"Yay Women's Rugby" or something like that?
I can't get over all the wide eyed fake naivety of "what do you mean its been used as a racist symbol? This has never happened before!".
My area of Wales was the first place the Welsh flags started popping up as part of this "operation raise the colours" (something like that), and the general reaction from normal people was "oh no, they're trying to make it like the English flag".
It's a very predictable pattern. The English flag was associated with a lot of general violence and thuggery which slid into xenophobic / racist violence over time, largely because it was perpetuated by people draped in England flags or wearing England football shirts and that image stuck.
Then, because that image has stuck, those same people complain "you can't fly an English flag these days or you get called racist / a thug". Normally reasonable people then start to think "well, you know, they've got a point - why can't we put our flags up without being called racist or thugs?".
Meanwhile, the people shouting the loudest are forcing the association between the flag and racist / thug behaviour by graffiting the flag in places or accompanying it with slogans of "stop the boats" or "go back home". They create the link between the rhetoric and the flags, but when people take the flags down, it's "they want us to stop waving our flags! They want to take away our national identity!".
It's a very deliberate attempt to covertly link the flag to views ranging from concerns about immigration to outright racial hatred, because the two then become intertwined. You can't then challenge the views, because then you're criticised for hating the flag. It's a very useful shield for cowards.