Oxford’s EU flag sends out the wrong message to applicants

As I walked through central Oxford at the weekend, an unfamiliar sight greeted me from the top of one of the university’s central buildings: the flag of the European Union had found its way amongst the spires. It fluttered gently in the breeze on the Clarendon Building, only yards from the Bodleian Library in the heart of the city.

The flag’s arrival looked like a statement. After all, it is not customary for the university to represent a political entity on its flagpoles. At a time of continued debate across the country, the flag has been widely read as the university taking a stance on an ongoing and fractious national discussion.

When I contacted the university, I was told that the flag also represented the Council of Europe and that there had been requests from students for it to fly for Europe Day. Yet it has never appeared in previous years, so why now? The unprecedented nature of this move – and its timing at a moment of considerable uncertainty around the future of UK-EU relations – mean it has inevitably been taken as a political comment on the Brexit debate.