Birmingham has been a Labour city for the past 14 years – but come 7 May, that could all change.
A difficult national backdrop, with the party slumping in the national polls, has collided with a unique set of circumstances in Birmingham – where bin strikes and bankruptcy have created a picture of a city in decline.
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Rubbish still lines the streets of the inner wards of this city. Children play in debris, and residents despair at the level of fly-tipping in some areas – with warnings against doing this often ignored.
One man I spoke to told me how he erected a fence around a pile of rubbish that was building up to stop it overflowing into the roads. People complained of multiple residents living in one home – houses of multiple occupation – as a reason why rubbish was accumulating at such a rapid pace.
I was shocked that these were the streets of Britain’s second city and that people were living in these conditions.
One resident in the Alum Rock area of the city – where the bin issue is particularly acute – told us about the scale of the problems on his road.
“The street is disgusting now,” he said.
“Look at the bins. There is drug dealing everywhere in our road. There is a parking problem; our children can’t walk – they hold their noses when they are walking.”
Birmingham ‘suffered’ from Tory cuts
Having seen these scenes for myself, I asked John Cotton, Labour’s leader on Birmingham Council, what he felt when he observed parts of his city.
He acknowledged there were issues – but he laid the blame for the city’s issues at the hands of the Conservative government and its programme of austerity.
“There’s still much more that we need to do, and I’m very conscious of that,” he said.
“We know local government in this country, not just in Birmingham, has suffered because of 14 years of austerity.
“This city lost £1bn because of cuts promulgated by the last Tory government. We’re now seeing that being fixed by a Labour government that’s finally giving us staff funding.”
While Mr Cotton may want to offer a forward-looking message going into these elections, there is no doubt that trying to sell a future that is still a work in progress is a challenging proposition.
The council leader is all too aware of this fact and knows his opponents are circling.
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Who will voters turn to?
What’s interesting in this set of elections is that it is all to play for.
Labour’s opponents are not just to be found in Reform UK or the Conservatives – but in independent candidates, the Green Party, and also the Liberal Democrats, who hope to be the home of the anti-Farage vote.
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Acknowledging that threat, Mr Cotton claimed a vote for Labour was a vote for unity – and other parties would only cause division and pit residents against each other.
“There is no single competitor, I think, in these elections,” he said. “All the other parties are in a position where they’re not able to take a majority on the city council.
“There’s very clear things at stake here – we either have unified leadership under a continuous Labour council that has stabilised the finances and invested in frontline services or people who are coming into this city who just want to turn communities against each other.”
Mr Cotton’s acknowledgement that the elections are all to play for shows he is operating in a fractured political landscape – and his desire to offer a message of hope and unity in a city plagued by issues could be wishful thinking.
