Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,
Britain’s largest local authority has spent a year treating the Union Flag and the St George’s Cross as a public-order problem. On Saturday the picture sharpened again: the legal squeeze now circulating around Birmingham’s flag war is being described as a ban aimed at England and the United Kingdom, while other national colours keep their place in the city’s official life.
Birmingham City Council has gone to the High Court to stop “unauthorised attachments” on the highway. Breach of an injunction of this kind can mean unlimited fines and up to two years in prison.
The people named in the papers are the campaigners who put British flags on lampposts. But the council still finds time to raise other nations’ flags outside the town hall and light the city library in foreign colours. To top it all off, they have reportedly confirmed that anyone raising foreign flags will be exempt from the new ban.
On 26 August the council submitted its application to the High Court. The named respondents include Raise the Colours co-founder Ryan Bridge, Elliott Stanley, Julian Keane, Ross Child, Billy Allison, Ben Cullen, Mark Keating and “persons unknown.”
The catch-all clause is the point. If a judge grants the order, it is not only the named men who are in the frame. Anyone who keeps putting flags on lamp columns, railings or other street furniture without permission can be pulled into contempt proceedings.
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 officers have “witnessed incidents that have involved harassment, intimidation or obstruction during removal activity.”
That is the official script. The record of the last twelve months tells a different story about which flags trigger the machinery of the state.
Raise the Colours started in the Birmingham area last summer and spread across England. Thousands of St George’s Crosses and Union Flags went up on lampposts, roundabouts and bridges. The council answered with safety language: attachments on tall columns, risk to motorists, LED upgrades, highways law. Flags twenty-five feet in the air became a danger to life.
Bridge has not offered the council the surrender it wants. On Talk TV he said he would keep going. “100% I will be carrying on. If I go to jail for it, so be it.”
Times columnist Matthew Syed, sitting with Kevin O’Sullivan, refused to treat the flag as a social contaminant. “I believe in the flag, I believe in the nation,” he said. “I think that if you don’t have a strong sense of nationhood, it’s very difficult to do anything.” He further argued that without a coherent nation, you get caste, clan and tribe. You do not get a country that can function.
Former Metropolitan Police detective Peter Bleksley called the jail threat “absolutely scandalous.” The Free Speech Union called it “truly mental.” Reform UK’s Birmingham group leader, councillor Jex Parkin, said: “It is extraordinary that we have reached a point where people peacefully displaying the Union Flag or St George’s Cross could potentially find themselves before the courts, with breach of any eventual injunction carrying extremely serious consequences, including imprisonment.”
He added: “The Union Flag and St George’s Cross belong to everybody in this country. They should unite us, not divide us.”
Conservative group leader councillor Robert Alden said the flags are “a unifying force celebrating our shared culture and heritage” and called on the council to enable formal neighbourhood displays instead of dragging patriots into court.
The phrase that is repeated ad nauseam in Birmingham is “community cohesion,” yet it was not the governing principle when other flags were raised in the street.
For months after October 7 2023, Palestinian flags flew from lampposts in parts of the city. Nearly a third of Birmingham’s residents are Muslim. The council did not race to the High Court. A leaked internal message from cabinet member Majid Mahmood, reported in 2025, explained the real constraint. On Palestine flags he wrote: “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.”
Reform UK’s Robert Jenrick commented, “It is ridiculous that the council is taking down England flags and Union flags while Palestine flags are allowed to remain,” adding “It’s blatant two-tier bias against the British people.”
Foreign colours get to stay, yet the national flag is treated as an attachment to be litigated out of existence.
The hypocrisy is not confined to protest banners. It is civic policy.
In July the Somali flag was raised outside Birmingham Council House in Victoria Square, with civic representatives present. The Library of Birmingham was lit blue and white for the occasion.
Reform UK’s Birmingham group put the contrast in writing: “Only weeks ago the Somali flag was officially raised outside Birmingham Council House with civic representatives present. Earlier this month the Pakistan flag was raised outside the Council House at a ceremony hosted by the Lord Mayor.”
“There is something badly wrong,” the group said, “if Birmingham City Council can proudly accommodate the national flags of countries around the world while people are made to feel that displaying the Union Flag or St George’s Cross is somehow provocative.”
The same authority now determined to strip British flags from the streets has been happy to fly the Somali flag from the civic building itself.
The library routine is now a seasonal fixture. Green and white for Pakistan Independence Day. Orange, white and green for India. The same council that scrambles to criminalise British flags will bathe a landmark in another country’s colours overnight.
Jamaica has had the same civic courtesy. Footage from Council House shows the Jamaican flag raised for independence day on the same steps now being used to lecture English residents about cohesion.
Last year a Pakistani flag flew over the central square.
They’re seemingly happy to fly any flag at all, except for British ones. Why is that?
Here’s why…
What happened to diversity being a good thing?
Councillor Alan Feeney, the Conservative shadow cabinet member for city services, said the obvious thing the cabinet will not. “This simply is not a priority for residents. Birmingham has an ongoing bin strike, roads filled with potholes and travellers breaking onto parks across the city, costing the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of pounds. The council’s focus should be on dealing with these issues, not taking down flags that were placed as a symbol of national pride.”
Labour’s remaining voice on the council, group leader Nicky Brennan, offered the opposing theology: “We cannot allow a small group of people to attempt to divide the communities of Birmingham.”
The communities he is referring to claim to be divided by the English flag. They are apparently knitted together by the Somali flag on the Council House and a library washed in the colours of Islamabad.
Birmingham is the prize because it is huge, broke, and demographically transformed. Almost a third Muslim. Large Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi and Somali populations. A political class that has learned to speak the language of cohesion while practising a hierarchy of flags.
The enforcement now taking shape singles out England and the UK while other countries’ colours remain in the clear.
A nation that will jail a man for the Cross of St George, and light a library for Pakistan, has told its own people where they stand.
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