Peter Whittle wants to see schools displaying national flag as well as fewer languages spoken in the classroom

Schools should be encouraged to fly the union jack to help “reassert” Britishness, Ukip’s culture spokesman has suggested.

Peter Whittle, a senior party official and long-term critic of multiculturalism, said he would like to see schools displaying the national flag as well as fewer languages spoken in the classroom to promote a sense of common identity.

Speaking to the Guardian, Whittle stopped short of endorsing the idea that Britain should adopt the approach of many US schools whose children perform a pledge of allegiance to the American flag each morning. However, he said he would like to see the UK develop a culture more like the US, where people are “united under an overarching sense of being American”.

“I think Cameron once said we don’t do flags. I think that’s a romantic idea, but I think it’s out of date,” Whittle, a former Conservative parliamentary candidate, said. “The position has changed and the problems we face are different now.

“For example, I would like to encourage schools to display the union jack. The time has come when we have got to draw together and reassert who we are. I don’t know about the anthem necessarily, but I would certainly like to see the union jack in schools. That’s not Ukip policy, that’s just what I would like to see.

“It is something that in America does make a difference. The old idea that the British don’t proclaim all of this stuff was born of another time, rather a patriarchal one you could say actually … I think the Tory romantic idea [about not flying flags] is that this is all a bit vulgar and beneath the salt.”

He also opposed having too many languages spoken by children in the classroom and praised a Labour mayor who cut council-funded translation materials and foreign newspapers in libraries to promote integration.

“Only very recently, it was put forward that there are so many different languages in our schools and isn’t it a wonderful thing? Well, I see that as: how can you say that is wonderful? I see that as a barrier to social progress and a barrier to social cohesion.

“There has been an emphasis too much on keeping people in separate boxes and keeping them apart,” he said.

The idea of flag-flying in schools was previously proposed by former Conservative leadership candidate Liam Fox in 2005, but this was attacked by Labour as “nationalism in class” and parties in Scotland and Wales objected.

Whittle is the founder of the New Culture Forum thinktank, which challenges what it perceives as the dominance of the “liberal left” in British culture.

In the aftermath of the Paris terror attacks against a satirical magazine, police officers and a kosher supermarket, he argued there was an “insidious” self-censoring in the arts and media when it came to criticising Islam and multiculturalism.