasgow’s southside when vast crowds prevented immigration enforcement officers from detaining two asylum seekers in May 2021, forcing their release.

Now the mood on the streets is shifting says Tabassum Niamat, a community activist based in the same area. She said the communities she works with, in particular those visibly Muslim women who cover their hair or faces in public, are reporting a rise in micro-aggressions such as staring, verbal and sometimes physical aggression.

“There’s a sense in the air that things are ready to explode; this brewing tension all around. You feel the anger, even in the way people look at you now. People are getting sworn at in the streets, and those who are most vulnerable, people for whom English is not their first language, children, women, the elderly, are getting targeted. Day in, day out it’s getting worse.”