A push to permanently fly the flag of Great Britain in Sandhurst has been rejected.
The Memorial Park in Sandhurst stretches across 69 acres and has a community hall, which is the home of the town council.
Councillor John Edwards has celebrated people raising national flags on broadcast media as a ‘patriotic outpouring’, but acknowledged concerns about flags being put up on highways without permission.
He therefore submitted a motion stating that the council should install a second flagpole in the Memorial Park to ensure that, in a military town like Sandhurst, the Union Flag is proudly visible to all as a national symbol of unity, identity, community and duty.
The motion was discussed at a meeting of the council’s strategy & policy committee yesterday (Thursday, September 25).
Cllr Edwards (Independent, Owlsmoor) said: “Imagine driving through Sandhurst as a stranger.
“You go, oh, driving through the home of the Royal Military Academy, and there’s not one Union flag up.
“I think it’d be really great to pull it off because what does our flag stand for? It stands for freedom and democracy.
“We fought fascists in World War II. We ended slavery.
“It’s actually not divisive. It’s a way to include and accommodate everyone’s views and to signal what the flag represents. I think it’d be a crying shame if we didn’t have one outside our council offices.”
However, fellow councillors did not agree with the idea of a second flag being installed.
Cllr Graham Birch (Conservative, Little Sandhurst) said: “I’ve actually found recent times quite challenging, particularly in the way that our national flag is viewed. And I think that the Union Jack should be a symbol of hope and unity. And I think it should be of us all standing together. You know, we are Britain. All of us, everyone who is a British citizen and it should be, you know, uniting us.
“However, I will say that I’m not in favour if it is a divisive symbol, if it’s for political gain. That’s certainly not what I think the flag should ever, ever be seen as. It is something for us all of all shapes and sizes to stand behind. ”
He added that having two flag poles “wouldn’t work.”
His father, cllr Dale Birch (Conservative, Little Sandhurst) said: “Do we need another flag pole? And why has it happened right now?
“I find it uncomfortable that this debate is going on in the context of a number of organisations who are seeking to use our flag as some sort of obscene motto with a divisive nature, and I think that’s wrong.
“When I see these flags flying at half mast I get mad!
“I don’t think there are enough people getting behind the true purpose of having a flag.
“And it’s not to send a quasi or even direct political messages because somebody isn’t happy with something that the government is or is not doing?
“That’s not what it’s there for.
“We need to raise the Union flag on the flagpole that we’ve got at the appropriate times.”
Cllr Michael Brossard (Conservative, Central Sandurst) supported a second flag being installed, while arguing that the current Green Flag award should be retained.
He said: “We’ve won it and we have won it fairly and squarely because of the quality of the memorial park and we deserve that.
“And I think it’s important that flag should remain in place to recognise the hard work that is done by the council employees.”
A substantive motion by cllr Dale Birch to not install a second flagpole was approved with cllr Brossard voting against it and cllr Graham Birch abstaining.
