Birmingham City Council recruits night staff to remove ‘unauthorised flags’

No luck sorting out the bin strike going on for 6+ months, but they have money for this?

>Council leader John Cotton had previously issued a plea to flaggers to stop adding more.

>He said last month: “I want to be absolutely clear with with all of your readers. I do not have any problem with people displaying their patriotism.

>”I’m proud of my British, English and Birmingham identity.

>”I absolutely recognise the importance of the Union flag and the flag of St George as symbols of national pride.”

>But he urged people to desist from sticking them up on the highways: “In Birmingham you’re absolutely free to, and we welcome, the flying of the flag on your own property.

>”But please desist from placing flags on street furniture or anywhere else.

>”There are health and safety obligations we have to ensure, as the highways authority, are respected.”

I’m sympathetic to the health & safety argument, if I’m honest. If only from a liability perspective – if one of them falls off and lands on someone’s windscreen, the council are going to get slaughtered for not ensuring that roads are safe.

But I can’t see why they’re taking the worst route out of this. Surely the best response would be “we love the flags, but we need to make sure that they’re safe, so we’re going to go around and secure them properly”. I can’t believe that there would be a significant cost difference between sending a man up in a cherry-picker to remove it, and sending a man up in a cherry-picker to secure it. Might be the extra cost of some cable-ties or whatever method the council use when they themselves hang some flags up, admittedly – but surely the majority of the cost is going to be the labour and the hire of the cherry-picker, which will be the same either way?

It would be a big PR win for them, and avoid a future row – because fundamentally, the people putting these flags up *want* them taken down, because they will use that as proof that the council are anti-British. And what’s really going to screw them is they take down the Union flags and St George’s Cross, and then someone finds a Palestinean flag up on a street somewhere – because the council will absolutely be accused of using health & safety as an excuse at that point, and having a two-tier approach to waving flags.

I know a lot of people on this sub eyerolled at the health and safety reasoning but tbh it seems fairly genuine. There’s a shedload of these up around my area of brum, and it’s been stormy these last few weeks- a lot are tattered, and as they were cheap flimsy temu jobbies a bunch have torn free on one corner and are hanging by a single cable-tie now. One of the most heavily flagged-up roads is very busy every morning and runs past several schools and nurseries, I keep worrying one’s going to break loose and temporarily blind a motorist.

China probably loving the influx of flag shaggers buying flags

I actually like the flags as I drive around Brum- particularly when I’m going to/from the airport on some of the longer roads.

The ones int he picutre actualy look pretty decent TBF. I’ve seen plenty that are an accident waiting to happen.

Might be a shrewd way out of the backlash. Note a few of the better examples and keep them.

We can be obtuse about this flag business if we want, but we should admit that it’s some weird kind of racist “claiming” of space. That’s why hanging or spray-painting St. George’s flags all over the place suddenly emerged as the thing to do.

If you disagree, then would you be okay with it if Muslims suddenly started hanging up or spray-painting the crescent-And-star, or other Islamic symbols, all over the place like this? I suspect people on this sub would suddenly become a lot more suspicious if that were the case.

If the safety concerns are that the flags that are flying are low quality and come down. Why doesn’t our government show solidarity and provide high quality flags and safely fit them up so we don’t have this whole kerfuffle of putting them up and ripping them down. Which is only causing more division.

They are implicitly authorized by virtue of being displayed in the country they’re the flag for.

Am not saying where but other authorities have done this and there’s been issues when they’ve done removal missions at like 3AM. It’s everything that sums up the state of this country right now. With Birmingham’s financial difficulties – that’s an entirely separate issue. Most of the Councils I have some degree of work exposure to are looking to remove them at some point (about 80% of the ones I’ve awareness of) but there’s no fixed timescale that they are going to do it over. On a basic level section 132 of the Highways Act 1980 violation.

Council should leave them up and get the people that put them up to remove them when they look a mess.
Areas where they didn’t want them local residents already took them down anyway.

Can they do this in Kent please? Not everyone in this county is flagshagging moron

What a colossal waste of money. This is the last thing they should be focused on. Birmingham is in dire straits! How incompetent or petty are the people in charge??