{"id":66272,"date":"2026-06-19T08:01:20","date_gmt":"2026-06-19T08:01:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/66272\/"},"modified":"2026-06-19T08:01:20","modified_gmt":"2026-06-19T08:01:20","slug":"flag-row-oxfordshire-councillor-scolds-authority-after-imposing-high-court-ban","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/66272\/","title":{"rendered":"Flag row: Oxfordshire councillor scolds authority after imposing High Court ban"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"\">A Tory councillor at Oxfordshire County Council has hit out at his authority for launching a High Court bid to ban the display of UK flags.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to GB News, Liam Walker declared the council is &#8220;clearly offended by our flag&#8221; as he expressed strong opposition to the move.<\/p>\n<p>Oxfordshire County Council has applied for an injunction to block <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gbnews.com\/news\/flag-row-britons-union-flags-raise-the-colours-attacked-locals-punched-kicked\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">the Raise the Colours group<\/a> from hanging the flag in a bid to &#8220;protect&#8221; its residents and &#8220;values&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>A spokesman for the council claimed the &#8220;ongoing scale and persistence of the behaviour by Raise the Colours&#8221; has created &#8220;safety risks, caused distress within communities, and led to abuse and intimidation directed at council teams and residents&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Delivering his verdict on the bid, Mr Walker told GB News that their timing &#8220;couldn&#8217;t be any more wrong&#8221; as the country celebrates the start of the World Cup.<\/p>\n<p>He said: &#8220;Well, they&#8217;re clearly offended by our national flag. The World Cup has started, England had a cracking game last night, and the council&#8217;s first move now is to look at this High Court injunction to get people to remove them from lampposts.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Their timing couldn&#8217;t be any more wrong, and the money they&#8217;re going to spend, it&#8217;s costing about \u00a345 per flag to send crews out in the cover of darkness, to start removing flags from lampposts.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The councillor argued the main issue affecting locals is the state of potholes, not people putting up flags.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" id=\"53840\" data-rm-shortcode-id=\"2f73db5f68d9bf8d8ba26ca50caf5291\" data-rm-shortcode-name=\"rebelmouse-image\" class=\"rm-shortcode rm-lazyloadable-image \" lazy-loadable=\"true\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg'%20viewBox='0%200%201280%20720'%3E%3C\/svg%3E\" data-runner-src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/liam-walker-flags.jpg\" width=\"1280\" height=\"720\" alt=\"Liam Walker, flags\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Oxfordshire councillor Liam Walker has hit out the authority for launching a High Court ban on flag displays<\/p>\n<p> | <\/p>\n<p>GB NEWS \/ PA<\/p>\n<p>He told GB News: &#8220;Anyone who comes to Oxford will tell you, what about the potholes? When are you gonna get the potholes fixed? <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;That&#8217;s where the priorities and that&#8217;s where the funding should be spent, not pulling down our flag from lampposts.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As host Martin Daubney highlighted that there has been no injunction to remove &#8220;Ukraine, Palestine or Pride flags&#8221;, Mr Walker declared their protest has been &#8220;selective&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>He said: &#8220;They&#8217;re certainly very selective, aren&#8217;t they? And I think the problem is with this whole debate on our flag is it becomes that sort of left versus right. <\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" id=\"1e37d\" data-rm-shortcode-id=\"cf86d173be1e099664590a84b66e7545\" data-rm-shortcode-name=\"rebelmouse-image\" class=\"rm-shortcode rm-lazyloadable-image \" lazy-loadable=\"true\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg'%20viewBox='0%200%205000%203333'%3E%3C\/svg%3E\" data-runner-src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/english-and-british-flags-flying-from-lampposts.jpg\" width=\"5000\" height=\"3333\" alt=\"English and British flags flying from lampposts\"\/>Oxfordshire County Council has placed an injunction, complaining about &#8216;safety risks, intimidation and distress linked to this activity&#8217; | GETTY<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And actually, you can&#8217;t just be a normal British person that&#8217;s actually just proud of our country and proud of our heritage and proud of our flag, which you can be.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The councillor stated that any crimes committed with flags should be &#8220;for the police to investigate&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>He said: &#8220;I&#8217;ve been very cautious to stay away from that sort of racism row, because I don&#8217;t believe that is the case. And where there are examples of crimes tht have been committed, that&#8217;s for the police to investigate, not for the council to start imposing rules. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I was in a town yesterday and saw two kids stop on their push bike and put an England flag on a road sign, the sort of people that the Lib Dems, Oxford County Council are now going to be taking to court. I think the timing is terrible.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" id=\"9a0d6\" data-rm-shortcode-id=\"fed9ab2d651af4dfd187ab1fc494be9d\" data-rm-shortcode-name=\"rebelmouse-image\" class=\"rm-shortcode rm-lazyloadable-image \" lazy-loadable=\"true\" src=\"data:image\/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20xmlns='http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg'%20viewBox='0%200%201920%201080'%3E%3C\/svg%3E\" data-runner-src=\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/liam-walker.png\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1080\" alt=\"Liam Walker\"\/><\/p>\n<p>Mr Walker told GB News that the council should &#8216;get a grip&#8217; and &#8216;spend the money on services that residents care about&#8217;<\/p>\n<p> | <\/p>\n<p>GB NEWS<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think that this is a sort of a lefty Oxford residents complaining to the Lib Dems about it. I think they need to get a grip, fix the potholes and spend our money on the services that actually residents care about.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Tim Bearder, leader of Oxfordshire County Council, said in a statement: &#8220;This application is about protecting our residents, our workforce and the values we stand for as a county. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are proud of Oxfordshire diverse communities and of our Council of Sanctuary status.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We will proudly fly the Union Flag and Saint George&#8217;s Flags at County Hall, and we fully support the right of residents to display flags on private property of their own.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Tory councillor at Oxfordshire County Council has hit out at his authority for launching a High Court&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66273,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[4],"tags":[380,31081,18,14,1634,547,5,20,6,1633],"class_list":["post-66272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uk","tag-across-the-uk","tag-martin-daubney","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-shows","tag-south-east","tag-uk","tag-uk-politics","tag-united-kingdom","tag-video-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116775726768923258","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66272\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}