Metro, Wednesday 12 August 2026
The Reform UK-run council in Wakefield has admitted it will cost "hundreds of pounds" to remove each St George and Union flag attached to lampposts as part of a social media campaign. Council cabinet member for highways Keith Anderson blamed "a world of the Health and Safety Executive" for the high removal cost, which council taxpayers will have to fund.
Putting a flag on a lamppost costs almost nothing and takes a few minutes with a ladder. Taking it down safely, under the regulations the council itself is required to follow, costs "hundreds of pounds" per flag, and that bill lands on the same taxpayers who did not put them up. The asymmetry is the whole story: signalling something is cheap, demonstrating a responsible outcome afterwards is not, and a council that campaigned on cutting waste is now explaining why removing a lamppost decoration needs specialist contractors.
Blaming the Health and Safety Executive is the easiest available move once that gap opens up, an unnamed external body absorbing responsibility for a cost the council will actually have to pay. Whether the regulation is reasonable is a separate question. What matters here is the pattern the manuscript describes, in which an institution's capacity to announce and signal consistently outpaces its capacity to actually deliver a clean outcome afterwards.
The flags went up as a signal. Taking them down, safely and lawfully, was never going to be free, and the council that benefited politically from the first half of that sequence is now the one presenting the bill for the second.
Institutions therefore become increasingly skilled at signalling intention while remaining far less capable of demonstrating outcomes.The Performance of Obedience, Ch. 14
This entry treats a council's admission that removing flags will cost far more than putting them up as a small, self-contained instance of the manuscript's account of institutions that can signal cheaply but only demonstrate outcomes at far greater expense.