There is an uncomfortable historical fact for today’s self-styled flag patriots: the law being used to remove flags from lampposts and other public highway structures was enacted by a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher.
The Highways Act 1980, which received Royal Assent on 13 November 1980 and came into force on 1 January 1981, contains the legal provisions that make attaching flags to highway structures without permission an offence.
But there is an important detail. The Act did not specifically set out to ban flags. It was a major consolidation of existing highways legislation, bringing together the Highways Acts 1959 to 1971 and related laws. The Thatcher government inherited and consolidated a legal framework that already restricted unauthorised attachments to public highways.
Section 132 is the crucial provision.
It states that anyone who, without the consent of the relevant highway authority, statutory authorisation or a reasonable excuse, “paints or otherwise inscribes or affixes” a picture, letter, sign or other mark on the highway or on a tree, structure or works on or in a highway commits an offence.
That is why a privately owned Union Flag hanging outside somebody’s house is one thing, while somebody attaching a Union Flag to a council-owned lamppost is quite another.
The distinction matters enormously.
A lamppost is not a public flagpole simply because it stands in a public place. Highway authorities control the infrastructure, and the law gives them powers to remove unauthorised material attached to it.
Indeed, section 132(2) expressly gives the highway authority power to remove unauthorised pictures, signs and other marks. The courts have now confirmed that the provision applies to flags attached to highway structures. In a major 2026 High Court case involving Oxfordshire County Council, Mr Justice Julian Goose stated that attaching flags to highway structures without the necessary consent can constitute a criminal offence under section 132.
So when flag campaigners portray councils removing unauthorised flags as some kind of modern assault on patriotism, there is a rather large historical problem with that argument.
This isn’t a new Labour rule. It isn’t a woke council invention. And it isn’t a law dreamed up to stop Union Flags being displayed.
The legislation dates back to the Thatcher era.
And the irony becomes even sharper when some of the loudest advocates of supposedly traditional British values appear to object to the very principle of property rights and lawful authority that the legislation protects.
People are perfectly entitled to fly the Union Flag, St George’s Cross or any other lawful flag on property where they have the right to do so.
What they are not automatically entitled to do is turn public infrastructure into their own flagpoles.
The government’s guidance on flag flying makes the same distinction: flags must have the permission of the owner of the site, which includes the highway authority where highway land is involved.
There is therefore a delicious historical twist to the current flag controversy.
Those demanding that councils “respect Britain” might want to start by respecting one of Britain’s most basic principles: the law applies to everyone, including people waving the Union Flag.
The Highways Act 1980 wasn’t created by today’s political opponents of the flag. It was passed under a Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher.
And while it did not specifically outlaw “flagging”, it established — by consolidating and continuing existing highways law — the legal framework under which attaching a flag to a public highway structure without permission is an offence.
For anyone claiming that removing an unauthorised flag from a lamppost is somehow anti-British, the historical record offers a rather awkward answer:
The law says otherwise and it has done so since the Thatcher era.
