Red, white and blue

Kent County Council is now led by Reform - the nationalists who started out as the Brexit Party. So why are they putting EU flags on their road signs?

There has been a bit of a surge in flags appearing on roads in general lately. Not many of them have been EU flags - the Union Jack and St George’s Cross have been the ones making appearances nationwide.

It started with flags being hung from lamp posts. Whole streets have been adorned this way by people taking direct action - buying a job lot of plastic flags online and climbing ladders to hang them wherever there’s a suitable post. To some this is a display of national pride, and to others it’s jingoistic marking of territory, but whatever your view it’s been inescapable in recent weeks.

Also seen across England has been the spraying of St George’s crosses on mini roundabouts, the white paint providing a tempting canvas for the quick addition of two red lines. At least one has turned up in Wales in what might be some very misguided bandwagon-jumping.

The mini roundabout fad is slightly stranger than the flag thing; it’s hard to think that anyone who wants to show pride in their community would think the best way to do it is to spray two wobbly red lines on a road junction - but it’s not graffiti to everyone.

Anyway, against the backdrop of English towns turning red, white and blue is an odd development in Kent. In May this year, Reform took control of Kent County Council. Reform started out as the Brexit Party and are, at their heart, Eurosceptic nationalists with an anti-immigration agenda, though it remains to be seen how much they can do about any of that at a county council level where the typical concerns are potholes, bin collections and social care.

To date they have not made any policy announcements on transport, but that doesn’t mean the council has been doing nothing. Over the summer they requested permission from the DfT to place the EU flag on road signs, and on 18 August, under Traffic Sign Authorisation 5318, permission was granted.

You have probably guessed that this has nothing to do with affection for the EU and everything to do with the Port of Dover. Plus, to tell the whole story, National Highways will also be putting up a fair number of EU flags , and both highway authorities are now authorised to place Union Jacks on road signs too.

The gateway to Europe

Kent’s problem (and perhaps one reason its residents have decided to give Reform a go at running their council) is that it is the UK’s closest point to the European mainland. Freight, tourists, business travellers and migrants all pass through in great numbers, meaning the county is always at the forefront of whatever is happening with cross-border travel. And since 2016 there’s been no end of developments on that front.

The latest is the EU’s Entry Exit System (EES), which is a change to the way EU countries handle visitors from non-EU countries entering the Schengen Zone, with the aim of making it easier to track people entering and leaving. There is a 90-day visa-free period for visitors which at present is very hard to enforce using passport stamps.

From Sunday 12 October, when you enter the Schengen area you will scan your passport and then have your photograph and fingerprints taken. Once that is done you’re covered for the next three years, but of course right now nobody has had it done and everyone crossing the Channel will have to do the full procedure, which will take extra time.

The UK has three “juxtaposed” border facilities, meaning places where you do the French border check before leaving the UK. One is the Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, which is fine: everyone there is on foot, they just need two queues at passport control, one for EU nationals who are exempt and the other for UK nationals (and other non-EU residents) who need to undergo the new EES checks.

The other two juxtaposed facilities are the Port of Dover and the Channel Tunnel terminal, and this is where Kent’s new signs come in. The queueing systems there are queueing systems for cars, and that means new road signs to try and get drivers in the right line before they reach the passport control booths.

Raising the flag

The new system uses the two flags as symbols that drivers are told to follow.

A sign on the approach to Dover tells you that EU nationals should follow the EU flag and everyone else should follow the Union Jack (since most non-EU nationals will be British). Signs into the port then use those flags to send the two streams of traffic in different directions to get everyone to the right passport check.

There is still scope for confusion here, of course - without grasping what the symbols mean, you might imagine that you follow the EU flag to get to Europe, which is not the plan. But in the circumstances there isn’t really any completely obvious and intuitive symbol that could be used in its place.

Business as usual?

It’s slightly amusing to think that one of the UK’s new Reform-led councils is, in one of its only changes to transport policy to date, putting up EU flags. But this peculiar little episode is more interesting for what it tells us about transport policy in general.

EU flags are, it should be abundantly clear, not appearing because Reform have a majority on the council - this is not happening for political reasons at all. It would be happening no matter who was in charge. The request for permission to put flags on road signs was jointly made by Kent County Council and National Highways, who have been working together on this plan for some time - probably since before May.

Rather, it is happening because engineers and officers of the council have been studying a novel problem and have come up with a rational plan to solve it.

So one thing this demonstrates rather neatly is that good transport planning leans more on engineering than politics. Whoever is in charge of Kent County Council, the same officers and engineers staff the transport department, which is just as it should be. Politics have not got in the way.

So with that in mind, we welcome Kent’s new EU flag road signs, and the fact that they represent a rational engineering approach to highway management in a world where a rational approach to anything feels like a rare thing. And for the same reason, we can’t see any of the county’s mini-roundabouts being repainted in similar fashion any time soon.