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Every administration promises transparency. The true test comes when somebody switches the light on. There is an old rule in politics: if you want to know whether scrutiny is working, do not start with the committee chart. Do not start with the agendas, the work programmes or the governance diagrams. Start with the faces around the table. If the people in power look relaxed, comfortable and faintly bored, there is a fair chance you are not watching scrutiny at all. You are watching theatre with minutes.

Birmingham should know this better than most places. For years the city had scrutiny. It had committees, reports, recommendations, reviews, task groups and enough paperwork to keep several forests in gainful employment. Yet somehow all that respectable machinery failed to stop Birmingham driving itself into a financial brick wall. If scrutiny had truly been working as an early warning system, we would remember the warnings. Instead, we remember the effective bankruptcy, Section 114, equal pay chaos, commissioners arriving from Whitehall, governance failures, budget failures and Birmingham becoming a national example of how not to run a major city. Whatever scrutiny was doing, it was not doing enough.

There is another uncomfortable question lurking in the background. During Birmingham’s final years of Labour control, taxpayers spent something approaching three quarters of a million pounds on scrutiny leadership allowances alone. Not officers. Not reports. Not meeting rooms. Not webcasts. Just the additional allowances paid to councillors chairing and leading scrutiny functions. For most of that period, those positions were overwhelmingly occupied by Labour councillors scrutinising a Labour administration.

Now, if that scrutiny had successfully sounded the alarm over the city’s worsening financial position, forced action on equal pay liabilities, exposed governance weaknesses or helped steer Birmingham away from effective bankruptcy, many residents would probably conclude that £750,000 was money well spent. Three quarters of a million pounds is not a great deal if it helps prevent a financial catastrophe. But Birmingham still ended up effectively bankrupt. The city still received a Section 114 notice. The city still ended up under commissioner oversight. The city still became a national cautionary tale. Which leaves a question many residents may reasonably ask: if scrutiny cost taxpayers around £750,000 during those years, and Birmingham still sailed straight into the biggest crisis in its modern history, what exactly did taxpayers receive for their money?

That is not a criticism of every Labour scrutiny chair. Some worked hard. Some asked difficult questions. Some undoubtedly spotted problems long before they became headlines. The question is whether a scrutiny system dominated by Labour councillors during a period of Labour control delivered the level of challenge Birmingham taxpayers had every right to expect. Because scrutiny is not supposed to be a ceremonial function. It is supposed to be an early warning system. And when the ship hits the iceberg anyway, people are entitled to ask what the lookouts were seeing.

Which brings us to the strange position Birmingham now finds itself in. Labour no longer runs the city. Other than, some might mischievously observe, through the all-powerful Labour Government appointed commissioners who still hover over the civic landscape like particularly expensive guardian angels. The elected administration is now a coalition of Liberal Democrats, Greens and independents. Reform has emerged as a significant force. Labour remains a substantial opposition group. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have found themselves in possession of all seven Birmingham City Council scrutiny chair positions.

That has not gone unnoticed. Labour and Reform have both expressed concern that they appear to have been left standing outside the scrutiny shop while the Conservatives have been handed the keys. Whether that criticism is fair or unfair is not really the point. The point is that they are asking the question. They are looking at the machinery of accountability and wondering whether they have been invited to operate it or merely admire it from a safe distance.

Ordinarily that would be the end of the story. Except it isn’t. Because while Labour and Reform have been expressing concerns about scrutiny arrangements in Birmingham, Conservatives have been expressing concerns about scrutiny arrangements at the West Midlands Combined Authority. This is where the story becomes genuinely amusing.

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According to a Conservative press release, Labour and Reform councillors at the Combined Authority have voted to abolish the dedicated Transport Delivery Overview and Scrutiny Committee. The outgoing chair of that committee was Cllr Tim Huxtable, Conservative councillor and one of the sharpest people in local government. Tim, or Two Brains Tim as some of us know him, is possibly the most intelligent person in the council chamber, regardless of gender, party or ideology. More importantly, he is a decent bloke, a hard worker and one of those infuriating people who actually reads the paperwork before the meeting rather than discovering the agenda while pretending to turn pages thoughtfully.

So let us stand back and admire the picture. At Birmingham City Council, Labour and Reform complain that Conservatives have ended up holding the scrutiny levers. At the Combined Authority, Conservatives complain that Labour and Reform have removed one of theirs from the scrutiny levers. You could not make it up. The same political parties who are demanding more influence over scrutiny in one room are accused of reducing scrutiny in another. The same party benefiting from scrutiny arrangements in one building is protesting about scrutiny arrangements in a different building. The players have changed places but the argument remains remarkably familiar.

The truth, of course, is that politicians have a complicated relationship with scrutiny. They all support it. Passionately. Wholeheartedly. Unconditionally. Right up to the moment it starts asking awkward questions about something they would rather not discuss. Politics is a little like football. The referee is always excellent when he awards a penalty to your side and a disgrace to civilisation when he awards one against you. Scrutiny works in much the same way. Every party loves scrutiny when it is holding the microphone. Every party becomes noticeably less enthusiastic when somebody points the microphone back at them.

I know this because I have been there myself. When I chaired scrutiny in Birmingham, every scrutiny chair was Labour. I thought that was wrong. Not unfortunate. Not less than ideal. Wrong. So I appointed opposition councillors. The late John Alden, father of current Conservative leader Bobby Alden, became a scrutiny chair. So did Liberal Democrat councillor Sue Anderson. Some of my Labour colleagues were not entirely delighted. Good. That usually means you have found the right answer.

John Alden was excellent. Sue Anderson was excellent. Both later became effective cabinet members when Labour lost power. Both became memorable Lord Mayors. Scrutiny did not damage them. It improved them. That is because good scrutiny is not punishment. It is preparation. It teaches politicians how to challenge assumptions, test arguments and occasionally identify a problem before it becomes a crisis.

That is why the current argument matters. The Conservative press release complains that transport already accounts for a huge proportion of Combined Authority spending and that scrutiny should be increasing rather than decreasing. It argues that Birmingham taxpayers continue to contribute heavily towards regional transport funding while Birmingham’s representation within scrutiny arrangements has reduced. Labour and Reform, no doubt, have their own rationale for the changes. Fine. Explain it.

Whenever a scrutiny committee is abolished, merged, streamlined, modernised, refreshed, repurposed or subjected to whatever fashionable management phrase happens to be circulating this month, the burden of proof should sit firmly with those making the change. Explain why accountability improves. Explain why transparency increases. Explain why the public should feel reassured rather than concerned. Because history offers a simple lesson. Nobody ever creates a scandal because there was too much scrutiny. Most scandals happen because there was not enough.

That is the real lesson hidden inside this entertaining little row. Today Labour and Reform complain in Birmingham while Conservatives complain at the Combined Authority. Tomorrow the positions may reverse. The day after that somebody else will be demanding fairness, transparency and accountability while another group explains why now is not quite the right time. The principle, however, remains constant. Scrutiny should not belong to a party, a coalition or an administration. It belongs to the public.

Politicians treat scrutiny rather like teenagers treat bedroom inspections. They support the principle in theory. They become noticeably less enthusiastic when somebody starts opening drawers. Yet that is precisely why scrutiny exists. Not to make life easier. To make life harder. To ask questions. To challenge assumptions. To shine light into corners where some people would rather the light did not reach.

Every administration promises transparency. The true test comes when somebody switches the light on. After everything Birmingham has been through, that may be the very least residents should expect.

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Every Soviet system had one. The general ran the army. The engineer built the bridge. The accountant counted the beans. But standing quietly behind them all was the political officer, the Commissar. His job was not to know more about tanks than the tank commander or more about steel than the steelworker. His job was to make sure everyone remained pointed in the correct political direction. Which brings us neatly to Birmingham and the curious case of John Biggs.

Officially, Biggs is not one of Birmingham’s statutory commissioners. He is a political adviser, appointed as part of the wider commissioner team and paid at £1,100 a day for up to 150 days a year. For those keeping score at home, that is potentially £165,000 before expenses. Yet despite that price tag, he remains remarkably difficult to find. There are no commissioner surgeries where residents can wander in and ask awkward questions. No public sessions where Brummies can challenge the intervention team face to face. No obvious opportunity to ask why a city of more than a million people is now subject to a form of oversight carried out by individuals who remain largely unseen. There is a website. There are profiles. There are organisation charts. There are carefully prepared words. What there is not, at least in any meaningful sense, is public accessibility.

Instead, Comrade Biggs sits somewhere behind the electronic wall of officialdom, inside the intervention machine, part of the commissioner team but not one of its most visible public faces. A political presence operating in a city already governed by commissioners, advisers, boards, panels and governance structures that seem to breed in dark cupboards whenever somebody utters the phrase “best value”. So perhaps it is time to shine a little light into the corner.

John Biggs is not a neutral technocrat who wandered into Birmingham carrying a calculator and a management textbook. He is a Labour veteran whose career stretches across decades of East London politics. Councillor. Council leader. London Assembly member. Mayor of Tower Hamlets. Political operator. Whatever else one thinks of him, nobody could accuse him of lacking political experience. That, in fact, is precisely what makes his appointment so interesting. The commissioners deal with finance, governance, housing, waste, Oracle and the rest of Birmingham’s municipal wreckage. Biggs appears to occupy a different space altogether. He is the political adviser. The man who understands councillors, factions, political pressures and the art of persuading elected representatives to keep marching even when the road ahead resembles a sinkhole with decorative lighting.

The title may say adviser. The function looks remarkably like Commissar. Now before somebody reaches for a complaint form, let me be clear. I am not suggesting Comrade Biggs has arrived in Victoria Square wearing a fur hat, carrying a copy of Pravda and demanding councillors sing revolutionary songs before scrutiny meetings. Though having attended enough council meetings over the years, I would observe that such a requirement might actually improve participation. No, the point is much simpler than that. If Birmingham is paying for political advice, residents are entitled to ask what sort of political advice they are buying.

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Because Tower Hamlets under Biggs was no municipal paradise. Children’s services were judged inadequate before later improving. Liveable Streets became politically controversial enough to trigger unrest inside his own Labour movement. There were rows over youth services, rows over spending priorities, rows over the treatment of vulnerable residents and rows over public money. There was also Tower Rewards, a name that sounds less like an employment dispute and more like a loyalty card scheme where after ten visits to the council offices somebody hands you a complimentary muffin and a commemorative pen.

Workers heard something rather different. Tower Rewards became one of the most bitter workforce disputes in local government. Unions were furious. Staff resisted. Campaigners mobilised. Labour activists found themselves watching a Labour administration accused by critics of pursuing the kind of workforce restructuring normally condemned when carried out by Conservatives. This matters because disputes tell us something about political character. When pressure arrived, Biggs did not acquire a reputation as a municipal hugger. His supporters would call him determined. His critics would call him uncompromising. Either way, he demonstrated a willingness to confront organised opposition when he believed he was right.

Which brings us neatly back to Birmingham. A Labour government. A commissioner regime appointed by that government. A council Labour has now lost control of. A workforce dispute dominating headlines. Trade unions furious. Residents exhausted. And somewhere inside the intervention machine sits Comrade Biggs, a former Labour mayor whose own political history includes a bruising confrontation with organised labour. You do not need to allege conspiracy to find that interesting. You do not need to invent secret meetings or coded instructions. You simply have to ask reasonable questions. What advice was being given? What lessons from Tower Hamlets were being applied? Did that advice make settlement more likely or less likely? If Birmingham is paying for political advice, surely residents are entitled to understand whether that advice helps solve disputes or merely manages the politics surrounding them.

The financial side raises further questions. Publicly released figures show Biggs receiving not only fees but also hotel, subsistence and travel expenses. In July 2025 his total monthly cost was shown as £10,816.83. In January 2026 it was £10,766.31. In February 2026 it was £8,704.29. This may all be entirely proper. Indeed, there is no reason to believe otherwise. But it is not invisible money. It is public money. Birmingham residents are entitled to know who is spending it, what they are doing and how they can be questioned about it. Accountability is not an optional extra that arrives after the bill has been paid.

That is why visibility matters. If Birmingham pays the political adviser, Birmingham should be able to see the political adviser. Which brings me to a public offer. Comrade Biggs, let us have a coffee. No ambush. No show trial. No Politburo minutes. Just one former Labour councillor talking to another. I remain a fellow member of the Labour Party. Like you, I have sat through impossible meetings, read reports that should probably have carried health warnings and watched local government perform feats of bureaucratic gymnastics capable of astonishing Olympic judges. There is even an East London connection. My dad’s side of the family came from East Ham. Between us we should be able to manage at least ten minutes of nostalgic conversation before moving on to Birmingham’s current experiment in government by invisible steering group.

So come on, John. Coffee. Public place. Civilised conversation. You can explain what a £1,100-a-day political adviser actually does for Birmingham. I can ask why Brummies cannot simply meet the commissioner team and put questions to them like adults in a democracy. No fur hats required. No secret handshakes. No coded references to the Five Year Plan. Just a straightforward discussion about who governs Birmingham, how they govern Birmingham and why the people paying the bills seem to have so little opportunity to engage with those doing the governing.

Because Birmingham has had quite enough government by closed door, internal memo, invisible adviser and digital brick wall. If Biggs is part of the commissioner team, let him be seen. If he is influencing political decisions, let that influence be explained. If he is merely offering harmless wisdom, let the public hear some of it. And if his role is helping government navigate the political consequences of Birmingham’s collapse, residents deserve to understand that too. The commissioners may hold the formal powers, but every Soviet system knew the most interesting figure was not always the person sitting in the big chair. Sometimes it was the quiet man standing just behind it.

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There are moments in politics when a subject stops whispering in the corners and walks straight into the room, muddy boots and all. Birmingham has just had one of those moments. Cllr Majid Mahmood, now enjoying one of those curious post-Labour bursts of popularity that often arrive when a politician leaves the machine and starts sounding more like himself, used X to praise Sheikh Zahir Mehmood for speaking openly about something many people have discussed privately for years. The Sheikh’s point was blunt. If someone cannot speak English properly, how can they properly represent residents on Birmingham City Council? That is not a small question. Nor is it a comfortable one. It touches language, class, migration, community politics, party selection, democracy, competence and that most delicate of civic nerves: who gets to speak for whom. Majid’s intervention matters because he is not some passing social media foghorn. Before Labour was badly mauled in Birmingham, he was a leading Labour councillor. When others were swept away, he survived. That tells you something. He knows his ward, his residents and his onions. You do not hang on in difficult political weather simply by having a red rosette and a hopeful expression. Before anyone thinks I have gone soft, I have not forgiven Majid for the potholes. Some are now so mature they should probably be twinned with other potholes in Europe. Nor have I forgotten his anti-car instincts when he held the roads brief. As a cyclist, even I found some of it hard to applaud. But politics is not a cartoon. A man may have a blind spot the size of a bus lane and still be worth listening to when he forces a serious democratic argument into the open.

The Sheikh’s remarks were sharper still. His argument, stripped of heat, was simple. A councillor must speak for residents, challenge officers, understand reports, send emails, engage with colleagues and represent the community in the working language of the council. If they cannot do that, how are they to perform the role? Some will say that is obvious. Others will say it is dangerous. Both reactions deserve attention. The trouble with Birmingham politics, and indeed British politics more widely, is that we have spent years confusing politeness with wisdom. Some subjects became unsayable not because they were false, but because they were inconvenient. Language competence in public office was one of them. Everyone knew it mattered. Everyone knew it occasionally caused difficulties. Everyone also knew that mentioning it risked being dragged into a row nobody wanted. So the subject was managed, softened, avoided and quietly passed around like a plate of sandwiches nobody quite fancied.

This Birmingham debate also sits inside a much larger national argument. Nigel Farage has recently written one of his long essays on what he sees as the effects of diversity, equity and inclusion, the Equality Act, public sector equality duties and what he calls a two-tier state. Politicians writing essays again is no bad thing. It provides material for every shade of political thought, and for cartoonists, which is one of democracy’s underrated blessings. Farage’s essay is not about Birmingham councillors speaking English, but it is relevant because it attacks the broader idea that public institutions should lower, bend or rearrange standards in the name of representation, identity or equity. He argues that “equality has nothing to do with it” and that positive action has become a route to unfairness. He says the Equality Act and public sector equality duty have helped embed a culture where institutions become more concerned with group outcomes than individual merit. Many readers will reject that argument. Some will embrace it. Others will agree with part of it and recoil from the rest. But it would be foolish to pretend it is not part of the same national weather. Farage is not shouting from a shed. He is leading a party that has become a major force in British politics. If he is writing long arguments about standards, fairness and who the state serves, Birmingham should at least read them before throwing the paper at the wall.

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Yet here is where I refuse the easy answer. I am instinctively against formal preconditions for standing for elected office. I do not want a clipboard democracy, where some official decides who is clever enough, fluent enough, polished enough or respectable enough to appear on a ballot paper. I left school at fifteen with no qualifications. None. I was not exactly troubling the exam boards. Yet I was later elected, worked in public life, became involved in journalism, and eventually Birmingham University gave me a chance after a year at Fircroft College. I still do not have a law degree. Life, mercifully, is not always run by the people who design forms. That is why I dislike the idea that candidates should be filtered by qualifications. Today GCSE English and Maths. Tomorrow a degree. Next week a training certificate in community leadership with a module on inclusive stakeholder engagement and sandwiches. Before long, politics becomes a gated estate for the already approved.

I even dislike some existing restrictions on who may stand. Take Police and Crime Commissioners. I would rather voters were trusted. If a candidate has a criminal record, declare it. If they have no criminal record, declare that too. If they have no qualifications, let the public know. Then let the voters decide. The public must retain the right to vote for who the hell they want, including the awkward, the unpolished and, occasionally, the alarming. That is not a small principle. It is the foundation of democratic freedom. The people who frighten me most in politics are not usually the eccentrics, independents, awkward squad members or late developers. They are the tidy-minded gatekeepers who believe democracy would work much better if only voters were prevented from making choices of which sensible people disapprove.

But democratic freedom does not remove democratic responsibility. A councillor’s job is not ornamental. It is not a token position, a family badge, a community trophy or a party favour. Councillors read reports, question budgets, challenge officers, scrutinise decisions, answer residents, sit in meetings and, when necessary, stand up and speak. If they cannot communicate effectively in English, and English is the working language of the council, then voters are entitled to ask whether they can do the job. That is not racism. Accent is not the issue. Origin is not the issue. Faith is not the issue. Many people who came to Britain as adults speak English with clarity, grace and power. Many born here make the language sound as though it has been reversed over by a bin lorry. The issue is not purity. It is competence.

The most interesting part of this debate is that some of the strongest frustration appears to come from younger British Asians themselves. I have been told, more than once, that many feel embarrassed by older representatives who cannot communicate properly in public office. They do not see that as representation. They see it as patronising, limiting and unfair to their own communities. That matters. It means this is not simply an argument being imposed from outside. It is also a conversation emerging from within communities tired of being treated as voting blocs, cultural exhibits or electoral property. A voter is entitled to more than a familiar surname, a community connection or a party label. A voter is entitled to someone who can argue, explain, challenge, negotiate and make themselves understood when decisions are being made.

For decades, Birmingham’s political parties tiptoed around this. Labour, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats all knew the issue existed. They also knew it was easier not to mention it. Selection systems adjusted. Officers compensated. Meetings moved on. Communities were managed. Everyone smiled politely while democracy quietly lost a little muscle. Majid and Sheikh Zahir Mehmood have now punctured that silence. So, from a very different direction, has Farage, who frames the wider national issue as one of merit, standards and the dangers of institutional ideology. I do not agree with every word from any of them. I do not need to. The point is that a serious debate has started. That is healthy. It may be uncomfortable, but democracy is not supposed to be a spa treatment.

My position remains deliberately awkward. No state English test. No qualification barrier. No bureaucratic permission slip to stand for office. But parties should raise their standards. Voters should ask harder questions. Communities should stop accepting symbolic representation when effective representation is needed. Journalists should report plainly what they see. Candidates should be honest about whether they can actually do the job. Let the voters decide, yes. But let them decide with their eyes open. Democracy is not tidy. It is not always wise. It sometimes elects brilliance, dullness, courage, vanity, and occasionally someone who should not be left in charge of a stapler. That is the risk of freedom.

Still, if a community chooses someone who cannot communicate effectively in the council chamber, that is its democratic right. It is also its democratic burden. The conversation is now open. Majid helped open it on X. Sheikh Zahir Mehmood gave it moral force. Farage has placed a wider national frame around standards, merit and institutional fairness. Birmingham, for once, cannot pretend not to hear. And perhaps that is healthy. Because democracy belongs to the voters. But competence still matters.

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There are honours, there are medals, there are awards, and then there are those rare moments when a nation quietly acknowledges that one of its own has changed the world. Tony Iommi has now been awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours List, and for Birmingham this is not just a pleasing footnote in the honours pages. It is a moment of proper civic pride. Knowing Tony and his delightful wife Maria, I know they could not be more pleased and excited. Tony is used to recognition, of course. He has received many awards for his achievements. Yet I suspect this will be regarded by him as a personal best, not because it is louder than the others, but because it comes from the nation itself.

And rightly so. Birmingham has produced many remarkable people, politicians, industrialists, scientists, writers, actors, entrepreneurs and musicians. Yet if someone asked me which Brummie is most likely to be remembered five hundred years from now, I would answer without hesitation: Tony Iommi. I say that also with full respect and affection for His Majesty King Charles III, a monarch I admire, but I suspect history may eventually make Tony Iommi’s name echo louder than the very King who honoured him. That is not a discourtesy to the Crown. It is simply how cultural memory works. Monarchs reign within their time. Great artists, when they truly alter the architecture of human expression, can travel far beyond it.

Tony’s fame, I believe, is still in the early stages of its historical life. That may seem odd to say about a man who helped found Black Sabbath, sold millions of records, influenced generations and has already been celebrated across the world. But there is ordinary fame and there is permanent fame. Ordinary fame belongs to the age that creates it. Permanent fame is different. It keeps renewing itself because the thing created remains useful, powerful and alive. That is why Tony’s reputation will not merely endure for decades, as it already has. I believe it will endure for centuries.

The reason is not simply that Tony was a great guitarist, though he plainly was and is. It is not simply that Black Sabbath became one of the most influential bands in the world. It is not even that he helped create heavy metal, although that would be quite enough for most careers. The deeper reason is that Tony changed what music could be built from. Before Tony Iommi, the guitar riff was often decoration. It might be a hook, an entrance, a flourish, a signature phrase. But usually the song itself was still carried by melody, harmony and movement. Tony changed that. In his hands the riff became structural. It became load-bearing. The song no longer simply used the riff. The song was built around it. That is the central argument of the book outline I have been developing on Tony: that his influence is structural rather than merely stylistic, because styles date, while structures endure.

And before we talk about how he adapted, we must pause on the injury itself. Tony suffered a dreadful industrial accident, losing the tips of two fingers on his fretting hand. For any young man that would have been traumatic. For a guitarist it must have felt almost like a sentence. In Tony’s age, injuries of that kind were not rare enough. Men and women worked close to machines that could take fingers, hands, confidence and futures in a moment. Mrs Olley’s mom, Mrs Donovan, had her thumb crushed. I once drilled through my own index finger, through the bone. Crikey. Yet that was industrial life in our industrial town. People took it in their stride because they had to. But Tony’s injury was different in one crucial respect. For a guitarist, losing the tips of two fingers on the fretting hand was not just painful. It threatened the very thing he was trying to become. The dangerous working world got him. Then, gloriously, he refused to let it have the last word. He did not really listen to the experts. He made new fingertips, changed strings, changed tuning, changed method and, in doing so, changed music.

That too is Birmingham. Not in the sentimental postcard version of the city, but in the real one. The Birmingham of work, pressure, improvisation and grit. The city that makes, fixes, adapts and carries on. Tony’s music does not sound as though it floated down from some soft artistic cloud. It sounds forged. It sounds engineered. It sounds as though weight, rhythm, repetition and consequence have all been hammered into shape. That is why it could not have come from nowhere. It came from here.

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Listen to Black Sabbath, War Pigs, Iron Man, Paranoid or Children of the Grave. The riff is not a polite introduction before the “real” song begins. The riff is the ground on which the entire structure stands. The vocal, bass, drums and lyrics do not float separately above it. They live inside it. That is why the music still feels modern, dangerous and alive long after the fashions around it have passed. It was never just a style. Styles date. Structures survive.

This is where Tony belongs in the company of the very rare musical disruptors. Beethoven changed what repetition, pressure and development could do within symphonic music. James Brown reorganised popular music around rhythm, command and physical activation. Tony Iommi changed the role of the riff. These figures do not need to sound alike to belong in the same historical category. They share something more important. They reassigned responsibility inside music. They altered what a musical idea was allowed to carry.

His influence did not stop with heavy metal. That is merely the most obvious inheritance. Hard rock took from him. Doom metal almost lives inside his shadow. Thrash, speed metal, stoner rock, sludge, grunge, industrial, punk, post-punk, alternative rock, noise rock, gothic rock and even parts of modern electronic and hip-hop production have absorbed something from that idea of repetition, weight, pressure and unresolved tension. Some of that influence is direct. Some of it is second-hand, travelling through bands who learned from bands who learned from Sabbath. But that is how deep influence works. It does not always arrive wearing its own name badge.

If one were bold enough to put a number on it, and I stress this is a judgement rather than a statistic, I would say that perhaps a quarter to a third of guitar-based music since 1975 carries some trace of Tony Iommi’s structural invention. Not every heavy riff is Tony. Not every dark chord belongs to Sabbath. But the idea that a riff can be the building, not the decoration, runs through an astonishing amount of modern music. Once heard, that idea could not be unheard. Once built, that architecture could not be unbuilt.

There is also a discipline in Tony’s work which is often misunderstood. People talk about heavy music as if it is merely loud, rebellious or chaotic. Tony’s best work is almost the opposite. It is controlled. It contains chaos rather than surrendering to it. The heaviness is not random noise. It is structure under pressure. The riff repeats not because nothing else can be thought of, but because repetition becomes force. It refuses easy release. It holds the listener in place. It builds weight by staying where it is.

For Birmingham, this MBE should therefore be received with real pride. We are not simply celebrating a famous local lad who did well. We are celebrating a Brummie who changed the world’s musical grammar. That is a far greater thing. Cities sometimes misunderstand their own greatness. They chase passing headlines while failing to recognise the people whose work will still matter when today’s headlines are dust. Tony Iommi is one of those people.

So yes, congratulations to Tony. Congratulations to Maria too, because great lives are rarely lived alone, and those closest to the great figures often carry more of the journey than the public ever sees. This is a lovely moment for them both, and Birmingham should share in it warmly. The MBE is richly deserved. The honour is welcome. The recognition is overdue and yet beautifully timed. But the greater award will come from history itself. Long after today’s celebrities are forgotten, long after chart positions have lost their meaning, long after many modern reputations have faded into archive dust, Tony Iommi’s riffs will still stand. They will stand because they were built to carry weight.

That is the measure of the man. Not merely a guitarist. Not merely a rock star. Not merely the founder of a genre. Tony Iommi is an architect of sound, Birmingham’s enduring son, and one of the few musicians Britain has produced whose name may echo for centuries.

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There are political resignations, dramatic political resignations, and then those rare civic explosions that send flakes of plaster drifting down from the ceiling while party officials stand underneath insisting the building is structurally sound. Cllr Majid Mahmood’s resignation from the Labour Party is one of those. Hot on the heels of Cllr Diane Donaldson walking away, Majid has now put his own letter into the Labour machine, and it is not exactly a thank-you note for the sandwiches. It is long, serious, occasionally repetitive in the way only a man with stored-up frustration can be repetitive, and damaging precisely because it comes from somebody who cannot simply be dismissed as a passing malcontent, social media foghorn or political day-tripper.

I have known Majid for a number of years. He is a solicitor, a committed politician, bright, serious, and someone who gets stuck in. That does not mean I am about to cover him in rose petals and carry him shoulder-high through Victoria Square. Good grief, no. When he was in charge of roads, his anti-car instincts were more than a little disappointing, and the pothole legacy he helped leave behind is not something I, as a cyclist, can applaud. Some Birmingham potholes are now so substantial they probably qualify for devolved status. There are craters in this city that have been with us longer than some cabinet members. But politics is not a cartoon. People are rarely all hero or all villain, except in party leaflets, where even the dog bins apparently vote on strict ideological lines.

Majid is more interesting than that. He believes things. He acts on them. He puts time, money and reputation into them. Over the years, I have been aware of his trips, often at his own expense, to offer aid, comfort and solidarity to refugees at the edges of Europe and to people caught in the horror of Gaza. You may agree with him. You may disagree with him. You may think his instincts are right, wrong, sentimental, courageous or politically awkward. But you would be wrong to suggest he lacks sincerity. Majid is not one of those politicians who discovers Palestine when there is a camera nearby and then forgets it when the buffet opens. He lives the issue. It matters to him. He has been prepared to make it part of his public life when silence would have been easier, tidier and far more convenient.

That is why this resignation matters. Parties can survive losing the loud. They can survive losing the ambitious. They can even survive losing the permanently offended, who in politics are less a faction than a weather system. What parties struggle to survive is losing the people who keep turning up. The people with roots. The people who have knocked the doors, answered the emails, carried the casework, taken the abuse, sat through the municipal porridge, and still come back the next morning. Diane Donaldson was one of those people. Majid Mahmood is another. Together they formed a serious ward operation in Bromford and Hodge Hill. They were not merely names on a ballot paper. They were a double act. Residents knew them. Officers knew them. Problems certainly knew them. If Diane’s resignation was a warning light on Birmingham Labour’s dashboard, Majid’s is the engine making a noise no responsible mechanic would ignore.

Naturally, the Labour machine will probably try to ignore it. That is what machines do when they are poorly maintained. They clank forward, leak oil, make dreadful noises and insist the service history is excellent. Modern Labour has become very good at producing language that sounds responsible while avoiding responsibility. Concerns are noted. Feelings are understood. Lessons will be learned. Matters are under review. Processes will be followed. Dialogue remains important. Everyone is valued. Nobody is listened to. It is a strange kind of politics, this, where members are praised as the lifeblood of the movement right up until one of them develops a pulse.

Majid’s letter is damaging because it accuses Labour, locally and nationally, of becoming centralised, cautious, top-down, closed, unresponsive and hostile to internal challenge. That is not a minor complaint. Indeed, the letter says these are not minor administrative issues so firmly that it more or less says it twice, which, in fairness, is sometimes necessary when shouting into the padded room of party management. He talks about dissenting voices being marginalised. He talks about questions going unanswered. He talks about a lack of feedback between leaders and those expected to deliver decisions on the ground. He talks about the Birmingham Labour Group becoming dysfunctional and toxic. He talks about local representatives being expected to support Reform UK councillors moving into influential committee positions. He talks about immigration, internal democracy, political expression being managed and policed, and Labour becoming disconnected from ordinary members and voters.

That is quite a list. In legal terms, and Majid will understand this better than most, it reads less like a resignation letter and more like particulars of claim. The defendant is the Labour Party. The alleged injury is political conscience. The remedy sought is escape. Labour may wish to present this as one councillor’s personal disappointment, but that will not do. Not after Diane Donaldson. Not after the quiet mutterings across the city. Not after the sense, now increasingly difficult to ignore, that Birmingham Labour is losing the people who once gave it local credibility while retaining the structures that made those people despair.

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The Gaza section is perhaps the most personally powerful part of the letter. Majid is clearly furious that Labour’s leadership, and many senior figures within the party, have failed, in his view, to show moral clarity about the scale of suffering in Gaza. Others may argue with his language, his figures or his conclusions. That is politics. But nobody sensible should pretend this is some manufactured grievance. For many Muslim members, Muslim voters and others appalled by the human suffering, Gaza has become a deep rupture with Labour, not a fringe irritation. It has become one of those moral dividing lines where party management, cautious phrasing and carefully calibrated statements start to look less like diplomacy and more like cowardice wearing a lanyard.

Majid also says he had hoped there might still be space in Labour for a different direction, mentioning Andy Burnham as someone many once saw as representing a more grounded tradition. Even that hope, he says, has faded. When members stop believing change is possible inside a party, they do not merely leave. They stop lending the party their patience. And patience is an underrated political asset. Labour used to benefit from enormous reservoirs of patience in Birmingham. Working people gave it patience. Muslim communities gave it patience. Trade unionists gave it patience. Local activists gave it patience. Councillors gave it patience. Voters gave it patience. They tolerated the rows, the closed-door decisions, the municipal chaos and the occasional sense that nobody at the top could organise a sandwich without establishing a stakeholder engagement framework.

But patience is not infinite. When a party starts losing councillors like Diane Donaldson and Majid Mahmood, it should not ask how to brief against them. It should ask why people who spent years serving under its banner have concluded they can no longer remain in good conscience. That phrase matters. Good conscience. It is not the language of tactical positioning. It is the language of someone who has reached the end of his internal argument with himself. And once that happens, the usual tricks no longer work. A stern phone call does not work. A regional official sounding disappointed does not work. A rumour whispered into the municipal wind does not work. The person has already gone further inside themselves than the party machine can reach.

There will, of course, be the usual muttering about whether Majid should stand down as a councillor. This is the standard party sulk, wheeled out whenever an elected member leaves the tribe. If parties truly believe councillors automatically belong to the party rather than the electorate, Parliament can change the law. Until then, voters elect human beings, not just coloured rosettes on legs. Majid and Diane were elected by Bromford and Hodge Hill residents. They now have to answer to those residents. That is democracy. Untidy, inconvenient, and far harder to control than a regional office email.

As for Labour, this is not merely another difficult day. It is another crack in the wall. The party has not just lost another member. It has lost another serious local operator, another rooted councillor, another person with credibility in a community Labour cannot afford to take for granted. The danger for Labour is not that Majid Mahmood has left. The danger is that more people will look at his letter and quietly recognise the organisation he describes. They may not all resign. They may not all speak. Some will simply stop working, stop believing, stop defending, stop knocking doors with enthusiasm, stop explaining away the latest absurdity, and eventually stop voting Labour with any conviction.

I do not agree with Majid on everything. I still reserve the right to complain about the roads, the potholes, and any transport philosophy that appears to regard the private car as a moral failing with wheels. But on this, he has done something many politicians talk about and very few actually do. He has taken a stand when it would have been easier to keep quiet. He did not have to do it. He has done it. And in politics, where courage is so often outsourced to anonymous briefings, WhatsApp groups and carefully worded statements, that deserves respect.

Labour has not simply lost another councillor. It has lost another worker, another believer, another person who once thought the party could still be worth the trouble. When organisations start losing people like that, sensible observers do not ask what is wrong with the individual. They start asking what is wrong with the machine. Birmingham Labour may not enjoy the question. But after Diane Donaldson and now Majid Mahmood, it is becoming harder and harder to avoid.

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Kemi Badenoch, leader of the Conservative Party, has announced that she wants to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty. The usual armies have duly taken up their usual positions. One side says common sense is returning. The other says civilisation is being reversed into a ditch while clutching a laminated diversity policy. But in Birmingham, there is a rather more interesting question. Would anybody actually notice?

Back in 2020, under Cllr John Cotton, then Cabinet Member for Social Inclusion, Community Safety and Equalities, Birmingham launched Everyone’s Battle, Everyone’s Business. It was ambitious, polished and full of fine civic intention. Birmingham was going to tackle inequality, confront structural disadvantage, address workforce race equity, examine pay gaps and put fairness at the centre of public decision-making. It had the title, the launch, the language and the glow of official virtue. If glossy paperwork could reduce inequality, Birmingham would now be so equal that every resident would be issued with a matching Labrador, identical curtains and a council-approved sense of moral improvement.

The really curious part is that John Cotton did not then vanish into political obscurity. He did not lose influence, leave the chamber, or get sent to chair a working group on the future of municipal flowerbeds. He became Leader of Birmingham City Council. Today, following the May 2026 elections, he has largely faded from the centre of Birmingham politics. Yet during the crucial years, the man who helped launch the flagship equalities programme possessed more influence than anyone else in the city administration. In normal organisations, that would be called an opportunity. In Birmingham, however, it appears to have become something else: a fine strategy followed by the familiar civic mist of action plans, updates, reviews, refreshed reviews and solemn reports explaining how previous reports would be monitored by future reports.

That is the problem. Birmingham is not short of equality language. It is drowning in it. The city has strategies, objectives, impact assessments, action plans, consultation exercises, internal challenge processes and all the usual public-sector embroidery. What is much harder to find is the simple public scorecard. What was promised? What was delivered? What failed? What was delayed? Who was accountable? What decision changed because equality evidence showed real harm before the damage was done?

This matters because Birmingham’s record since then has not exactly resembled a golden age of competent, fair and accountable government. The city suffered one of the largest equal pay disasters in local government history. It effectively went bankrupt. Commissioners arrived. Services declined. Assets were sold. Residents paid more and received less. Yet through it all, the equalities machine continued to hum away in the background, producing the reassuring noise of an engine that may or may not have been connected to the wheels. Indeed, the cruel irony is that while Birmingham was producing equality strategies by the pallet load, it was simultaneously sitting on one of the largest equal pay liabilities ever seen in local government. The city quite literally bankrupted itself over an equality issue. If there is a more expensive way to demonstrate a gap between aspiration and delivery, I have yet to find it.

Nor is this just about the main council machine. Birmingham Children’s Trust receives more than £300 million of council money to deliver children’s services. It is not a minor civic side room with a kettle and three folders. It is one of the largest and most important public service bodies in the city. It talks extensively about equality, diversity, inclusion and workforce race equality. Excellent. But once again the question is not whether the words exist. They do. The question is whether the public can easily see the scorecard.

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Then there is the governance curiosity of Andy Couldrick, who served as Chief Executive of Birmingham Children’s Trust before retiring and becoming Chair of the Trust Board. That may have been entirely proper. It may have been justified on grounds of continuity and experience. But in a city that endlessly lectures others about openness, fairness, representation and opportunity, residents are entitled to ask simple questions. Was the chair role openly advertised? Who else was considered? What was the selection process? What equality and governance safeguards were applied? Those are not allegations. They are exactly the sort of questions Birmingham likes asking of everybody else.

This is where the Kemi Badenoch argument becomes more complicated than the Westminster shouting suggests. She wants to abolish the Public Sector Equality Duty. But Birmingham’s difficulty may not be the existence of equality duties. Birmingham’s difficulty may be the apparent inability to demonstrate, in plain public language, what those duties have actually changed. If Equality Impact Assessments are shaping decisions, show us where. If the race action plan worked, show us how. If the race pay gap ambition was met, publish the result. If the Children’s Trust is delivering against its equality promises, let residents see the evidence without needing a miner’s lamp, a legal dictionary and three spare afternoons.

Of course, this is no longer just a Labour problem, although Labour owns the original wallpaper. Labour launched Everyone’s Battle, Everyone’s Business. Labour controlled the council. John Cotton became Leader. The city then hit financial catastrophe, equal pay disaster, governance collapse and commissioner control. Labour cannot now pretend the equalities machine belongs to somebody else. It built the machine, painted it in civic pastel colours and invited everybody to admire it.

But the new political actors do not get a free pass either. The Liberal Democrats campaigned on accountability, local responsiveness and a different way of running Birmingham. The Greens campaigned on fairness, ethical leadership and real scrutiny. Conservatives now hold important scrutiny positions. Splendid. Then let us see it. If the new Birmingham settlement means anything, it should mean that the city stops admiring its own reports and starts testing its own results.

So here is the challenge. Let the new scrutiny chairs conduct a proper review of Birmingham’s equalities machinery. Not another officer celebration. Not another PowerPoint parade. Not another report congratulating a previous report for bravely existing. A real review. Start with Everyone’s Battle, Everyone’s Business. Then examine workforce representation, the race pay gap promise, Equality Impact Assessments, Children’s Trust governance, child poverty, service cuts and the actual effect of equality assessments on major decisions.

Ask one question: what happened?

Not what was intended. Not what was announced. Not what was launched. What happened?

As a former scrutiny chairman, I would be happy to assist. I appreciate that some in the Council House may greet this offer with the warm delight usually reserved for a wasp entering a nudist colony, but the offer stands. If Birmingham’s new political actors meant what they said in May, this is their chance to prove it.

For six years and many more Birmingham’s political class has spoken the language of equality with almost religious devotion. Labour launched strategies. The Greens promised fairness. The Liberal Democrats promised accountability. The Conservatives promised scrutiny. Wonderful. Let us now gather them around the same table and ask a question so simple that Birmingham City Council will probably need three working groups and a consultant to avoid answering it.

What measurable outcomes are to be and when actually delivered?

Because Kemi Badenoch may want to tear down the Public Sector Equality Duty. But in Birmingham, residents might reasonably ask whether the wallpaper was ever attached to anything more substantial than a press release.

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If Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership is now entering its final act, historians may find themselves looking not first to Westminster, not to the Treasury, not to a television studio full of stern-faced political editors, but to Birmingham. More precisely, they may find themselves looking to Selly Oak, where our very own political Action Man, Al Carns MP, appears to have done something rather unfashionable in modern politics. He looked at power, weighed it against principle, and walked away.

I instinctively like Al Carns because of my dad’s service as a Royal Marine. That does not mean he gets a free pass. It does mean I start from a position of respect. Royal Marines are not usually fragile creatures given to dramatic exits because the coffee machine in Whitehall has run out of oat milk. They are trained to endure, to persist, to obey difficult orders and to carry burdens that most of us would rather discuss from the safety of a warm room with a decent biscuit. So when a former Royal Marine resigns from government saying Britain is failing those who serve, the grown-ups in the room should stop pretending this is just another day in the Westminster tumble dryer.

John Healey’s resignation as Defence Secretary was bad enough for Starmer. Healey is not a lightweight, a mischief-maker or a man permanently searching for a camera. He is one of those serious Labour figures who gives the impression that he actually reads the brief before appearing on television. His resignation letter was devastating because it used two words that may now hang around Starmer’s government like damp in a council flat: “unable” and “unwilling”. Unable to commit what is needed. The Treasury unwilling to provide it. That is not a routine resignation. That is a senior minister saying the government is failing in the first duty of the state.

Then came Carns. Not as some noisy backbench insurgent. Not as a man seeking a better job. Not as an act of rebellion against Labour, but arguably as an act of loyalty to the Labour tradition that once understood national defence, working-class service and the dignity of those who put on a uniform. Carns said we owe those who serve the kit to do the job and the loyalty to stand by them when it is done, and that we are failing on both. There is no clever way to spin that. A serving Armed Forces minister, a former Royal Marine, looked at the government’s position and concluded he could no longer defend it.

This is why Birmingham matters in the story. The West Midlands has always contributed more than its fair share to Britain’s Armed Forces. Our region has sent sons, daughters, fathers, uncles, brothers and neighbours into uniform for generations. Birmingham may look like a city currently being run by a committee of lost sat-navs and broken photocopiers, but when the nation has needed people to serve, this place has never been missing. We build, we graft, we serve, we grumble, and then we serve again. So when the MP for Selly Oak resigns over defence, it is not some remote Westminster melodrama. It lands here with a different force.

There is a brutal simplicity to the argument now. The first duty of government is not messaging. It is not triangulation. It is not giving a minister a shiny new job title and hoping everyone forgets the previous promise by teatime. The first duty of government is to protect the nation. If a Prime Minister cannot convince his own Defence Secretary and his own Armed Forces minister that he is prepared to fund that duty properly, then he has a problem deeper than opinion polls. He has a legitimacy problem.

Dan Jarvis now inherits the job, and he too comes with serious military credentials. That makes the appointment clever in one sense and dangerous in another. Starmer can point to another veteran and say defence is in safe hands. But veterans understand the gap between words and capability. They understand that rhetoric does not buy ammunition, that warm statements do not repair military housing, that patriotic speeches do not retain trained personnel, and that apprenticeships, useful though they are, do not replace ships, aircraft, equipment, stockpiles and serious long-term planning.

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That is the trap now. Starmer can reshuffle the faces, but he cannot reshuffle the facts. Healey walked. Carns walked. Jarvis arrives. The question remains exactly where it was before the Downing Street machine started moving the furniture around. Will this government fund defence properly, or will it ask serious people to front an unserious settlement?

This may be remembered as the tipping point. Not because one resignation automatically ends a premiership, but because some resignations reveal what everyone has been trying not to say. Starmer’s great political offer was competence. Dull perhaps, but competent. Serious perhaps, but competent. Sensible, managerial, steady, grown-up, reassuringly grey. Yet here we are, with senior figures leaving government because they say the state is unwilling or unable to meet its most basic duty.

And if that is true on defence, what else is true?

This is the political danger for Starmer. Once “unable” and “unwilling” attach themselves to a Prime Minister, they spread. Unable to grip the economy. Unable to fix public services. Unable to resolve Birmingham’s municipal collapse. Unable to restore trust. Unwilling to make hard choices. Unwilling to confront the Treasury. Unwilling to tell the country what security actually costs. That may be unfair in parts, but politics is not a seminar in fairness. It is a street fight conducted in suits.

For Birmingham, there is a particular irony. We have become used to being discussed as a problem to be managed. Bankruptcy, commissioners, bins, equal pay, broken governance and all the rest of the grim civic alphabet soup. Yet this week Birmingham may have produced the man who helped expose the central weakness in the Prime Minister’s authority. Not with a speech full of theatrical nonsense, but with the simple act of saying no.

Al Carns may not have intended to see off Starmer. He may not think of himself in those terms at all. That is partly why the resignation matters. It does not look like ambition. It looks like duty. It looks like a man trained in service deciding that staying silent would be worse than losing office. In modern politics, that is dangerously powerful stuff.

So yes, if this is the beginning of the end for Sir Keir Starmer, let Birmingham take its place in the footnotes, preferably in bold and with a decent font. The city did not give him power. It did not write his manifesto. It did not create the Treasury hole, the defence dispute or the slow leakage of authority from Downing Street. But through Selly Oak, through Al Carns, through a former Royal Marine who decided he had heard enough, Birmingham may have provided the moment when the polite pretence finally cracked.

And that is not a bad day’s work for a city Westminster usually remembers only when something has gone wrong.

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Cllr Diane Donaldson walked away from Labour this week. That alone would have been enough to make Birmingham political eyebrows perform a small Mexican wave. But now GRIT has been passed a private email from Cllr Majid Mahmood to Birmingham Labour’s leadership, and it turns the Donaldson resignation from an isolated departure into part of a much larger story. The email was sent to Cllr Nicky Brennan, Cllr Suranjeet Kaur and Cllr Ray Goodwin following the reconvened Council AGM. It was not a rant, not a tantrum and not one of those late-night political WhatsApps written with one thumb and too much righteous caffeine. Cllr Mahmood is a lawyer, and it shows. The email is shaped with judicial precision: calm, structured, evidential and quietly devastating.

Its central allegation is stark. Cllr Mahmood says Labour councillors were whipped into supporting arrangements that could have enabled Reform councillors to take control of key committee positions at Birmingham City Council. He says he had made clear beforehand that Labour should not vote in a way that could allow Reform to chair Planning, yet the group proceeded with an arrangement which, if successful, would have handed Reform influence over some of the council’s most important democratic functions. This lands at a particularly delicate moment. Cllr Mahmood is also understood to be facing disciplinary action, or at least investigation, this weekend over his public position that there was no final deal on the Birmingham bin strike. That is a separate issue, but the timing is impossible to ignore. One senior Labour grafter, Cllr Donaldson, has already walked. Another, Cllr Mahmood, has now placed on record a forensic objection to the party’s conduct over Reform and is reportedly being called in over the bin strike row. In politics, coincidence often arrives wearing a very bad disguise.

The email asks the questions Birmingham Labour may least want to answer. Did the party authorise negotiations with Cllr Jex Parkin, the Reform Group Leader? If so, were Labour’s Birmingham leaders given similar leeway to negotiate with other political groups? What discussions took place with the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Independents? And if no acceptable agreement could be reached, why did Labour not simply withdraw and nominate only Labour candidates, rather than support arrangements that have caused such obvious reputational damage? Those are not the questions of a man throwing his toys out of the pram. They are the questions of a lawyer building a paper trail. And that is where this story becomes rather more serious than a routine disagreement inside a political party.

The most striking aspect of Cllr Mahmood’s email is that it is not really about Reform at all. Reform is merely the trigger. The real issue is what Labour was prepared to do and why. Cllr Mahmood’s argument is essentially that Labour found itself supporting arrangements which could have handed significant influence to a party many of its own members regard as fundamentally opposed to Labour values. For a city like Birmingham, that matters. This is not some sleepy rural district where the biggest political controversy of the month involves a hedge being six inches too tall. Birmingham is one of the most diverse cities in Europe. Every ward contains communities of different faiths, cultures, ethnicities and traditions. Political decisions are not merely administrative. They carry meaning.

Cllr Mahmood’s email sets out why he believes Reform holding key committee positions would be deeply troubling. He refers to comments made by Nigel Farage concerning British Muslims. He refers to Sarah Pochin’s comments regarding the burqa. He refers to Reform’s position on the kirpan and concerns expressed within Birmingham’s Sikh community. He refers to criticism of Muslim prayer within civic life and wider concerns about community cohesion. Whether one agrees with every point or not is almost beside the point. The point is that Cllr Mahmood believes these concerns are serious enough that Labour should never have found itself facilitating Reform’s route to influence over important council committees. That is a remarkable position for a senior Labour councillor to feel compelled to place formally on record.

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What makes the situation even more awkward for Labour is that Cllr Mahmood’s concerns now sit alongside those expressed by Cllr Donaldson. Cllr Donaldson’s resignation initially looked like the departure of a respected councillor frustrated with the direction of travel. Now, viewed through the prism of Cllr Mahmood’s email, it begins to look more like part of a broader pattern. Cllr Donaldson spoke of concerns around bullying, lack of support, internal democracy and the direction of the party. Cllr Mahmood is now asking whether proper alternatives were explored before Labour entered discussions that could have benefited Reform. One councillor leaving can be dismissed as an individual decision. Two respected councillors expressing profound concern over the same political episode becomes much harder to explain away.

The difficulty for Labour is that both Cllr Donaldson and Cllr Mahmood fall into the same category. They are workers. Neither is known for grandstanding. Neither spends their days hunting television cameras. Neither has built a reputation for dramatic public outbursts. These are not the usual suspects. These are precisely the sort of councillors parties normally treasure. Which is why the current situation looks so odd. At a time when Birmingham Labour is already struggling with electoral losses, declining public confidence and growing voter frustration, one might imagine the priority would be retaining experienced and respected local representatives. Instead, one has left and another appears to be heading into a disciplinary process.

There may, of course, be explanations for all of this. Labour may argue that the arithmetic of the AGM left limited options. It may argue that difficult compromises were unavoidable. It may insist that no endorsement of Reform was intended. It may explain that the disciplinary process concerns entirely separate matters. All of those arguments may yet be advanced. But politics is not merely about what happened. Politics is also about what people believe happened. And that is where Labour has a problem. The image now emerging is of a party that appears increasingly comfortable disciplining dissent while becoming increasingly uncomfortable answering questions. That may not be fair. But it is becoming a perception. And perceptions have an unfortunate habit of turning into political realities.

The broader question now facing Birmingham Labour is surprisingly simple. When respected councillors raise concerns, does the party listen? Or does it reach for the disciplinary handbook? Because voters are watching. Party members are watching. Councillors are certainly watching. And somewhere in the middle of all this sits Cllr Majid Mahmood’s email, quietly asking questions that nobody seems especially keen to answer. Perhaps Birmingham Labour has good answers. If so, now would be an excellent time to provide them. Because when grafters start walking away and loyalists start writing letters of conscience, the machine is not demonstrating strength. It is demonstrating strain. And strained machines have a habit of breaking at precisely the moment their owners insist everything is working perfectly.

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There is something rather useful happening on BBC Radio WM. It is beginning, again, to sound like a station that knows Birmingham exists outside press releases, council statements and carefully managed optimism. Ed James has helped with that. He has a way of letting the city speak without wrapping every answer in studio cotton wool. It feels local, alert and alive, which is exactly what Birmingham needs when the city itself appears to be run by people most residents could not pick out of a police line-up, unless the charge was aggravated use of management jargon.

That is why his recent exchange with Professor David Bailey mattered. Bailey made the case that Birmingham’s voters had sent a message for multi-party politics, and that the new Lib Dem, Green, Independent and Better Birmingham arrangement should be given a chance. I call it the GLIBB Pact, partly because it is shorter, partly because it sounds like something formed late at night in a committee room, and partly because it gives the whole thing the necessary Birmingham flavour of hope, confusion and someone asking where the biscuits went.

But we should not overdo the idea that voters directly chose this exact arrangement. Nobody went into the polling booth and found a ballot paper marked: “Please tick here for a rotating progressive municipal coalition with shared executive responsibility and a constitutional migraine.” Voters chose individual councillors. The pact came afterwards. That is still democracy, but it is not quite the same as the city knowingly ordering the full coalition meal deal, including assembly instructions, missing screws and three people claiming to be in charge of planning.

Where Bailey was absolutely right, and where Birmingham should now focus its anger, is on the commissioners. Because this is the real question: who is actually running Birmingham? Not who has the title. Not who gets photographed near the Council House. Not who issues the statement. Who has the power? Who can stop a deal? Who can block a decision? Who can tell elected councillors that democracy is all very charming, but the grown-ups from Whitehall have not finished with the steering wheel?

The commissioners were sent in after Birmingham’s financial collapse. The official language is improvement, intervention, best value and support. But the old imperial smell still hangs in the room. “Commissioner” is a word with a very British aftertaste. It sounds like someone dispatched from Whitehall to inspect the drains, calm the natives, write a stern report, and remind the locals that self-government is a privilege to be restored only when they have learned to keep quiet and file their paperwork correctly.

That may be unfair. But democracy is allowed to be suspicious of unelected power. Especially when that power sits over the largest local authority in the country, takes decisions affecting more than a million people, and communicates with the public in the manner of a locked filing cabinet.

One of those commissioners is Myron Hrycyk. The name may sound, to the untrained Birmingham ear, like a small Welsh village you pass through on the way to Aberystwyth, but it is not. Myron is a Greek-rooted first name, and Hrycyk appears to be Eastern European, most probably Ukrainian or Polish/Ukrainian in origin. More importantly, he is one of the Government-appointed commissioners placed over Birmingham City Council after the city’s financial collapse. He is not a councillor. He was not elected by Birmingham residents. He was appointed from above, and his particular brief is the one that should make every ratepayer’s ears twitch: Oracle, IT, procurement and commercial recovery.

That matters because Oracle is not some minor back-office inconvenience. It is the council’s financial nervous system, and Birmingham’s version appears to have gone through civic life like a drunk electrician with a hammer. Hrycyk was appointed from 5 October 2023 to 4 October 2028, unless the Secretary of State ends the appointment earlier. His appointment letter says he was expected to focus on helping Birmingham rectify its Oracle issues, improve IT and provide commercial insight. In other words, he was sent in with a very specific suitcase: Oracle, technology, procurement and the big machinery of corporate recovery.

On paper, you can see why Whitehall liked him. He had senior experience at Severn Trent. He had been a Cabinet Office Crown Representative for major suppliers including Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. He knew big systems, big contracts and big transformation programmes. He was, in Whitehall language, exactly the sort of person you send when a council has fallen into an Oracle-shaped hole and is shouting up from the bottom asking whether anyone has seen the ladder.

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But Birmingham is entitled to ask the simple question. Has Oracle been fixed? Not improved in a report. Not re-profiled through a programme board. Not turned into a recovery journey with milestones, assurance, senior ownership and enough arrows on a PowerPoint slide to invade Belgium. Fixed. Working. Reliable. Usable. Delivering the basic financial control that a council must have if it is to know what it has spent, what it owes, what it can afford and whether the civic sofa has already been sold to pay for the cushions.

The fair answer is: not in any ordinary public sense. Birmingham has moved towards recovery and reimplementation, but the system did not magically mend because an Oracle specialist commissioner arrived in October 2023. The city is still being asked to wait for the promised cure. That may be serious technical recovery. It may also be the oldest civic product in the Birmingham catalogue: jam tomorrow.

Not ordinary jam, of course. Birmingham civic jam. Jam with governance. Jam with dependencies. Jam with a risk register. Jam that may arrive after another round of patience has been extracted from residents who have already endured service cuts, council tax pain, bins chaos, equal pay fallout, Oracle failure and the strange sensation of being governed by people they did not elect and cannot remove.

This is where Bailey’s attack lands. His language was sharper than mine might be, but the political point is unavoidable. If Birmingham has elected a new administration, that administration cannot spend the next chapter pretending to run the city while commissioners sit behind the curtain holding the actual levers. The GLIBB Pact may be awkward, fresh, fragile and slightly held together with string, but it has one advantage over the commissioners. People voted for its councillors. Nobody in Birmingham voted for a commissioner.

There is also a wider cultural question. Hrycyk came from the privatised utility and big-supplier world: big systems, big budgets, big executive rewards, big promises and a very polished language of transformation. That does not make him responsible for Severn Trent’s environmental record, and it would be unfair to suggest otherwise. He was an IT and procurement figure, not the man personally standing by a pipe with a stopwatch. But Birmingham residents are entitled to ask whether the same managerial culture that promises future efficiency while the public carries present pain is really the culture that should now be sitting above their elected council.

Because this is the deeper democratic problem. Commissioners may be skilled. They may be experienced. They may be decent people doing a difficult job. But they are not accountable to the voters of Birmingham. They are accountable upwards, not outwards. The residents who live with the consequences cannot remove them. The councillors who face the public anger do not fully control them. The city is stuck in a half-democracy, where elected representatives are blamed for outcomes shaped by unelected intervention.

That cannot continue indefinitely. Either councillors are responsible, or commissioners are. Either the new administration is running Birmingham, or it is front-of-house while the real management sits upstairs. Either local democracy has been restored, or it remains in storage somewhere between Whitehall and the Oracle recovery plan.

So here is the respectful suggestion. Myron Hrycyk’s role should now be reviewed. Not abused. Not personalised. Reviewed. If the Oracle commissioner was appointed in October 2023, and Birmingham is still waiting for a clean, functioning recovery years later, then elected councillors should ask whether his work is complete, whether his role remains necessary, and whether the Secretary of State should now end that appointment.

And the same test should apply to the wider commissioner model. What has each commissioner delivered? What remains undone? What powers are they exercising? What are they costing? When does Birmingham get its city back?

The new GLIBB Pact should not waste its democratic moment. It should take its mandate seriously, however imperfectly formed. It should put down a marker that Birmingham cannot be governed forever by remote authority, polite intervention and invisible power. It should demand a timetable for the end of commissioner control, and it should start with the commissioner most visibly tied to the city’s most notorious unresolved technical failure.

The great unwashed may not speak fluent Oracle. They may not know the difference between remediation, reimplementation and civic purgatory with a login screen. But they know when they are being asked to wait. They know when power is being exercised over them. And they know when jam tomorrow has started to smell suspiciously like yesterday’s bin bag.

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There are resignations in politics, dramatic resignations in politics, and then there are the departures that leave people staring into their tea wondering whether they have just witnessed the first crack in a much larger wall.

Cllr Diane Donaldson’s departure from Labour belongs firmly in that last category.

The reason is simple. Political parties can survive losing loudmouths. They can survive losing rebels. They can survive losing ambitious careerists who spend half their lives plotting and the other half briefing against one another. What they struggle to explain is losing the grafters.

The people who quietly turn up, do the work, answer the emails, attend the meetings, sit through endless committees, and generally keep the show on the road while others compete for the best photograph, the best slogan and the most dramatic social media post. And that is precisely why Diane Donaldson’s resignation matters.

Donaldson joined Labour in 2010. Like many members of her generation, she was motivated by a desire to stop the Conservatives rather than by any burning ambition to become a political celebrity. Four years later she was selected to fight Stechford and Yardley North against the Liberal Democrats. She lost. Badly. Most sensible people would have regarded that as a sign from the political gods that there were easier ways to spend their evenings. Gardening perhaps. Amateur dramatics. Collecting stamps. Learning the bass guitar. Anything, in fact, other than knocking on strangers’ doors asking them for votes.

Not Diane.

Like every proper political addict, she dusted herself down and came back for more. In 2016 she stood in Hodge Hill, won comfortably and has remained there ever since. Over the years she developed a reputation for something deeply unfashionable in modern politics: hard work.

Together with fellow councillor Majid Mahmood she became part of what many inside Labour privately regarded as a golden team. While Birmingham Labour was enduring defeats, internal rows and periodic nervous breakdowns, Donaldson and Mahmood simply got on with representing their ward. Residents knew them. Council officers knew them. Problems generally knew them too. If something needed chasing, they chased it. If something needed fixing, they tried fixing it. If somebody needed an answer, they generally got one.

It is not glamorous work. Nobody gets invited onto national television because they successfully resolved a fly-tipping complaint or sorted out a planning issue. Yet local government depends entirely upon people willing to do precisely those things. Donaldson was also Labour Group Treasurer, which sounds rather grand until one discovers the job largely involves pursuing fellow councillors for money they would rather keep in their own bank accounts.

Think less Chancellor of the Exchequer and more dinner lady chasing dinner money from reluctant teenagers.

Councillors are expected to pay a levy into the Labour Group, reportedly around £700 a year, with indications that the figure may rise further. Donaldson discovered that some now former councillors had not paid. Being the sort of person who believes rules should apply equally, she sought support from Labour Group officers to enforce the rules. The support never arrived.

Which left the Treasurer in the curious position of being expected to collect money while simultaneously being denied the authority to ensure everybody paid it. One might describe that as awkward. One might also describe it as absurd.

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Eventually Donaldson resigned as Treasurer.

Then she resigned from Labour altogether.

At that point Birmingham’s political rumour mill sprang into action.

The city’s rumour mill is a magnificent institution. It operates twenty-four hours a day, requires no electricity, and can travel from Victoria Square to Sutton Coldfield faster than broadband. One theory suggested her departure was primarily linked to Labour’s support for Reform during last week’s dramatic council manoeuvrings.

That certainly appears to have been a factor, but it was not, according to Donaldson, the whole story.

Far from it.

She says the Labour Group had previously agreed not to support Reform, only for members to be told the following evening, in short order and under pressure, to vote the other way. Donaldson did so reluctantly, but the decision clearly lodged somewhere deep. The vote happened. The meeting moved on. The political machine clanked forward. Diane went home, did not sleep properly, and by lunchtime the next day had sent her resignation letter.

That is not a tantrum.

That is a conscience finally refusing to be whipped.

Nor was this an isolated irritation. Donaldson describes broader concerns involving bullying, lack of support, internal culture and what she regards as increasingly anti-democratic behaviour both nationally and locally.

She is also concerned about Labour’s refusal to publish a report into Birmingham Labour affairs which, in her view, would shed light on how leaders, leadership teams and councillors have been selected without meaningful consultation with ordinary members.

That point matters because Donaldson is not some ideological revolutionary. She is not plotting to seize control of anything. She is not demanding ministerial office or seeking a grand title. Her instinct has always been rooted in local democracy: the idea that members should have a meaningful voice in decisions affecting their party, that rules should apply equally, and that voters matter.

Radical stuff, apparently.

Then there is Sir Keir Starmer.

Donaldson is not exactly a card-carrying member of his fan club. More importantly, many of her voters are not either. And that worries her.

For a grassroots politician, electoral reality tends to matter more than conference speeches, focus groups or expensive presentations from London consultants earning more money in a month than some families see in a year. If voters are unhappy, local councillors eventually hear about it. Repeatedly. Usually on doorsteps. And often in language unsuitable for family newspapers.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the saga came after her resignation.

Having left Labour, she was apparently encouraged by party officials to consider standing down as a councillor too. This is the normal tired little chant political parties make when one of their elected members leaves. Labour does it. The Conservatives do it. The Liberal Democrats do it. If Reform gets big enough, they will probably do it too, possibly with a flag and a foghorn.

The argument arrives dressed as principle, but usually looks more like a political sulk.

If Labour really believes councillors should automatically lose their seats when they leave a party, it is now in government and could try changing the law. It will not, because everyone knows the electorate elects the individual as well as the rosette.

Whether Labour genuinely believes it could retain Hodge Hill in a by-election is another question. Yet some officials may be deluded enough to think so. Otherwise why encourage Donaldson to stand down?

Donaldson is not a decorative badge pinned to a red rosette. She has spent years building relationships and delivering casework. If Labour believes voters will automatically choose the machine over the woman who has done the work, someone needs to open a window and inhale some actual Birmingham air.

Meanwhile Majid Mahmood, her long-time colleague and political ally, faces his own difficulties within Labour. Whether he remains in the party remains to be seen. Politics is a strange business. Yesterday’s loyalist becomes today’s dissident. Today’s rebel becomes tomorrow’s elder statesman.

As for Diane Donaldson, the world appears very much her oyster.

She could remain independent. She could join another grouping. She could align with former Labour councillors such as Sam Forsyth and Martin Brookes, good people both, who left Labour on grounds of principle and continue serving their communities after being elected as independents. She could even decide that party labels matter less than representing local residents.

Whatever she chooses, one fact remains.

Labour has not simply lost a councillor.

It has lost one of its workers.

And when an organisation starts losing the people who quietly keep the wheels turning, sensible observers do not ask what is wrong with the individual.

They start asking what is wrong with the machine.

That, more than any resignation letter, may be the question Birmingham Labour now has to answer.

For the avoidance of doubt: Cllr Donaldson remains a councillor for Hodge Hill an independent councillor.

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There is a simple democratic test for Birmingham now. Can any resident name a commissioner? Can any resident contact a commissioner? Can any resident question a commissioner? Can any resident vote a commissioner out of office? If the answer is no, or even “not without a torch and a cousin in Whitehall”, then Birmingham does not merely have a financial crisis, a bin crisis, a housing crisis or a political crisis. It has a democracy crisis wearing a sensible suit.

That is why former council leader John Clancy’s intervention on Sarah Julian’s excellent early morning BBC Radio WM show matters. Not because John is having a pop at Tony McArdle. That is the easy version. Old politics. Old wounds. Old Labour. Old rows. In John’s case, an old brain operating like a civic filing system with an espresso machine attached.

Birmingham has just had an election. Labour was heavily rejected. The city now has a Liberal Democrat leader, Roger Harmer, a Green deputy leader, Julian Pritchard, and a loose arrangement of Lib Dems, Greens, Better Birmingham and independents. For convenience, and because Birmingham politics is already ridiculous enough, I shall call it the GLIBB Pact: Greens, Liberal Democrats, Independents and Better Birmingham.

The GLIBB Pact now has the visible authority of office: cabinet, speeches, smiling officers and even applause, which in Birmingham civic life is usually reserved for retirements, funerals and the rare moment someone finds the correct agenda. What it may not yet have is power. That was Clancy’s point. Birmingham residents voted one way, but unelected Labour-appointed commissioners remain, still shaping the city. That goes to the heart of local democracy.

Nobody serious pretends Birmingham City Council has been a model of civic excellence. “Oracle”, “equal pay”, “bin strike”, “bankruptcy” and “temporary accommodation” do not exactly form a municipal hymn. But intervention must not become occupation. Commissioners are not councillors. They do not knock doors in Bartley Green, Erdington, Alum Rock or Northfield. They do not stand in draughty halls seeking votes. They do not get chased about missed bins, damp flats, flytipping, potholes or why council tax keeps rising while parts of the city look lightly abandoned.

They are appointed from above, report upwards and exercise influence sideways. The ordinary citizen is left peering through the municipal fog asking: who are these people and where is complaints? At the annual meeting, after Harmer had been elected leader, I congratulated a senior councillor. I then offered advice, because I am nothing if not shy and retiring. I said: now do something. So I suggested a modest start. Build some council houses.

Not a taskforce. Not a seminar. Not a glossy strategy with a child on the cover and a foreword nobody reads. Actual council houses. Bricks. Mortar. Front doors. Homes where families are not moved around like unwanted furniture. This is rather more important than waging holy war on the motorist or holding another civic conversation about flags.

The Liberal Democrats said in their manifesto that the council must urgently speed up social housing, prioritising it over so-called affordable housing, often affordable only to people with the income of a minor royal. Another part of the GLIBB Pact put it plainly: social housing, not luxury flats. Council-owned land should be used for social rent homes. That was the Greens. Either way, the commitment is there. Social housing. Not warm words. Not “affordable” homes with a gym and a rent that requires a hedge fund.

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When I raised this, the reply came back that permission would be needed. Permission? That made my ears stand up like a municipal meerkat. Permission from whom? If the answer is the commissioners, Birmingham’s new political leadership has a problem. If elected representatives cannot push social housing without unelected commissioners leaning over the balcony of power like imperial prefects, what exactly did Birmingham vote for?

At this point I suggested no confidence in the commissioners. Naturally, this was the moment I noticed the Lead Commissioner sitting rather close by in the public gallery. You may care to insert a “whoops” here. I did not feel the need. I do not withdraw the point. I would sharpen it.

Three years on, what has this intervention delivered that residents can feel? You could argue it has got worse. The bins remain a public humiliation. Housing remains desperate. Temporary accommodation remains a civic wound. The city remains unsure where real authority lies. And they have cost us millions of our pounds to boot. Why?

If commissioners exercise public power, they must be publicly reachable. If they shape decisions, they must explain themselves. If they set the boundaries for elected councillors, residents should know who drew them. At the weekend, I submitted a Freedom of Information request asking Birmingham City Council for the business email address, postal address and contact arrangements for the commissioners. I also asked how public correspondence to commissioners is received, forwarded, acknowledged or answered.

I did this because the commissioners appear to hide away, with no clear public contact details on the council website. Let us see what comes back. To be clear, I am not asking for private home addresses or personal details. I am asking for public contact arrangements attached to public functions exercised over a public authority, paid for by the public. That should not require a treasure map, a séance or a retired permanent secretary.

There is something almost Victorian about the arrangement. The commissioners appear, issue letters, attend meetings, shape decisions, pronounce on improvement and retreat into the official fog. Their names are published. Their reports are published. Their fees may be listed, but the true costs are another matter. That is another Freedom of Information request I am waiting on. Accessibility is not the same as existence. A lighthouse is visible. That does not mean you can ask it why your bins have not been collected.

Democracy only means something if the people who win office can govern, and those who govern can be held to account. The commissioners may say they are necessary. They may even be right. But necessity is not a blank cheque. A city cannot be told to vote, then told the real decisions are elsewhere. A new administration cannot be told to lead, then need permission to move. Residents cannot be told to trust a system they cannot see, question or remove.

So here is the test for the GLIBB Pact. Do not manage decline politely. Do not inherit Labour’s mess, wear a nicer tie and call it renewal. Do not spend the next year saying nothing can be done because permission is required from people most residents could not pick out in a bus queue. Put the question openly. Who runs Birmingham?

If it is the elected council, then govern. If it is the commissioners, let them come out from the shadows, publish their contact arrangements, answer residents directly and explain why they still need to hold the reins after voters threw the old riders off the horse. And if nobody can name them, contact them, question them or vote them out, then Birmingham should say so plainly.

That is not democracy. That is remote control government. After everything this city has been through, Birmingham deserves better than being run by people whose greatest political skill appears to be staying just out of reach. At that point, our elected representatives should jolly well put a vote of no confidence in them before we, the great unwashed, and I am sorry, I know it is early days, but life goes on apace, put one in the GLIBB Pact.

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The annual meeting of Birmingham City Council began on a sombre note at 18.07, with a minute’s silence for Henry Nowak, the 18-year-old Southampton student whose murder has shocked the country.

Only after that moment of reflection did Birmingham return to its more familiar civic pastime: attempting to work out who was actually going to run Britain’s largest local authority.

The Lord Mayor arrived fashionably late, nominations were made and then, almost immediately, proceedings were suspended for twenty minutes while councillors disappeared into corners, huddles and whispered conversations. It was less House of Commons and more school disco, with everyone trying to work out who was talking to whom.

When councillors re-emerged, Roger Harmer looked relaxed and cheerful. Robert Alden looked rather more serious. Labour members gathered in an informal meeting on the chamber floor before breaking up with smiles on their faces. Several quietly indicated they intended to abstain.

The city solicitor eventually took charge. Each candidate would get five minutes before councillors were called individually to vote.

Cllr Roger Harmer, Liberal Democrat, went first. Reading from prompts, he spoke of working together, getting Birmingham back on track and focusing on the things residents actually care about. Clean streets. Potholes. Antisocial behaviour. Fixing the bin strike through fair and reasonable negotiations. Less rhetoric, more action. It was a disciplined and thoughtful speech that landed well around the chamber. I clapped.

Cllr Robert Alden, Conservative, followed. Echoing a phrase often used by his late father John, a decent man and former councillor himself, he described Birmingham’s council chamber as the greatest democratic forum outside Westminster. He attacked years of failure, called for action rather than excuses and focused heavily on the bin strike, poor housing, HMOs, green spaces, Oracle and antisocial behaviour. His most interesting proposal was to devolve more funding to ward councillors so local representatives could actually solve local problems. In a city as vast as Birmingham, it was a point that found some sympathy. I clapped.

Then came Reform UK’s Cllr Jex Parkin. Delivering a confident and rather good maiden speech, he argued that Birmingham needed change rather than political posturing. Reform, as the largest opposition party, should be given the opportunity to tackle decline and restore confidence in local services. Whether members agreed or not, it was an assured performance from a newcomer.

Then came the vote. The city solicitor read out each councillor’s name and they shouted back who they were voting for.

The Greens, Liberal Democrats and independents largely lined up behind Harmer. Conservatives backed Alden. Labour mostly abstained. Most Reform councillors voted for Parkin.

One Labour wag, Cllr Majid Mahmood, shouted out his vote for Andy Burnham.

This created a slight constitutional difficulty, principally because the Mayor of Greater Manchester is not currently a Birmingham councillor and had shown no obvious intention of becoming one. I am not sure whether Labour could find a councillor willing to stand down for him.

The vote was therefore treated as an abstention.

The final result was Harmer 40, Alden 19 and Parkin 18.

And with that, Roger Harmer became the first Liberal Democrat leader in Birmingham City Council’s history.

The chamber then adjourned.

Again.

During the break I congratulated the new leader and may, entirely accidentally, have offered an unfiltered observation regarding one of the Labour Government-appointed commissioners. Unfortunately for me, the commissioner in question, the lead commissioner indeed, was sitting directly above in the public gallery.

Readers may insert their own “whoops” at this point.

Eventually the bell rang for councillors to return. Remarkably, a round of applause broke out around the chamber. The Lord Mayor reappeared accompanied by smiling officers carrying fresh paperwork. In Birmingham local government that is usually a sign that either a breakthrough has been achieved or somebody has finally located the correct agenda.

Harmer then announced a cabinet. it was at this point he announced Cllr Julian Pritchard as the councils new Deputy Leader. Sealing a large part of the new compact. The cabinet was also announced. That drew members from across the city’s three principal political groups, the Lib Dem’s, Greens, Better Birmingham along with other independents, an acknowledgement perhaps that in a hung council nobody gets everything they want and everybody has to live with somebody they would rather not.

For now at least, Birmingham has a leader and a leadership.

After months of bin strikes, political deadlock, anonymous briefings, public rows and enough manoeuvring to keep a chess club occupied until Christmas, that alone felt like an achievement.

Whether the new arrangement lasts is another question entirely.

This is Birmingham, after all.

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The evidence also has its moments of accidental theatre. In this strange legal world, people are not always identified by name. Instead, the council evidence follows them through clothing, video footage and repeated appearances. One protester becomes “Mr Greybuff”, apparently because of a grey face covering. Another becomes “Mr Camouflage”. There is also a gentleman with a distinctive cane, shoes and jacket. It is not quite Dickens. It is more like civil procedure after a collision with a depot CCTV compilation.

But the point is serious. The council was trying to show continuity. It was not saying, “Here is a random crowd.” It was saying, “Here are some of the same people, turning up repeatedly, moving between sites, and shifting the pressure point when the injunction made Birmingham harder ground.”

That is where Coventry becomes important. The court accepted that the February injunction had worked in Birmingham. There was no evidence of breach within the city after it was made. But the council then pointed to protest activity at Tom White’s Ryton depot in Coventry, outside the reach of the Birmingham order, where Tom White was providing waste support to Birmingham. According to the council’s evidence, one video included wording to the effect that the council had obtained an injunction to stop protests in Birmingham, but Coventry was not included.

That was powerful evidence for the council. It allowed them to say: the injunction stopped disruption here, but the pressure moved there. If the order lapses, it will come back here.

The judge accepted that logic. The injunction was extended until 20 November 2026, final determination of the claim, or further order, whichever comes first. The council’s wider claim seeks relief until 1 January 2028. That date matters. This is not merely a quick emergency shove to keep the depot gates clear for a fortnight. Within days of the February order being sealed, the council applied to amend its claim form to specify that it wanted injunctive relief until 1 January 2028. That is a long legal horizon. Not quite the Hundred Years’ War, admittedly, but in bin strike terms it is not exactly a passing shower either.

The council would say this is necessary. It would say residents have suffered missed collections, waste build-up, increased fly tipping, environmental risk and large extra costs. The Particulars of Claim refer to tens of thousands of missed collections and more than £400,000 in January 2026 overtime and additional resource costs. A city has to collect waste. Clinical waste is not a debating society. Missed collections are not a romantic expression of civic dissent when rubbish starts piling up outside people’s homes.

But there is another revealing part of the council’s case. It was plainly not satisfied with the police response.

In the council’s pleaded case, West Midlands Police had allegedly allowed protesters to remain for hours because of their interpretation of protest law. Lots of people think the police do not do a proper job from time to time, usually after a stolen bike, a noisy neighbour, or an online fraud report disappears into the national filing cabinet of despair. The difference here is that Birmingham City Council managed to turn its dissatisfaction with policing into evidence before a High Court judge.

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That is quite a thing. Two public authorities, both theoretically on the same civic side, and yet the council’s case effectively says: the police did not give us the operational protection we needed, so we came to court.

You would not necessarily know from the polite legal language that anyone had fallen out. There is no slammed door. No municipal handbags. No chief officer shouting across Lloyd House car park. But the meaning is clear enough. The council wanted protesters moved more quickly. The police were apparently not prepared to do that. So the council asked the High Court to put things right.

And, from the council’s point of view, the judge did.

That does not make the injunction wrong. It does make the governance question sharper. The law is now being used to define the practical boundary of solidarity protest in an industrial dispute. The injunction does not ban protest, but it does create a contempt-risk zone around the places where protest has maximum operational effect. A protest that has no effect is not always much of a protest. A protest that has too much effect may become an unlawful blockade. Somewhere between those two sits the battered British compromise, wearing a hi-vis jacket and looking for a toilet.

This is why the story is not simply “Labour council crushes protest”. It began under Labour, yes. But it now belongs to a wider system: officers, external lawyers, commissioners, police frustration, High Court judges, trade union strategy, activist networks and the long shadow of Birmingham’s collapsing civic governance.

The bins are the visible issue. The deeper issue is power. Who holds it when an elected administration falls away? Who owns a legal strategy when the political leadership changes? When does public service protection become protest management? When does solidarity become obstruction? When does a temporary injunction become long-term architecture?

And when a new leadership team arrives at 6pm on a Friday, how much of Birmingham is actually waiting to be led, and how much has already been placed inside legal, financial and commissioner-shaped tramlines?

Birmingham has not banned protest. But it has built a legal perimeter around the places where protest bites hardest. The High Court has accepted that, for now, the perimeter is justified. The council has shown the machinery behind it: legal officers, DLA Piper, witness statements, depot notices, social media posts, process servers, finance sign-off and commissioner support.

It is all very public. It is also very heavy. The documents are online, but reading them feels less like civic transparency and more like being invited to assemble a wardrobe from legal plywood while someone shouts “Article 11” through the letterbox.

Still, the story is clear enough.

Birmingham’s bin strike has entered its High Court phase. The council says activists filled the space left by Unite’s injunction. The court says the risk remains. The officers say the legal process is properly notified. The finance officer says the council can meet the damages risk. The commissioners are supportive. The police, it seems, were not moving fast enough for the council’s liking. The politicians, as ever, are somewhere between a press statement, a private briefing and a future meeting.

And the rest of us are left staring at the municipal spectacle: a city in democratic fog, a legal machine still moving, and a bin lorry waiting at the gate while Mr Greybuff becomes part of English civil procedure.

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There is a photograph of the Perry Barr Commonwealth Games flats that does something rather inconvenient. It makes the place look good. Really good, in fact. Handsome apartment blocks, clean paving, careful landscaping, proper balconies, neat planting and the sort of modern finish that normally appears in glossy regeneration brochures just before somebody from the council uses the word “transformational” and everyone in the room quietly loses the will to live.

But here is the thing. It is handsome. It is solid. It is clearly built to a high standard. It is not the usual beige box of apologetic municipal housing, flung up with all the architectural imagination of a filing cabinet. These flats look as if somebody cared about design, materials and finish. They look expensive because they were expensive. They look high specification because they are high specification. They look, in short, like housing that did not begin from the grim assumption that ordinary people should be grateful for whatever they are given, so long as the roof does not actually fall in before the defects period expires.

And on that point, bravo.

Because nothing is too good for the working class. Nothing. Not decent brickwork. Not proper balconies. Not attractive public space. Not paving that looks like somebody chose it rather than apologised for it. Not a place where a person can step outside their front door and feel they live somewhere that has been designed, not merely processed. The old attitude, still hanging around some corners of British public life like damp in a cellar, is that entry-level housing should look entry-level. Utility blocks for utility people. Keep it cheap, keep it plain, keep expectations under control. Well, no. Good homes are not a luxury prize for the already comfortable. They are the foundation of a civilised city.

So let us be fair. The Perry Barr flats themselves are not the villain of this story. The buildings in the photographs look good. The setting looks good. The public realm looks good. If the argument were simply whether Birmingham should ever build good quality homes for people who are not already swimming through inherited wealth and artisan coffee, the answer is yes, yes, and yes again.

The awkwardness is that Perry Barr does not look like a failure. It looks like a success that has had its balance sheet mugged in a side street. It looks like the disaster put on a clean shirt, straightened its tie and turned up at the auditors hoping nobody would ask about the numbers. It is finished. It is shiny. It is resplendent. It is the sort of place that can photograph beautifully while quietly carrying a financial headache in the basement, sobbing into a council lanyard.

The Commonwealth Games themselves were magnificent. I went to the opening ceremony. I went to the closing ceremony. I saw almost nothing in between, which is possibly the purest Birmingham way to experience an international sporting event, but I was proud. Birmingham looked alive. Birmingham looked confident. Birmingham looked like a city that had remembered it was allowed to enjoy itself without first submitting a risk assessment to a directorate of managed enthusiasm.

There was also, at the time, a feeling that Birmingham had stepped up almost as a favour to the Government. The Commonwealth mattered. The late Queen cared deeply about it. The country needed the Games to happen. Birmingham, with all its usual muddle, swagger and civic appetite, looked at a large complicated challenge and said: go on then, we’ll have a bash. There was also the understanding, spoken or unspoken, that Government would be paying the bill. And this, of course, is where local government becomes like a man in a hotel bar with somebody else’s credit card. At first it is one glass of house red. Then it is the second bottle. Then it is a cheese board, a brandy, a suite upgrade and a speculative conversation about whether the hotel might sell him the piano.

If someone else is footing the bill, half-cocked ideas begin to look like statesmanship. An athletes’ village? Excellent. A housing legacy? Even better. New homes, new streets, new public realm, new confidence. Wonderful. Who could object? Only a miserable person, and Birmingham had enough misery without importing more of it.

The problem is that the word “legacy” is one of those words that arrives carrying a clipboard and leaves with your wallet.

I remember writing about the Games legacy for the Birmingham Mail and finding it hard work. I was proud of the Games. I wanted them to work. I was not going to sit there while Birmingham was having a rare moment of civic delight and announce, “Excuse me, everybody, but I suspect some of this legacy talk may be municipal blancmange.” That would have been rude. Also, nobody likes the person who turns up at a party with a spreadsheet, especially when they are probably right.

But the actual legacy argument was thin. There was uplift, regeneration, opportunity, skills, pride, visibility, confidence and all the usual words that appear when nobody wants to say: “We are hoping this all works out somehow.”

Perhaps that is because we have become embarrassed by enjoyment. We cannot simply say: the Games were magnificent, we loved them, they lifted the city, and sometimes a great civic moment is worth having because people need joy as well as bin collections. No, we have to dress pleasure in the grey cardigan of accountancy. We must have outcomes. We must have metrics. We must have legacy units. We must have an economic impact assessment with a foreword by somebody called the Director of Inclusive Acceleration.

We are a bunch of silly sausages. We cannot even enjoy ourselves without trying to put the fun through procurement.

The original idea sounded grand enough. A Games village. Athletes. Flags. Commonwealth sparkle. Then, after the medals had been awarded and the television cameras had gone away, the village would become housing. A perfect story. Sport into homes. Celebration into legacy. Running tracks into front doors. Civic poetry with planning consent.

Except the athletes did not end up living there for the Games. The village became a village without the villagers. A Games village that missed the Games is not so much a legacy as a very expensive case of arriving at the station after the train has left, waving a commemorative ticket.

Then came the street names.

The new Perry Barr roads were not simply named after local history, old landmarks, Birmingham characters, lost factories, athletes, musicians, reformers, workers, inventors, pubs, churches, farms or the sort of actual human material from which places normally get their memory. No. They were given names that sound as if a council equalities workshop escaped from a flipchart and started issuing postcodes.

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Diversity Grove. Equality Road. Destiny Road. Inspire Avenue. Respect Way. Humanity Close.

Humanity Close. Imagine giving that address to your car insurer.

“Yes, that’s Humanity Close.”

“Sorry, did you say Humanity Close?”

“Yes.”

“And is that near Reality Bypass?”

The council said the names came from a competition. Well, perhaps they did. A competition, maybe, but one suspects not the sort of competition in which Virtue Signalling Avenue would have been allowed anywhere near the shortlist. Which is a shame, because if the public had been given a proper open vote, Virtue Signalling Avenue would have won by a landslide, followed closely by Pious Close, Committee Crescent, Inclusivity Mews and Please Applaud Our Values Way.

That is the trouble with civic consultation when it becomes theatre. The public is invited to participate, but only inside the vocabulary already approved by the people running the show. It is democracy with stabilisers, a public vote in which the public is gently steered away from anything too funny, too honest or too likely to win.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with diversity, equality, respect or humanity. They are good things. But once you staple them to road signs, they stop sounding like values and start sounding like the stationery cupboard has developed a conscience. It is not placemaking. It is slogan deployment.

And then, gloriously, beautifully, inevitably, came the cars.

Look closely at the photographs. The flats may have been designed in the spirit of modern urban planning, but the residents have brought their own reality with them. Cars are there. Cars are parked wherever they can be fitted. In bays, on edges, along roads, tucked into corners, squeezed into the built environment like common sense forcing its way through a policy document.

The public, as usual, has listened politely to the sermon, nodded in the right places, gone home, and done what it needed to do.

This is where Perry Barr becomes more than a story about housing. It becomes a story about the governing class and its little fantasies. For years, politicians and planners have grown increasingly anti-car in tone, while remaining, in many cases, deeply fond of their own vehicles. The public are told they do not need cars. There is a railway station over the road. There are buses. The future is walkable, sustainable, connected, integrated and probably wearing ethically sourced trainers.

Then real life arrives.

People have jobs in places not conveniently arranged around a transport strategy. People have children. People have elderly relatives. People have shopping. People have late shifts. People have weekend commitments. People have hospital appointments, football matches, school runs, tools, bags, pushchairs, rain, tired legs and relatives in places where the bus service appears once every seventeen years under a blood moon.

So they buy a car.

That is not selfishness. That is not moral failure. That is not a refusal to embrace the future. That is life refusing to be laminated.

The same political world that imagines car ownership can be designed out by aspiration also seems surprised when the cars do not vanish. They lurk. They gather. They occupy. They appear in photographs like a peaceful uprising of hatchbacks.

This is the democratic genius of the British public. They may not march. They may not write consultation responses. They may not attend cabinet meetings, largely because life is too short and most cabinet meetings feel like a punishment for crimes committed in a previous existence. But give them a development with too few parking spaces and they will conduct civil resistance one Ford Focus at a time.

Even the police car in the photograph finds a spot. There is a whole sermon in that police car. The state itself has turned up at the state’s own anti-car sermon and parked outside.

Marvellous.

This is not an argument against public transport. Good public transport is essential. Birmingham needs better buses, better trains, safer walking routes, proper cycling routes and genuine integration. But good public transport gives people choices. Bad ideology removes them and then congratulates itself for doing so.

And this, perhaps, is the real Perry Barr lesson. The flats may be good homes. They may be very good homes. In appearance, finish and ambition, they may even be better than the sort of housing too many people assume is “good enough” for those starting out, renting, working, saving, struggling, rebuilding or simply trying to get a decent place to live in a difficult city. On that, I will not sneer. I will cheer. Build well. Build beautifully. Build for dignity. Build as if ordinary people matter, because they do.

The problem is not that the buildings are too good. The problem is that the thinking around them was too smug. The problem is not quality. The problem is fantasy. The problem is not that working people got handsome flats. The problem is that civic leaders wrapped a complicated housing and finance gamble in Games bunting, gave the roads the names of motivational fridge magnets, underplayed the reality of car ownership, and then seemed surprised when real people turned up with real lives.

A Games village became a housing legacy. A housing legacy became a financial problem. A financial problem became a political embarrassment. A set of streets became a vocabulary test. A planning theory became a parking problem. And through it all, the ordinary resident turned up with the one thing the theory had tried to airbrush away.

A car.

Perry Barr looks built. The business case looks demolished. The legacy looks complicated. The road names look like a diversity seminar got lost on the way to the stationery cupboard. The parking looks like the public quietly sticking two fingers up at the idea that their lives can be planned by people who confuse aspiration with infrastructure.

Still, let us be fair. The Games were wonderful. Birmingham was wonderful. The city shone. We should do big things again. We should host, build, celebrate and occasionally behave as if we are more than a spreadsheet with potholes.

But next time, perhaps we should be honest. If we want a party, call it a party. If we want homes, build the homes people actually need. If we want quality, do not apologise for quality. If we want public transport, make it good enough that people choose it, not so mediocre that politicians have to bully them into pretending it works. And if we want to name new streets, for heaven’s sake let the public have a proper go.

Because I still maintain Virtue Signalling Avenue would have won.

By miles.

Probably in a car.

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I have seen a fair few politicians in my time. Some very good ones. Some bright, warm, engaging people who understand that politics is not just about winning a seat, making a speech, or collecting a title. It is about people, streets, families, small businesses, pride, pressure, loyalty, grievance, memory and place. I have also seen a few, at council level, where you are left wondering how on earth they convinced a party selection panel to put them forward, and why on earth the electorate then completed the transaction. There are always a few fag-end politicians knocking around local government, along with the occasional bright spark who reminds you why local democracy, for all its absurdities, still matters.

This week I had the immense pleasure of meeting one of the bright ones: Nosheen Khalid, the brand-new councillor for Alum Rock. I knew her father. His name was Khalid Mahmood, not the Khalid Mahmood who became an MP, but another Khalid Mahmood from that fascinating era of inner-city Birmingham politics when the Justice for Kashmir councillors emerged in the 1990s and took a whole sway of Labour seats. They were led by the venerable Allah Ditta, or Allan as I knew him back in the 1980s, when we were both businessmen in Small Heath.

Mr Ditta ran a wedding hall. I was opposite him with my engineering works. Between us, that little piece of Small Heath was reasonably well marshalled. He was a serious man, a community man, and a man who understood something Labour should have understood much earlier: that people do not like being treated as electoral cannon fodder. That, in truth, was one of the great mistakes Labour made with Birmingham’s Kashmiri communities. Too often, it patronised them. Too often, it expected obedience. Too often, it assumed loyalty was automatic, endless and owed. When communities did not behave as meekly as the party machine expected, Labour seemed more irritated than reflective.

Mr Ditta got annoyed with that attitude. So he did something about it. Justice for Kashmir, which became known as JFK, did not just complain from the sidelines. It won seats. It hurt Labour. It sent a message. Yet it seems Labour learned rather less from that episode than it should have done, because here we are again, decades later, watching independents, Greens and Reform UK all taking chunks out of Labour’s local standing. If Labour had learned even a little more from Mr Ditta, it might still be in charge of Birmingham City Council. But political machines are very good at mistaking habit for strength. They confuse inherited votes with earned respect. Then one day the votes go missing, and everybody starts pretending to be surprised.

Nosheen Khalid sits in that long and rather important Birmingham tradition. She is modern, but she is not rootless. She is independent, but not detached. She is political, but not synthetic. She is, in the best sense, a woman of a place. I took her at face value, which is usually the best way to start with people. She wears a headscarf and presents as very Islamic. That puts me off not one jot. Quite the opposite, really. What came across almost immediately was a wonderful smile, a natural warmth, and a kind of radiating confidence that does not need to shout to be noticed.

There are, of course, cultural differences. Birmingham is full of cultural differences. That is not the problem. The problem is usually the people who either pretend those differences do not exist, or treat them as suspicious. What I found in Nosheen was someone who loves Birmingham, loves Alum Rock, and feels entirely at home in the place she now represents. She adores it. That matters. Not in some dreamy tourist-board way. Not in a “isn’t everything lovely” way. She knows Alum Rock needs cleaning up. In fact, she places that at the top of her list. Cleaner streets. Housing. Youth services. That is not a manifesto written by a policy officer trying to impress a committee. That is the list you get from someone who has knocked the doors, listened properly, and understood what life feels like at pavement level.

Cleaner streets should not be revolutionary. It should not require a political uprising. It should not require independent councillors, community campaigns, outrage, leaflets, door-knocking and endless pressure just to get the basics done. Yet in Birmingham, basics have somehow become advanced governance. I asked Nosheen why on earth council officials on lovely salaries, with some at director level enjoying six-figure pay and aristocratic pensions, have to be told that streets should be clean. It is not a trick question. The public pay for a service. The service should be delivered. Bins should be emptied. Streets should not look abandoned. Residents should not have to beg for the most basic signs of civic respect.

Clearly, though, some people in the system do need telling. More than once. Possibly with a loud voice and a very firm stare. I get the impression that with Nosheen around, a few officials may begin to understand that doing the job at a basic level is not optional. It is the minimum. It would appear that previous occupants of the councillor role in Alum Rock did not quite get this clean-streets thing right. Well, they are history now. I put it bluntly to Nosheen that she has a few years to sort matters out. I suspect she will. And I would add this: as much as I enjoyed my time with Nosheen, and I did, very much, I would not want to get on the wrong side of this sweet lady. She is lovely company. She is warm. She is engaging. But there is steel there. The smile is real, but so is the spine.

Housing may prove harder. It always does. Every party talks about housing. Labour talks about housing. The Liberal Democrats talk about housing. The Greens talk about housing. Conservatives talk about housing. Everybody has a document, a policy, a pledge, a vision, a framework, a strategy, an action plan, a taskforce, and possibly a stakeholder conversation with sandwiches. Yet too often, the lived reality does not move. Families remain squeezed. Streets absorb badly managed HMOs. Good landlords get lumped in with bad ones. Bad landlords exploit weak enforcement. Communities are told change is coming, while the paper mountain grows and the practical results remain thin.

That is where Nosheen interests me. When I challenged her on housing, there was a sparkle in her eye. I do not yet know whether she has a plan, or whether she and her colleagues in Better Birmingham have the makings of one. But I got the sense that she understands the difference between talking about housing and doing something about the conditions people actually live in. There is a world of difference between a policy document and a door that locks properly. Between a council strategy and a family not having to live in overcrowded rooms. Between a housing conference and a street that does not feel as if official Birmingham has given up on it. That is the practical ground on which councillors such as Nosheen will be tested.

The same applies to youth services. At first glance, people can reduce that phrase to something small: a youth worker, a hall on a Tuesday evening, a few activities, a bit of diversion. But that undersells the issue. Youth services, when properly understood, run across almost everything. Safety. Confidence. Skills. Belonging. Identity. Education. Crime prevention. Ambition. The ladder of life. A child or teenager with somewhere to go, someone to trust, and something useful to do is not a soft social extra. It is basic civic infrastructure. It is as real as roads, drains and streetlights. Nosheen seems to understand that. Her list is short, but it is not shallow. Cleaner streets. Housing. Youth services. Those are not decorative issues. They are the front line of urban government.

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Nosheen is herself a former Labour figure. She is now independent. She is also part of Better Birmingham, a grouping of like-minded inner-core independent councillors who have emerged from communities Labour once assumed it could rely upon without too much effort, too much listening, or too much respect. What makes the group particularly interesting is that many of them appear to have come through Labour at some stage. They are not outsiders who never understood the Labour machine. They are people who knew it from the inside, worked within it, believed in parts of it, and then found themselves bruised, pushed aside, patronised or, in their view, badly treated by it. That gives Better Birmingham a particular edge. It is not simply anti-Labour noise from the margins. It is Labour’s own inner-city inheritance talking back to it.

That matters because Birmingham Labour’s problem is not just policy. It is culture. Too many people who should have been listened to appear to have been managed, disciplined, selected against, spoken down to, or taken for granted. In wards such as Alum Rock, where politics is deeply local and memory is long, people notice. They remember who turned up, who disappeared, who treated them with warmth, and who treated them as voting stock to be rounded up at election time. Better Birmingham seems to have drawn strength from that resentment, but also from something more hopeful: the idea that independent councillors rooted in their own neighbourhoods might get closer to the basics than a large party machine which has forgotten how to hear the streets beneath its own slogans.

From what Nosheen told me, Labour pushed her around, and that was a mistake. You do not do that to this woman. She is not for pushing, unless you are happy to receive the push back. Labour got it. I was also struck by what she told me about the campaign against her and her colleagues. I am not going to pretend I investigated every leaflet, whisper, doorstep claim or political manoeuvre, but one allegation does need calling out plainly. The suggestion that her colleague, now Councillor Shaukat Mahmood, could not speak English was not just absurd. If that was said as reported, it was racist. There is no pleasant form of racism, and it does not become cleaner, cleverer or more acceptable because it is Asian upon Asian, or because it comes wrapped in local political rivalry rather than shouted from the far right. Racism is racism. If someone tries to diminish a candidate by suggesting he cannot speak the language of the country he plainly belongs to, and plainly serves, then they are not making a serious political argument. They are reaching for a dirty old weapon.

For the record, Shaukat speaks perfectly good English, as one would expect from any well-adjusted Englishman. Nosheen, as a delightfully adjusted Englishwoman, speaks perfect English too, along with a few other languages. I only speak one. So perhaps the language test, if there is to be one, should not be aimed at people such as Nosheen and Shaukat, but at those who still cannot speak the basic democratic language of respect. Birmingham is full of accents, histories, faiths, families, migrations and memories. That is not a weakness. It is the city. Those who try to turn that complexity into a smear usually end up telling us rather more about themselves than about their target.

Nosheen also told me that at least fourteen fake or false social media accounts have been created in her name, or around her identity, by people who are plainly not members of her fan club. I have not counted them myself, but if accurate, that is quite something. I can only recall one such site being created in my name over the years, so I confess to being a little jealous. What am I doing wrong? Fourteen in a matter of months suggests Nosheen has made quite an entrance. But beneath the joke sits a darker point. Fake accounts, impersonation, smear pages and spiteful online nonsense have become part of the miserable modern furniture of politics, especially local politics, where personal grievance often dresses itself up as public concern. So perhaps this is her formal welcome to public office: the doors have been knocked, the votes counted, the abuse started, and the fake accounts multiplied. Welcome to the chamber, Councillor Khalid.

Many years ago, former councillor Mike Wilkes, who was an SDP campaigner in the 1980s, gave me advice when I was a very young fellow-me-lad. He said: “Just concentrate on your own campaign.” He was right. That is exactly what Nosheen did. She knocked doors. She delivered leaflets. She reached people. She got to the hearts and minds of her now constituents. While others were apparently making claims, muttering, briefing, accusing and playing games, she got on with the oldest and most effective form of local politics: she asked people for their vote, face to face. There is still nothing quite like it.

This Friday, the council meets to carve up positions, allowances, titles, offices and committee places. That is always a revealing moment. Local government loves its furniture. Chairs, vice chairs, board memberships, outside bodies, portfolios, allowances, nameplates, status. There will be much calculation and plenty of self-importance. My guess is that Nosheen may not get high office. New independents rarely walk straight into the grandest rooms. But Alum Rock may still do well out of it, because representation is not only about titles. Sometimes a ward benefits most from a councillor who is hungry, rooted, visible and impatient.

Nosheen has ruffled feathers getting where she is. No doubt she will ruffle a few more, along with her colleagues in Better Birmingham. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Birmingham has had far too much political smoothness, far too much machine management, far too much taking people for granted. History tells us that Mr Ditta and JFK bloomed for a few years, then faded as Labour won matters back. Mr Ditta has passed on. He lived good years, served Birmingham well, and left behind a lesson that the city’s political class should have remembered more carefully. God Bless you Mr Ditta.

Nosheen Khalid and her Better Birmingham colleagues may yet last a little longer. That will depend on whether they turn protest into delivery, anger into organisation, and personal reputation into practical results. But based on the time I spent with her, I would not underestimate her. She is optimistic, but not naive. Warm, but not weak. Theoretical enough to understand the bigger picture, but practical enough to know that residents judge politics by what happens outside their front door.

And if Alum Rock gets cleaner streets, stronger action on housing, and better support for young people, nobody will care whether the idea came wrapped in the right party colours.

They will simply know that someone finally got on with the job.

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For years, Professors John Clancy and David Bailey have been chipping away at the West Midlands Pension Fund with that most dangerous of weapons in public life: common sense. Again and again they have questioned whether councils, schools and other public employers have been paying more than necessary into a fund already strong enough to meet its obligations. Again and again, the pension establishment appeared to greet their arguments with the warm enthusiasm usually reserved for a wasp at a picnic.

Yet persistence has a habit of becoming vindication. What once sounded like a lonely campaign against an immovable wall of official intransigence now looks rather different.

Kensington and Chelsea’s 0 per cent employer contribution decision has blown a hole through the old defence. The question is no longer whether Professors Clancy and Bailey were being awkward. The question is whether they were right too early, while the officials were either in denial, asleep at the switch, or simply far too comfortable with a system that made little sense to anyone outside the sacred fog of pension administration.There are moments in local government when a dry committee report lands with the force of a brick through a very comfortable window. The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea may just have thrown one.

Its pension fund has approved a 0 per cent employer contribution rate for the council and Kensington and Chelsea College. Not because pensions are unsafe. Not because pensioners are to be squeezed. Not because public servants should be denied what they have earned. Quite the reverse. The argument is that the fund is strong enough to pay its promises while releasing hard-pressed public employers from contributions which may no longer be justified at previous levels.

That matters in the West Midlands.

It matters because the West Midlands Pension Fund is not some dusty back-office contraption humming away behind a filing cabinet in Wolverhampton. It is one of the largest Local Government Pension Scheme funds in the country. It touches pensioners, current workers, councils, schools, academies, police, fire, colleges, universities and, at the end of the long municipal food chain, the council taxpayer. That familiar creature who is regularly invited to pay more, receive less and be grateful for the opportunity. It also matters because the politics around the fund is changing.

For years, the old Labour and Tory order has sat on pension bodies with the solemn expression of people guarding the Crown Jewels, when in truth too many have looked more like nightclub doormen waving through the regulars. The officer says. The actuary says. The investment adviser says. The committee nods. The taxpayer pays. The pensioner waits. The fund grows. The fees flow. Everyone looks serious. Everyone says “fiduciary duty”. Nobody asks why the bill is quite so fat. That old rhythm is now under pressure.

Labour has been badly weakened across the West Midlands. The Conservatives are hardly riding into town on a white charger either, unless the charger has failed its MOT and is being pushed by a councillor with a rosette. Reform, the Greens and independents have changed the electoral weather. Whether one likes that or not is beside the point. The new councillors arriving around the region will have fresh mandates, fewer old loyalties and, one hopes, a sharper appetite for asking simple questions.

And simple questions are exactly what the West Midlands Pension Fund now needs. How large is the surplus? Why are employer contributions set where they are? What assumptions sit beneath them?

How much has been paid in investment management fees? How quickly are pensions being processed? How many members have been left waiting? How many complaints are being upheld? Why does governance still look designed for the comfort of insiders rather than the confidence of pensioners and taxpayers?

None of this is anti-pensioner. Quite the opposite. The first duty of any pension fund is painfully obvious. Pay the pensioners properly, promptly and accurately. A pension is not a Christmas card from the council. It is deferred pay. It is money already earned. Any administration system that leaves people waiting, chasing or wondering when their income will arrive has failed at the human level, however glossy the annual report and however grand the investment presentation.

Indeed, the West Midlands Pension Fund has felt obliged to publish customer service updates telling members that key payment processes are back to business-as-usual standards. That is meant to reassure. It may do so. But it also raises the rather obvious question of what “usual” had become before normal service had to be announced like the return of a missing bus.

A pension fund should not need a round of applause for paying pensions properly. That is the job. It is not a gold-star moment. It is not a civic miracle. It is not the municipal equivalent of landing a plane on one wheel in a thunderstorm. It is the thing the fund exists to do.

The second duty is just as important. Do not overcharge employers simply because the system has always done so, or because advisers have wrapped caution in a language so complex that elected councillors quietly lose the will to live somewhere around paragraph 14.7, appendix C.

Kensington and Chelsea has now shown that a different question can be asked. If a fund is strong enough, why keep taking money at the old rate? If pensions can be paid securely, why lock away public money that councils, schools and public services desperately need now?

The answer may be that the West Midlands is different. Fine. Then show us.

Publish the assumptions. Explain the funding position in plain English. Show the downside risk. Show the upside. Show the effect on council budgets if contributions were reduced. Show what safeguards would protect members. Show why 0 per cent is impossible, if it is impossible. Show why a staged reduction is not possible, if that is the case. But do not hide behind complexity.

Complexity is the velvet curtain behind which far too much local government failure has spent a comfortable retirement. It is the language of “nothing to see here”, spoken fluently by people who always seem to know where the public money went, but only after it has gone.

The West Midlands Pension Fund’s Pensions Committee is made up of councillors. Ten come from Wolverhampton, as administering authority. Six come from Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull and Walsall. So the politics of those councils matters directly.

There is another wrinkle here, and it is not a small one.

The current structure is often spoken about as though it had been brought down from Mount Sinai on stone tablets, somewhere between the commandments and the council constitution. It was not. It is a governance arrangement. It was made by people. Subject to the relevant legal and constitutional requirements, it can be reviewed by people.

That matters because Wolverhampton is the administering authority. If the next third of Wolverhampton comes up and Reform takes full control, the political temperature around the fund changes again. The very authority with the ten seats and the formal administering role may be controlled by councillors with a direct political interest in questioning the fund’s assumptions, contribution levels, fees, service performance and governance structure.

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That does not mean anyone can simply kick the door in and rearrange the furniture before lunch. Local government has rules, and then rules about the rules, and then a subcommittee to consider whether the rules about the rules were properly stapled. But it does mean the current arrangements should not be treated as sacred.

Is the present balance between Wolverhampton and the metropolitan authorities right? Should the administering authority carry more weight, or less?

Should the metropolitan districts have more say if their employers and taxpayers are carrying the cost? Should trade union representatives continue to debate but not vote? Should pensioner and member representation be strengthened? Should the whole thing be reviewed in the light of a changed political map?

These are the kind of questions the old order tends to greet with the expression of a man whose sherry has been watered down. Yet they are perfectly legitimate. Public money is involved. Public workers are involved. Public confidence is involved. The days when pension governance could be treated as a private conversation between officers, advisers and councillors with heavy folders may be coming to an end.

Reform has made local government pension funds a specific political target. Reform UK Richard Tice MP has questioned fees, performance, contribution levels and governance. Some will agree with him. Some will not. That is politics. But councillors who arrive with an instinct to challenge rather than doze gently through the briefing pack may be exactly what this system needs.

The old parties should not sneer too quickly. They had years to ask the awkward questions. They preferred the comfort of the nodding room.

And what of pensioners themselves? They should be put at the front of this debate, not hidden behind actuarial smoke. If there have been delays, backlogs or service failures, let them be reported plainly. If performance has improved, say so and prove it. If complaints have been reduced, show the figures. If members have been left waiting for money, explain why and say what has changed.

A pension fund that cannot consistently deliver timely service to its members should not expect a standing ovation for clever investment charts. People cannot eat a pie chart. They cannot pay the gas bill with a governance dashboard. They cannot take a “funding strategy statement” to the supermarket and ask whether it covers the weekly shop.

This is not an argument for gambling with pensions. It is an argument against gambling with council tax, public services and public trust.

If a fund is genuinely in surplus, and if pensions can be paid securely, then money extracted from employers beyond what is needed is not prudence. It is hoarding. It is the quiet diversion of public money from today’s services into yesterday’s actuarial anxieties.

The West Midlands has councils under immense pressure. Birmingham has already been through civic financial humiliation. Social care is stretched. Neighbourhood services are thin. Council taxpayers are exhausted. Schools and public bodies are under pressure. Every unnecessary pound locked away is a pound not spent on the living city.

For too long, too many councillors have behaved as though pensions were too complicated for democratic challenge. That is not prudence. That is surrender wearing a lanyard.

And let us be honest. The old municipal left has too often confused spending other people’s money with moral seriousness. It has not been enough to ask whether contributions are fair, whether funds are overprovided, whether services are efficient, or whether taxpayers are being rinsed through technical language. The answer has too often been: carry on, comrades, there is always another household bill to absorb the theory.

The Conservatives have hardly covered themselves in glory either. Many of them watched the same machinery run, nodded at the same reports, and then acted shocked when someone suggested the machine might be eating the furniture.

The fund must serve three groups fairly: pensioners, current workers and employers. At present, too many ordinary people may reasonably wonder whether a fourth group, advisers and fund managers, has had the easiest ride of all.

So yes, change ahoy.

The new sheriffs, if they are coming, should arrive with five demands.

First, a public comparison between the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea decision and the West Midlands Pension Fund position.

Second, a clear report on whether employer contributions can be reduced, and by how much.

Third, a full fee and performance review, written in English rather than in the sacred dialect of municipal fog.

Fourth, a service recovery report on payment delays, complaints and pensioner experience.

Fifth, a governance review of the Pensions Committee, including political balance, member representation and voting rights.

No pensioner should lose a penny. No worker should be frightened. But no council taxpayer should be overcharged because old parties, old officers and old advisers got used to the comforting sound of one another’s voices.

Kensington and Chelsea has opened the door. The West Midlands should now walk through it, preferably before someone forms a working group to consider the possibility of drafting a framework for discussing whether a door exists.

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Labour can win Birmingham back.

There. I’ve said it.

Indeed, if you locked a dozen Birmingham residents in a room with a kettle, a packet of Hobnobs and a flip chart, they would probably produce a reasonably accurate recovery plan by lunchtime. Cleaner streets. Safer neighbourhoods. Better housing. Functioning services. More visible leadership. A council that occasionally gives the impression of being in charge. The Greens know this. Reform knows this. The Liberal Democrats know this. The independents know this. Labour knows this. The route back is hardly hidden. The question is whether the people who need to walk down it are willing to do so.

The recent elections were fascinating because they exposed something deeper than a simple swing from one party to another. If Labour had only lost white working-class voters, the explanation would be relatively straightforward. If Labour had only lost support in Asian communities, there would be another explanation. If Labour had only lost middle-class liberals to the Greens, there would be yet another. But Birmingham did something far more interesting. Different communities, with different histories, faiths, cultures and backgrounds, all started expressing versions of the same frustration. The retired Jaguar worker in Castle Bromwich, the self-employed businessman in Small Heath, the Black churchgoer in Handsworth, the family in Kingstanding, the shopkeeper in Sparkbrook, the professional couple in Sutton Coldfield and the pensioner in Yardley all looked around and increasingly concluded that the city was not improving.

That matters because it blows a hole in the lazy explanations. Birmingham’s voters are not one thing. They are not a tribe. They are not a demographic category. They are a collection of communities that often disagree with one another. Yet many of them appear to have reached remarkably similar conclusions about the performance of the city. The pothole does not care whether you are white, Black or Asian, a lone female lesbian or a gay male. The fly-tip is blissfully indifferent to your religion. The missed bin collection has no interest whatsoever in your politics. Declining neighbourhood standards are among the most equal opportunities experiences in modern Birmingham.

And this is where I think Labour’s problem has been misunderstood. The traditional class argument no longer fully explains what is happening. This is not simply a story of rich versus poor or of aristocrats versus workers. Birmingham has developed its own political and managerial class. Many are decent people. Many are hardworking. Many entered public life with entirely honourable intentions. Yet over time they developed their own language, assumptions and priorities. They attended the same meetings, spoke at the same conferences, sat on the same panels and gradually became more comfortable talking to one another than listening to the people they claimed to represent. The result is a political culture which often appears genuinely bewildered when ordinary residents become angry about things that ordinary residents have been angry about for years.

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What makes Birmingham particularly interesting is that this frustration cuts across racial and cultural lines. A self-employed Pakistani businessman in Small Heath may have more in common with a self-employed white electrician in Yardley than either has with a political adviser in Westminster. A Black churchgoer in Handsworth may share concerns about neighbourhood standards, education, family and public safety with a Sikh business owner in Hall Green or a retired factory worker in Castle Bromwich. Different cultures. Different experiences. Different histories. Yet often remarkably similar expectations of local government. They want a city that works.

For years Labour’s electoral strength rested on the assumption that these different communities would remain within a broad coalition. Increasingly that coalition has fractured. Not because voters suddenly became Green, Reform or independent overnight. Rather because many concluded that the people running Birmingham had become detached from everyday experience. Residents were discussing litter, fly-tipping, anti-social behaviour, housing, road maintenance and local services. Too often Labour appeared to be discussing something else.

The reactions to Labour’s defeat were therefore revealing. Of Birmingham’s Labour MPs, Shabana Mahmood, our very own Home Secretary, emerged with the greatest credit. Her response was refreshingly straightforward. The verdict, she said, was on Labour, not the voters. No excuses. No elaborate theories. No suggestion that Birmingham had somehow misunderstood the brilliance of its political masters. It was the response of somebody who appeared to understand that being punched squarely on the nose by the electorate should probably lead to a period of reflection.

Then there was what I have affectionately christened “On Message Al”. Al , MP for Selly Oak or maybe “action Al”, he responded exactly as one might expect a disciplined politician to respond. Labour needed better delivery. Policies needed work. Campaigning needed work. Everything was calm, sensible and reassuring. The difficulty is that every governing party in history has discovered a sudden enthusiasm for better delivery immediately after voters have punished it for poor delivery. One is left wondering whether Birmingham wants harder or different.

Liam Byrne’s, he was MP for Hodge Hill but it’s got a much longer name now, his response was perhaps the most revealing of all. Whilst large parts of Birmingham were discussing litter, anti-social behaviour, housing and public services, Liam was discussing the supply side of populism at the London School of Economics. Now I have no doubt whatsoever that the supply side of populism is a fascinating subject. I am equally certain that a resident standing beside a mountain of fly-tipped rubbish might prefer the council to remove the mattress before commissioning the seminar. Byrne’s response perfectly captures a criticism increasingly levelled at Labour. Faced with a practical problem, its instinct is often to produce a theory.

And then there was Paulette Hamilton, MP for Erdington. Birmingham Labour had just suffered the political equivalent of falling down a flight of stairs whilst carrying a tray of drinks. One might have expected a period of soul-searching. Instead the conversation drifted back towards leadership, representation and internal Labour matters. Important subjects, certainly. Yet one could almost hear Birmingham’s voters collectively suppressing a yawn. The electorate had spent election day discussing Birmingham. Labour appeared determined to resume discussing Labour.

What happened next may be the most revealing thing of all. Having been hammered in a democratic fist fight, Labour’s first visible act was not a period of public reflection but the selection of a new group leader, not election but a selection by a faceless few. This, followed by social media applause from many of the same people who had just overseen the defeat. Perfectly democratic, was it? Perfectly legitimate, maybe! And it did and dose raise an awkward question. If Labour’s analysis of the election is that fundamental change is required, why does so much of the post-election behaviour look exactly the same as the pre-election behaviour?

And that brings us back to the central question. Can Labour win Birmingham back?

Absolutely.

The Greens are not dominant. Reform is not dominant. The Liberal Democrats are not dominant. The independents are influential but fragmented. Birmingham remains politically fluid. The electoral arithmetic is not impossible.

Labour’s obstacle is not Reform. Labour’s obstacle is not the Greens. Labour’s obstacle is not the Liberal Democrats or the independents.

Labour’s obstacle is Labour.

The party already possesses the instruction manual for recovery. It is written on every litter-strewn pavement in Handsworth, every neglected shopping parade in Small Heath, every frustrated conversation in a Kingstanding taxi, every complaint heard in a Yardley pub, every discussion in a Sutton Coldfield café, every mosque, church and community centre across the city. The message is not complicated. Residents want competence. They want pride restored to their neighbourhoods. They want a council that does things rather than explains why things have not been done.

The question is not whether Labour can read the instruction manual.

The question is whether it genuinely wishes to.

Because if the people who lost Birmingham remain convinced that they were fundamentally right all along, then the road back may prove considerably longer than they currently imagine.

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Week Ending 29 May 2026

Well dear reader, another week draws to a close and, if I am honest, this one did not entirely go according to plan. One or two articles arrived fashionably late, one briefly wandered off into the digital wilderness altogether, and there were moments when technology and I appeared to be engaged in a bitter struggle for supremacy. I would naturally like to reassure everyone that these difficulties had absolutely nothing to do with my age, declining IT skills or an inability to remember which button does what. The unusually warm May weather is the more likely culprit. At least that is the explanation I intend to stick with until compelling evidence emerges to the contrary. Despite the occasional wobble, readership remained above 20,000 across the various platforms, which is enormously encouraging. Thank you for that. Midlands GRIT only works because people continue to read it, share it, challenge it and occasionally tell me I have completely missed the point.

Looking back over the week, it became clear that although each article approached the subject from a slightly different angle, they were really all asking the same question. Birmingham’s voters have changed the political landscape dramatically, but who actually governs the city now? On Monday I argued that the election result was more than a routine political shift. Birmingham’s voters have not merely rearranged the furniture inside the council chamber. They have disrupted an entire political settlement that had become stale, managerial and increasingly detached from ordinary residents. The challenge I set the new councillors was deliberately simple. Build something. House someone. Fix something. Decide something. The city has had no shortage of reports, consultations, reviews, frameworks and strategies. What it has often lacked is visible decision-making.

Tuesday took that argument a stage further by examining the difference between process and leadership. Nobody sensible wants public services run on instinct alone. Officers matter. Experts matter. Evidence matters. But politics exists for a reason. It exists because eventually someone must exercise judgement. Drawing on memories of the South Birmingham Study during the 1990s, when transport planning was being debated seriously by politicians who were prepared to make difficult choices, I reflected on how modern government too often confuses administration with leadership. More and more decisions appear to disappear into systems, procedures and consultations until nobody can quite remember who was responsible in the first place. The result is not better government. It is simply slower government.

By Wednesday we arrived at perhaps the most uncomfortable question facing Birmingham. The city remains under commissioners. There were certainly serious failures which justified intervention. The financial collapse, governance failures, equal pay liabilities and Oracle debacle are not inventions. They happened. But intervention was supposed to be a repair mechanism, not a permanent replacement for democratic accountability. If commissioners can influence, delay, shape or effectively veto decisions, then residents are entitled to ask who ultimately governs Birmingham. Elected politicians can be removed by voters. Commissioners cannot. That may be lawful, but it creates an increasingly important democratic question which deserves a public answer.

Thursday widened the lens and looked beyond Birmingham to the condition of Britain’s traditional political parties. Labour and the Conservatives still attack each other with great enthusiasm, but increasingly it feels as though they are arguing within the same narrow managerial framework. The article reflected on how political parties begin to lose their vitality when they stop behaving like movements and start behaving like brands. Birmingham Labour’s evolution over recent years provided an obvious example. Once a party that produced independent-minded figures willing to challenge assumptions, it increasingly appeared to become a managed organisation where decisions flowed downwards rather than upwards. The Conservatives have their own problems nationally, but Birmingham’s Conservatives have often survived because they retained something of a local civic identity rooted in practical municipal politics. The wider point was that voters may not be looking for better management. They may simply be looking for politics again.

That brought us to Friday and the central question facing Birmingham’s new political forces. Winning an election is exciting. Governing is much harder. Reform must prove it can be more than a vehicle for public frustration. The Greens must demonstrate that enthusiasm, principle and moral urgency can be translated into practical administration. The Liberal Democrats may find themselves in the unfamiliar position of genuinely influencing events. Labour must decide whether it wishes to renew itself or merely explain its defeat. The voters have not chosen chaos. They have rejected the old order. Those are very different things. Birmingham’s electorate has effectively told the city’s politicians that the old arrangements no longer command confidence. The task now is to prove that something better can replace them.

If you missed any of the articles during the week, perhaps because one arrived late, another briefly vanished or life simply got in the way, I would encourage you to look back at the full versions. Taken together they form a single conversation about Birmingham, democracy, accountability and the future direction of Britain’s second city. They are, in many ways, five chapters of the same story.

As always, thank you for reading. Without you there would be no Midlands GRIT. There would simply be an elderly columnist sitting in front of a keyboard, muttering about governance, democracy and municipal politics while occasionally blaming software failures on unusually warm weather. Frankly, that would be a much less attractive proposition.

See you next week.

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Birmingham’s voters have done the easy bit. They have smashed the old machine. Very satisfying. Therapeutic, even. One imagines a small civic hammer being passed from hand to hand in the counting hall, with people taking turns to land a blow on the old settlement. Labour’s dominance has gone. Reform has arrived. The Greens have surged. Independents matt…

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There was a time when Labour and the Conservatives sounded as if they wanted different futures for the country. They disagreed not merely about management, tone, tax rates, spending lines or the acceptable shape of a press release, but about the purpose of the state, the dignity of work, the meaning of enterprise, the role of public service, the balance between market and community, and the kind of Britain they wished to build.

That time now feels further away than it should.

The parties still argue, of course. They argue loudly, bitterly, theatrically and often absurdly. They accuse each other of wrecking the economy, weakening the country, betraying voters, neglecting services, failing working people, ignoring business, mishandling migration, mismanaging public money, and lacking seriousness. The noise remains. The tribalism remains. The ambition remains. What has thinned out is the sense that either old party possesses a genuinely renewing imagination.

The public increasingly sees two parties competing to operate the same failing machine.

That is the danger Birmingham now exposes with such uncomfortable clarity. The city is not simply a Labour failure, though Labour has been the dominant governing force and must own much of the local story. Nor is it simply a Conservative failure, though national austerity, local government underfunding, Whitehall centralisation and years of Conservative government created much of the surrounding weather in which Birmingham’s crisis developed. Birmingham is more troubling than that. It is a picture of what happens when the old parties, in different ways, become administrators of decline.

They do not stop governing. They govern cautiously. They govern managerially. They govern within shrinking horizons. They speak of delivery, stability, restraint, difficult decisions, fiscal responsibility, stakeholder engagement, process, challenge, assurance and review. Some of those words are necessary. A serious state cannot live on slogans alone. But when that language becomes the whole of politics, something vital has gone missing.

Politics is not administration with an election attached. It is the argument about direction. It is the capacity to say what should be different, why it should be different, who will pay, who will gain, who will lose, and why the risk is worth taking. It requires imagination, not fantasy. It requires judgement, not recklessness. It requires courage, not theatre. Above all, it requires elected people willing to lead rather than merely narrate the constraints placed upon them.

Birmingham shows what happens when that function decays. Labour controlled the city for years, and over time the party seemed to mistake possession for competence. That is always dangerous. Once a party begins to regard a place as naturally its own, it stops listening properly. It stops feeling the ground move. It assumes loyalty where there is only patience. It assumes patience where there is already resentment. Then one day the voters arrive with a hammer.

The recent Birmingham election was that hammer. Labour was not merely bruised. The old map was shattered. Reform, the Greens, independents, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and others now occupy parts of a city Labour once treated as a civic inheritance. The voters did not just say they wanted a different administration. They said they no longer accepted Labour as the city’s default operating system.

There is a Birmingham-specific reason this matters. Birmingham Labour became an incredibly obedient party. It did not merely lose the council chamber. It lost the habit of internal democracy. After John Clancy, Birmingham Labour council leaders were not chosen in the ordinary democratic way by Labour councillors exercising free political judgement. They were selected, approved, imposed or removed through party machinery operated by largely faceless Labour officials and committees. That is not a living local movement choosing its own direction. That is managed politics.

The same applies to candidates. In Birmingham, Labour’s local candidates are, in large part, not chosen by ordinary local Labour members in any meaningful democratic sense. They are filtered, approved and presented through the same party machinery: officials, panels, national rules, regional power-brokers and internal fixers. The 101 candidates placed before Birmingham voters in the recent all-out election were therefore not simply the voice of the local membership rising naturally from the wards. They were the output of a managed system.

That is why Labour’s collapse in Birmingham was not merely administrative. It was democratic. A party that does not trust its own members will eventually struggle to persuade the public to trust it. Members are not just leaflet machines with shoes. They are the early-warning system. They hear the streets. They know when resentment is building. They know when a candidate does not fit a ward. They know when the official line has stopped making sense. If you silence them, manage them too tightly, or treat them as inconvenient furniture, you do not create discipline. You create deafness.

Even under Jeremy Corbyn, when Labour was supposedly at its most member-led, I did not get a meaningful say in who my parliamentary candidate should be. I had no say in who should be the Police and Crime Commissioner candidate. And compared with some members, I probably had more room than most to shout, complain and make myself generally inconvenient. If that was the generous version of internal democracy, one hesitates to inspect the ungenerous version without protective clothing.

The last Birmingham Labour leader with a real independent political edge was John Clancy. He was not a managerial cardboard cut-out. He could be difficult, awkward and gloriously unhelpful to the official comfort zone. He challenged contractors. He challenged outsourced failure. He spoke about municipal socialism, housebuilding, Brummie Bonds and the council as an active economic force. He also helped set in motion Birmingham’s Commonwealth Games bid, one of those urgent political moments where a city either acts or watches the opportunity pass. Others later inherited the delivery, but the early political decision belonged to that period. That is what politics looks like when it still has a pulse.

That is not to canonise Clancy. Nobody sensible should canonise a council leader while the bins are out. But the difference matters. Clancy looked like a politician trying to make decisions. Since then, Birmingham Labour too often looked like a party trying to remain within the permitted channels of the machine. The tone changed. The party became more obedient upwards, more cautious sideways, and less responsive downwards.

Labour did not merely lose Birmingham in the ballot box. It lost the habit of listening long before that.

This is why the party should be very careful about explaining Birmingham away as a local aberration. Birmingham is not an eccentric side-show. It is one of the clearest warnings Labour could receive. If Labour cannot convincingly govern Birmingham, understand Birmingham, listen to Birmingham and renew Birmingham, then people will rightly ask what that tells us about Labour’s capacity to renew Britain.

The national leadership may be tempted to say that Birmingham is complicated, which it is. It may say local government finance is hard, which it is. It may say inherited problems are severe, which they are. It may say responsible government requires difficult choices, which it does. But none of that answers the larger question: where is the political imagination?

The public can hear caution. It can hear calculation. It can hear the fear of frightening markets, upsetting officialdom, provoking hostile headlines or appearing fiscally loose. What it struggles to hear is a compelling account of the country Labour wants to build.

Without that, Labour risks becoming the careful custodian of a national decline it did not start, but may fail to reverse.

The Conservatives have no right to look superior. Their own national collapse is written through the same story. Years of Conservative government left Britain with weakened public services, exhausted local government, stagnant productivity, insecure infrastructure, brittle institutions and a state that often seemed simultaneously too large to be accountable and too weak to be effective. The party of enterprise did not produce an enterprise economy. The party of order did not produce civic order. The party of fiscal discipline did not leave the public feeling that the country had been repaired.

Yet Birmingham Conservatives tell a more interesting story than the national Tory collapse. National Conservatism has crashed to something close to civic irrelevance in many urban settings, but Birmingham Tories have not vanished in the same way. They have held their heads up better because they are not quite the same creature as the national party. They have often seen themselves as urban Conservatives, and that phrase matters.

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We saw that during the Conservative-Liberal Democrat years at the council. Whatever one thought of that administration, it had a recognisable civic style. It understood infrastructure. It understood city-building. It invested in visible things. It helped create the framework for municipal housebuilding through the Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust, one of the great ironies of modern Birmingham politics. The machinery for building council homes was not born from Labour’s heroic working-class romance. It emerged under a Tory-Lib Dem administration that still understood the city as a place to be built, not merely managed.

That is why Birmingham Tories have not suffered exactly the same fate as Labour. They are damaged, of course. They carry the weight of the national Conservative brand. But locally they still possess fragments of a civic memory: street politics, infrastructure, visible delivery, urban pride. Labour had history. The Birmingham Conservatives had, at times, machinery. And in politics, machinery that builds things can sometimes beat history that merely recites itself.

This does not rescue the Conservatives from their national record. It simply makes Birmingham more interesting. The local Tory story is not the same as the national Tory story. Birmingham Conservatives did not win some grand civic endorsement, but nor were they swept away in the manner one might expect given the national Conservative brand. That tells us something. It suggests that a party can survive better when it has a local civic identity stronger than its national decay.

Labour, by contrast, had the city’s great inheritance and managed to look tired inside it. It had the language of working people, social justice, municipal pride, housing, services and community. It had the history. It had the emotional architecture. But it became too obedient, too managerial, too hollowed out by internal control and external caution. It began to speak to Birmingham less like a movement and more like a governing office.

That is the wider lesson. Parties do not die when they lose an election. They die earlier, when they stop being democratic movements and become managed brands. Labour’s Birmingham failure was not just administrative. It was democratic. The Conservatives’ national failure was not just electoral. It was civic. Both parties became too comfortable with managing decline, but in Birmingham the local story is more revealing: Labour became obedient just as the city needed argument, and the Conservatives survived better where they retained some urban civic instinct.

This is why both old parties now face a similar public judgement, even though their histories and responsibilities differ. Voters see Labour and the Conservatives arguing over blame while sounding strangely similar about the boundaries of possibility. Both speak as though the first duty of politics is to reassure the institutions already presiding over decline. Both fear the charge of irresponsibility more than they fear the reality of national stagnation. Both reach too quickly for the managerial grammar of modern government.

And that grammar is deadening.

Stakeholders. Delivery. Robust process. Financial challenge. Difficult decisions. Partnership working. Long-term plan. Independent review. Evidence base. Lessons learned. Assurance framework. Transformation programme.

One can almost feel the public soul leaving the room.

This is not a plea for reckless politics. Britain does not need fantasy economics, magic money, empty populism or policy by mood swing. But the opposite of caution is not stupidity. The opposite of drift is not chaos. A country can be serious and bold at the same time. A city can be financially honest and politically imaginative. A party can accept constraints without becoming imprisoned by them.

The old parties have too often forgotten that.

They have become professionalised machines for producing office-seekers. People who know how to rise, how to message, how to avoid traps, how to survive reshuffles, how to say nothing dangerous, how to offend no internal power centre unnecessarily, how to speak fluently without revealing much thought. The system rewards smoothness over courage, discipline over originality, career management over conviction, personal advancement over public disruption.

That is why the phrase “trophy politician” resonates. Too many now appear to want the status of office without the burden of leadership. They want the title, the photograph, the room, the platform, the sense of being someone. But the hard business of governing is increasingly displaced onto officers, advisers, consultants, commissioners, civil servants, regulators and the process machine.

Then, when the public asks who is responsible, everyone points somewhere else.

Birmingham has lived this. The council points to financial constraints. Commissioners point to legal and affordability duties. Ministers point to local failure. Officers point to process. Unions point to management and commissioners. Residents point to the bins. Voters point to everyone. Responsibility becomes a maze, and people hate mazes.

Nationally, the same pattern repeats. Adult social care is reviewed rather than settled. SEND is consulted upon while families fight. Infrastructure is announced, delayed, redesigned and abandoned. Defence ambition is declared while the bill is postponed. Policing is promised in comforting old images while crime moves through digital networks, fraud and online systems. Local government absorbs national failure until councils break, then receives lectures on competence.

This is not government as leadership. It is government as delayed confrontation with reality.

The public understands more than politicians think. People may not read every fiscal forecast or committee report. They may not follow every council paper or statutory direction. But they know when something does not work. They know when they are paying more and receiving less. They know when language is being used to cover weakness. They know when no one seems to be in charge. They know when the emperor is naked.

That is why Reform and the Greens are rising.

They are not the same. They do not draw on the same instincts. In many respects they are opposites. Reform offers rupture, a politics of anger, border, nation, rejection and disruption. The Greens offer urgency, ecology, moral seriousness, local energy and, in places like Birmingham, a broader anti-Labour coalition that contains its own tensions. Both are risky. Both may disappoint. Neither should be romanticised.

But both have one shared advantage: they do not sound like the old managerial block.

The public may not yet know whether these newer forces can govern. But it increasingly believes the old ones have stopped imagining. That belief is politically explosive. Once voters decide that the old parties are not merely wrong but exhausted, they begin looking elsewhere, even if elsewhere is uncertain.

That is precisely what happened in Birmingham. Reform did not need to prove it could run the city to benefit from the city’s anger. The Greens did not need to resolve every contradiction inside their coalition to benefit from Labour’s decline. Independents did not need a full civic programme to become vehicles for local revolt. The old order had to fail first. It did.

For Labour, the lesson is brutal. The party cannot assume urban Britain is permanently its own. It cannot assume working-class voters will remain loyal out of memory. It cannot assume minority communities will remain loyal out of habit. It cannot assume younger progressive voters will accept caution as maturity. It cannot assume local government failure can be blamed on inheritance forever. It cannot assume that a national Labour government will protect damaged Labour councils from local public anger.

For the Conservatives, the lesson is equally severe. They cannot rebuild trust by acting as if the last decade and a half happened to someone else. They cannot merely wait for Labour to fail and expect automatic restoration. The public has seen the Conservative version of management. It did not like the results. The Birmingham lesson for them is more subtle: where Conservatism retains civic instinct, it can still stand. Where it becomes merely national slogan and decline management, it falls.

Both old parties now face the same question: can they become political again?

Not performative. Not loud. Not extremist. Political.

Can they say what they believe the country is for? Can they make choices before crisis forces them? Can they rebuild institutions rather than merely inhabit them? Can they restore local democracy rather than supervise its decline? Can they speak to people as citizens rather than customers of managed scarcity? Can they accept that leadership involves risk, disappointment and argument?

If not, the future belongs to disruption.

That disruption may be creative. It may be destructive. It may renew democracy. It may further fragment it. Reform may prove to be a release valve rather than a governing answer. The Greens may discover that protest energy is easier to assemble than administrative coherence. Independents may expose local arrogance but struggle to produce strategic direction. None of this is simple.

But disruption does not arise from nowhere. It is invited by exhaustion.

Birmingham has invited it because the old civic settlement failed. Britain is inviting it because the old national settlement is failing. The voters are not merely being volatile. They are responding to a political class that too often asks to be trusted with decline.

That will not do.

Labour and the Conservatives need to understand that their shared problem is not merely popularity. It is purpose. They have become too comfortable with the administrative state, too fluent in its defensive language, too respectful of inherited constraints, too cautious before vested systems, too interested in the choreography of office.

The country does not need politicians who merely promise to manage decline more decently than their opponents. It needs politicians willing to break the frame of decline altogether.

Birmingham has shown what happens when that does not happen. The voters eventually do it themselves. They break the frame for you. And once they have started, they may not stop politely.