Britain’s largest local authority has gone to the High Court to stop people hanging the Union Flag and the St George’s Cross from lampposts, with campaigners warning that a breach could mean up to two years behind bars.
Birmingham City Council filed the application this week as the latest move in a year-long war on “unauthorised attachments.” The attachments in question are the flags of the country. The penalties being threatened include prison, unlimited fines, and seized assets.
Protesters who fly the Union Jack from lampposts could criminal proceedings if the injunction is granted.
BREAKING: Protesters who fly the Union Jack from lampposts could face two years in jail after Birmingham Council applied for an injunction. @PeterBleksley: "It's absolutely scandalous!"@TVKev pic.twitter.com/XExfsblLcR
— Talk (@TalkTV) August 26, 2026
Former Metropolitan Police detective Peter Bleksley called it what it is. “It’s absolutely scandalous!”
The Free Speech Union described the move as “truly mental.”
A year ago the same city was already ripping the colours down and calling it safety. Residents put them back up. The council has now decided a High Court order is the way to finish the job.
On 26 August the council announced it had submitted an injunction application “as part of our ongoing work to prohibit unauthorised attachments on the highway, including flags and banners.”
Green councillor Jane Baston, cabinet member for equalities, communities and social justice, said: “The Council is taking a lawful, proportionate and evidence-led approach to unauthorised attachments on the highway. This includes pursuing injunctive action based on the evidence gathered to date.”
She added: “Our priority is to protect public safety, staff and contractor welfare, community cohesion and the responsible use of public funds. We ask residents and community groups to support this approach and to ensure any displays are placed only where permission exists.”
The authority insists the action “is not directed at any particular community, belief or viewpoint.” It says the installation and reinstallation of flags has had an impact on the public, and that officers have “witnessed incidents that have involved harassment, intimidation or obstruction during removal activity.”
The named targets give the game away. The application lists Raise the Colours co-founder Ryan Bridge, plus others associated with the campaign. Raise the Colours said it had not received or reviewed the papers and could not comment on the application. The group rejected “any suggestion that we are seeking to divide communities,” and describes itself as a “grassroots movement for unity and patriotism.”
The nationwide campaign by the group to put the England flag back on the street is widely reported to have started in Birmingham last summer. The council spent the following year treating that campaign as a highways nuisance. Now it wants a judge to make the nuisance a city-wide prohibition.
Anti-flag campaigners in the city have been lobbying for exactly this. Brummies United Against Racism and Hate Crime applauded the legal bid, spoke of “thuggish behaviour,” and framed the flags as an attempt to “harass and intimidate residents of our proudly multicultural city.”
So the national flag is an attachment. Opposition to it is cohesion. And a bankrupt council that spent more than a year failing to collect the bins has found the money and the energy to take patriotism to the Royal Courts of Justice.
Birmingham is taking a page from the book of Liberal Democrat-run Oxfordshire County Council, who won the first injunction of its kind, barring unidentified people from attaching England or Union flags to highway structures or painting flag imagery on roads.
Council leader Tim Bearder celebrated. “This is a welcome judgement. We’re very pleased with the result,” he said, adding: “This sets a legal precedent and will hopefully deter people in not just Oxfordshire but around the country from partaking in this criminal activity.”
He described those putting the flags up as “very challenging people, not patriots.”
Oxfordshire spent about £80,000 taking flags down and another £40,000 on lawyers, costs it said it intended to recover. Staff removing flags were said to have faced hostility so serious that some were told to wear face coverings and check vehicles for tracking devices after a worker’s home address was published.
The judge said maintenance teams had been “working in fear,” that people directed by the council had been obstructed “to the extent that at times they have simply given up on the removal,” and that there was “little prospect absent an injunction that it will stop.”
The order does not stop flags on private property. Oxfordshire still flies the Union Flag and the St George’s Cross at County Hall. Bearder has repeated that the case “is not, and never has been, about the flag,” and that Raise the Colours’ conduct was “nothing to do with national pride or with support for the England team during the World Cup.”
If it was never about the flag, the council would not have needed a High Court order aimed at the flag. If it was never about patriotism, Bearder would not have needed to announce that the people doing it were “not patriots.”
Long before any judge got involved, town halls were already spending public money to erase the colours from the street.
Freedom of Information requests to hundreds of local authorities showed councils had spent at least £70,000 removing Union Jacks and St George’s Crosses from lampposts and street fixtures. The true figure was higher. Many authorities folded the work into existing budgets and reported nothing.
Medway Council alone spent close to £11,600 taking down more than 700 flags. Labour councillor Alex Paterson, who oversaw community safety there, called it “money well spent” to combat “far-right agitators” and to “make the community feel safe again.”
He told the BBC: “I think at this stage the world is divided into people who know exactly why these flags were put up and those who are still pretending they don’t know why they were put up.”
Left-wing activist Pablo O’Hana, who sent some of the FoI requests, was filmed pulling flags off a Manchester bridge. He told the man who had put them up that he took them down because “that’s not what our country is.”
That is the official mind in a sentence. The country is not allowed to look like the country.
The same pattern produced a small masterpiece of modern administration in Essex. Staff were offered emotional support if they felt “discomforted” by the national flag on road signs, bridges and trees.
An internal note said: “While these symbols may hold different meanings for different people, we recognise that for many – particularly our colleagues of colour – they can evoke feelings of discomfort and be associated with anti-immigration rhetoric.”
Senior leaders invited anyone “feeling unsettled or affected by what you’re seeing” to speak to managers, “Global Majority Leads,” an assistant director or the director. The Union Flag and the St George’s Cross still flew outside headquarters. The problem was not the flag on the civic pole. The problem was the flag in the community.
Nigel Farage, as an Essex MP, called the council “totally out of touch with the county.” Lord Maurice Glasman put the priority list in one line: “You get mugged and your bag nicked and that’s nothing to do with them, but you put a flag up and it’s suddenly an issue.” Former Attorney General Sir Michael Ellis said: “This is two-tier. The council won’t fix a pothole but worry about this.”
Local jobsworths did not invent the idea that the Union Flag is a social hazard. A leaked draft of the government’s “social cohesion” strategy did the theological work for them.
The document claimed national symbols were sometimes used to “exclude or intimidate,” and that the “extreme right has tried to turn symbols of pride into tools of hate.” Flying the English, Scottish and Union flags was folded into a story of hate rather than belonging.
The 47-page draft, Protecting What Matters, leaked to The Spectator, sketched hundreds of millions of pounds for areas where cohesion was “under pressure,” a special representative to tackle hostility directed at Muslims, and a new definition of Islamophobia.
Reform UK’s Richard Tice’s verdict on the flag passage was blunt: “Absurdly, this says our national flag is a tool of hate used to intimidate. The whole paper is a divisive nonsense that should be consigned to the bin.”
A Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government spokesperson said only: “We do not comment on leaks.”
There is a word for the official twitch. Vexillophobia: fear of the flag. Not a clinical diagnosis. A political allergy. A country that treats the St George’s Cross or the Union flag as an act of aggression while other political colours are treated as inclusion.
The same institutions had no comparable panic when other flags owned the street. Palestinian colours hung from Birmingham lampposts for months. A leaked 2025 email from cabinet member Majid Mahmood, reported by the Mail, said of those Palestine flags: “We are taking these down, but we need the support of the police due to issues that have cropped (up) when we first tried to take them down.”
Conservative opposition leader Cllr Robert Alden called the contrast “completely disgraceful,” adding “Frankly, for the last two years, the council has made little effort to remove Palestine flags and now, suddenly, residents are putting up the Union Jack and St George’s Cross and they’re saying it’s a health and safety risk — it’s madness.”
Robert Jenrick called it “blatant two-tier bias against the British people.”
The World Cup made the double standard impossible to miss. Councils warned that English flags might upset “community cohesion.” Bristol talked about remaining “welcoming, respectful and safe for everyone during the tournament.” English people, in England, were told to mute their own colours in case someone else took offence.
Other authorities joined the queue. Portsmouth, Cheshire, Bristol, Oxford: flags painted off roundabouts, taken off street furniture, treated as a fire risk or an inclusivity problem, while other political symbols stayed put.
Raise the Colours did not come out of a vacuum. It followed years of mass immigration, grooming scandals, and taxpayer-funded hotels for people who arrived illegally. The official response was not to fix the conditions that produced the flags. It was to pathologise the flags.
Section 132 of the Highways Act already lets a council cut an unauthorised sign off a lamp column. What Oxfordshire wanted, and what Birmingham now wants, is something sharper: a civil injunction against the entire country, enforced by contempt of court.
An authority that needs a High Court order to keep the national flag off a lamppost is one whose officials are more frightened of displays of national pride than of the declining conditions that produced the trend in the first place.
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