‘Our children are being indoctrinated by the left wing’ while No. 10 in North is ‘disgusting’:  Operation Raise the Colours’ founder rages after High Court rejects flag campaign

Ryan Bridge, founder of Operation Raise the Colours, the online campaign to display national flags in public spaces, has reacted furiously after the High Court backed Oxfordshire County Council’s decision to stop people attaching flags to roadside lampposts.

Oxfordshire County Council recently secured a High Court injunction preventing people from fastening flags to lampposts across the county. The Liberal Democrat-led authority argued that the practice created road safety hazards while also amounting to trespass and obstruction. Breaching the injunction could result in the seizure of assets, unlimited fines or even imprisonment.

The ruling follows a sustained campaign of intimidation directed at council staff. During proceedings, the judge heard that employees had been advised to check their vehicles for tracking devices after harassment linked to the dispute, while one worker’s home address was published online. Three individuals associated with Operation Raise the Colours were also warned by the court not to engage in any future flag-related activity.

Oxfordshire County Council has made clear that it continues to fly both the Union Flag and the St George’s Cross at County Hall and fully supports residents displaying flags on their own property. The case was about unauthorised installations on public infrastructure, not banning national flags.

That distinction, however, was largely absent from the predictable outrage that followed.

The Express declared that a ‘woke’ council had ‘banned’ St George’s and Union flags, despite the court ruling being about where they could be displayed rather than whether they could be flown at all. To reinforce that framing, the newspaper turned to the founder of Operation Raise the Colours.

Bridge told the Express: “This is the country we’re living in. This is the woke, middle-class, liberal, left agenda and, in places like Oxford, Cambridge, and Brighton, which are heavily occupied by people from the university education sector, we feel that our children are being indoctrinated by the left wing. This is where it’s happening.

“These people are getting rules and regulations for their own little world.”

His comments quickly moved beyond flags altogether.

Asked whether he believed Andy Burnham was patriotic, whether he could see the new Prime Minister hoisting a flag himself. Bridge said:

“I do, but I think he would do it for purposes of trying to get people onboard, just like he says ‘I’m one of the people, I’ll speak to the people’ and all this malarkey.

“I think it’s all one big cover. I am disgusted that he has got a Number 10 of the north. I think that’s disgusting.”

He went on to claim that Britain’s traditions  like Downing Street and Buckingham Palace, were being eroded “because of people like Burnham.”

What began as a legal dispute over attaching flags to street lamps rapidly became, in Bridge’s view, evidence that Britain’s children are being indoctrinated, universities are driving a liberal takeover and devolved political institutions somehow threaten Buckingham Palace and Downing Street.

Needless to say, embedded with the article is one of the Express’s familiar reader polls asking whether English towns should fly more St George’s flags.

The verdict, it seems, had already been written.