Pride flag bans are spreading across England – and there’s more at stake than just flags

Author: Nick Baldwin

For years, every June, the Pride flag flew outside Enfield Civic Centre in north London. This June, it didn’t. The borough’s new Conservative administration has adopted a policy of flying only the Union Flag, the Flag of St George, and the Enfield Beast. It made an exception, days later, for the Armed Forces Day flag.

I grew up in Enfield and attended school across the road from the Civic Centre, so this decision hit me surprisingly hard. But I’m well aware that Enfield is only the latest council to do something like this.

In June, Reform UK-run Havering became the first London borough to cancel its annual Pride flag-raising ceremony, days before it was due to take place. In Derbyshire, Reform councillors banned Pride flags following a complaint from a Christian bookshop owner, shortly after reintroducing Christian prayers to council meetings on the basis that the UK is a ‘Christian country’. 

In St Helens, the council’s new leadership ordered officers to cease all engagement with the town’s Pride celebrations and, according to the town’s MP, instructed libraries to remove references to Pride. Similarly in Essex, 74 libraries were told to scale back LGBT+ content and Pride events. (The blanket wording in the Essex order, targeting ‘any particular groups or themes’, has also impacted the library’s support groups for widows, dementia patients, and elderly people wanting IT support.)

Last month in Cambridgeshire, a Pride flag was removed from Huntingdonshire District Council’s headquarters over a planning technicality, in a row during which a councillor linked the flag to paedophilia – a baseless and vile smear, rightly condemned by the council’s own chair. And now the bans have spread beyond Reform-run councils to a Conservative one, defended in the same language of ‘clarity’, ‘consistency’, and flags that ‘represent everyone’.

I won’t spend long on that justification because it doesn’t merit it. A council that flies a special flag for the Armed Forces, as Enfield rightly did, has already accepted that recognising one community takes nothing from any other. The ‘neutrality’ argument is a paper-thin pretence, and everyone on both sides of the debate knows it. What is actually happening is that visible support for LGBT+ people is being deliberately withdrawn, and dressed up in the language of flagpoles and planning consent.

Fanning the flames

Why does a flag matter so much? Because of the world it flies in.

Even excluding London’s Metropolitan Police (whose figures could not be counted this year), Home Office statistics record 18,702 hate crimes against people because of their sexual orientation in England and Wales in the year to March 2025, and 3,809 against trans people.

Despite modest falls in the last two years, those figures remain roughly 20% higher (for lesbian, gay, and bi people) and 50% higher (for trans people) compared with five years ago, with the sharpest surge coming in 2021–22 – a rise the Home Office said may have been fuelled by online debate about transgender issues. 

Galop, the LGBT+ anti-abuse charity, saw a 60% increase in hate crime victims and survivors coming to it for support between 2023 and 2024. This is what years of escalating homophobic and transphobic commentary online looks like when it arrives in the offline world: in a shove on the night bus, a slur outside the school gates, a brick through a window.

Imported hate: US-funded Christian Nationalism

And it is not only statistics. Last October, a Christian Nationalist group calling itself the ‘King’s Army’ marched in military formation through Soho, the heart of London’s LGBT+ community, chanting at passers-by in a deliberate display of intimidation. Humanists UK has been raising the alarm about rising Christian Nationalism funded by US anti-human rights groups for some time. 

Religious groups with deep pockets, buoyed by cultural and political ascendancy in the United States, have deliberately exported a ‘MAGA-style’ politics, grounded in an extreme form of Christian theology, which is explicit about wanting to roll back LGBT+ rights, women’s reproductive freedoms, and other hard-won freedoms secured by progressive campaigners and humanists in the 20th and 21st centuries. Recently, the movement has also found willing amplifiers in British public life, including a handful of MPs and home-grown billionaires.

Seen against that backdrop, Pride bans stop looking like quirks of local politics and start looking like part of a wider effort to push LGBT+ people back to the margins. For decades, the UK built a broad consensus, across the major parties, most religious groups, and the overwhelming majority of non-religious people, that LGBT+ people are equal citizens whose inclusion is a basic British civic value, not a contested opinion. What some cultural conservatives are now attempting is to unpick that consensus: to recast Pride not as a civic norm but as a ‘political’ or ‘ideological’ position, something a council may reasonably decline to be associated with. First, the flag becomes ‘divisive’. Then it becomes comparable to the vilest things imaginable. 

We have seen where this road goes in other countries, recently including Poland, where dozens of local authorities declared themselves ‘LGBT-Free Zones’ until the EU intervened, and Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. We also remember, some of us personally, how things used to be in this country.

Symbols matter. That is precisely why they are being targeted. A Pride flag on a town hall never housed anyone or fixed a pothole, but it told every LGBT+ resident that their council saw them as part of the community it serves. 

This is not about any one party. LGBT+ people, like humanists, belong to every party and none, and councillors from across the political spectrum – including many conservatives – have defended these flags. It is about a choice now facing every council in Britain: whether inclusion remains a shared civic value, or becomes another front in somebody else’s culture war.

So make your voice heard. Sign the Humanists UK petition to stop councillors banning Pride. Write to your councillors and tell them what that flag means to you or to someone you love. The people taking these flags down are counting on the rest of us to shrug. Instead, we should take inspiration from the pioneers who fought for Pride decades ago.

---