Birmingham has voted. Now the councillors must take back the council.

Birmingham has shattered the old Labour machine. Now the city’s fractured council must decide who governs, and who really controls Birmingham.

Well, this is exciting. There is no point pretending otherwise. Birmingham has just done something genuinely significant. It has kicked out the old Labour administration, reduced it to a rump, and left the city staring at the most fragmented and politically fascinating council chamber it has seen for decades. Not tidy. Not comfortable. Not predictable. But exciting. After fourteen years of Labour control, the city has delivered no overall control, a Reform surge, a Green breakthrough, a substantial block of Independents, a steady Liberal Democrat presence, and a Conservative group still large enough to matter. In other words, Birmingham has not chosen one master. It has told all of them to start talking. That is democracy. Messy, noisy, awkward, slightly alarming democracy perhaps, but democracy all the same. The question now is not whether Labour lost, because plainly it did. The question is what Birmingham does next, because somebody now has to run the place.

Reform is the largest group, or very close to it depending on the final declarations and adjustments, but the Greens are right behind them. Labour is badly damaged but not irrelevant. The Conservatives are still there. The Liberal Democrats are not huge in number but they are experienced operators. And the Independents, particularly those linked to the Independent Candidates Alliance, now sit right in the middle of the arithmetic. Shakeel Afsar, the architect of the ICA, has already delivered what may become the defining quote of the election when he reportedly said he would rather do a deal with Reform because at least they are known to be wolves, whereas Labour are wolves in sheep’s clothing. That is an absolutely magnificent political line. It may also be the most Birmingham political sentence uttered in years. But colourful rhetoric is one thing. Running refuse collection, highways, social care, housing, planning, elections, libraries and equal pay settlements is another matter entirely. The hard truth is this: the ICA and the Liberal Democrats are now kingmakers. The Greens may naturally lean towards Labour. The Conservatives may find it easier to work alongside Reform. But neither side gets anywhere near a workable administration without help from elsewhere. My sense is that the ICA and the Lib Dems may instinctively lean towards some form of Green and Labour arrangement, but that is far from certain and I do not think anyone can confidently call this situation yet. The Liberal Democrats have previously shown themselves willing to work with the Conservatives when circumstances demanded it, while parts of the ICA appear deeply distrustful of Labour after years of political bitterness and fallout within sections of Birmingham politics. That leaves the situation remarkably fluid. Perhaps that uncertainty is no bad thing. Birmingham has had too much certainty for too long. Too much machine politics. Too much assumption that power naturally belonged to one governing culture. Now every bloc matters, every councillor matters and every vote matters. That may yet prove healthy for the city.

One of my regrets, as someone who remains a Labour Party member and who voted Labour in these elections, is that the old Labour council allowed itself to become far too heavily influenced by what many people inside Birmingham politics privately refer to as the officer party. And yes, I do mean the officer party. The permanent governing machine inside the council. The senior officers who write the reports, shape the choices, narrow the options, warn of legal risks, determine the policy direction and then quietly stand back while elected members carry the blame when everything goes wrong. That experiment has clearly failed. It failed on finance. It failed on equal pay. It failed on the Oracle disaster. It failed on the bins. It failed on public confidence. And when an experiment fails this comprehensively, you do not continue with it simply because somebody in a suit assures you lessons have been learned. You stop. The bin dispute is perhaps the clearest example of all. It was publicly presented as a dispute between workers and the council, but there is strong evidence that what it became in reality was a dispute between workers and a council machine determined under no circumstances to allow the binmen to succeed. That is not healthy governance. That is bunker politics. The first duty of the new administration, whatever form it eventually takes, is to remind the officer class that Birmingham is still a democracy. Officers advise. Councillors decide. Officers implement. Councillors answer to the public. That is the proper order of things. Not the other way round.

And if anyone wants my opinion, which of course is something I often give, the first department the new administration should sort out is the elections office. What an extraordinary performance that was. The city voted on Thursday 7 May. The count did not even take place that night. By Monday 11 May Birmingham still had final declarations not properly filtered through to the public. This is Birmingham, not a parish raffle. Why did politicians tolerate this? Why did nobody insist the count should happen overnight? Why did nobody demand that the city should know, as quickly as possible, who had won? In a general election MPs insist on overnight counts because Parliament long ago decided that democratic legitimacy matters and that the country should know its result without unnecessary delay. Local councillors possess exactly the same authority over their own processes if they choose to use it. They can insist on standards. They can insist on urgency. They can insist that democracy should not be fitted around the convenience of the back office. And then there was the website. The elections office knew perfectly well that people would be checking for results throughout the weekend. It knew the city was politically volatile. It knew journalists, activists, candidates and ordinary residents would all be hammering refresh on the results pages. Yet the website repeatedly crashed because nobody apparently thought resilience mattered. That is not a trivial thing. The elections office is effectively the front door of democracy in Birmingham. If it cannot run a timely count and keep a functioning website online during one of the most important local elections in modern city history, then the new council should make it one of the very first departments subjected to a serious review. Not a witch hunt. A standards hunt.

Birmingham now needs ten things from its new council. First, councillors must take political control back from the officer party. Second, the bin dispute must finally be resolved and clean streets restored as a basic civic expectation rather than some impossible dream. Third, the elections office requires a complete review including count timing, website resilience and public communication. Fourth, the potholes need filling and road maintenance must stop being treated as a luxury. And can I say potholes isn’t just about fixing potholes it’s about preventing them in the first place and that means proactive inspections. Something Labour was negligent about..!! Fifth, the city needs to end the ideological war on motorists. Public transport matters. Cycling matters. Walking matters. But so do ordinary drivers trying to get to work, take children to school, visit elderly relatives and run businesses. Sixth, Birmingham’s finances need genuine transparency because if the city was not bankrupt in quite the way the public was told it was bankrupt, then residents deserve to know how that narrative emerged. Seventh, there must be proper scrutiny of the equal pay figures, the Oracle catastrophe and the ongoing programme of negligent asset sales. Eighth, local services need rebuilding ward by ward instead of through vague slogans and glossy presentations. Ninth, councillors must once again become civic representatives rather than voting fodder for reports they barely shaped or influenced. They need to eject the officer party from the power grab they made over Labour. And tenth, Birmingham must rediscover a sense of civic pride. That final point matters enormously because for too long Birmingham has been discussed almost exclusively through the language of decline: bankruptcy, bins, rats, potholes, cuts, commissioners and chaos. Enough. This is still Birmingham. It is still the great civic engine of the Midlands. It remains a city of enterprise, humour, argument, immigration, ambition, industry and sheer stubborn energy. But it needs councillors with backbone, not councillors nervously asking officers what they are allowed to think.

That is why the coming coalition, whatever form it eventually takes, has to be more than simple arithmetic. A Green-led arrangement could work if it remembers Birmingham is not a university seminar and that residents primarily want clean streets, safe roads, functioning services and some confidence that their council tax is not disappearing into a black hole. A Reform-led administration could work only if it proves it can govern rather than merely protest, because anger may win elections but administration requires patience, detail and discipline. A Labour-Green-Lib Dem-Independent arrangement may ultimately emerge as the most obvious anti-Reform bloc, but Labour cannot be allowed to behave as if it has merely misplaced its majority and will stroll casually back into office after a brief interruption. It lost. It must show humility. The Lib Dems bring experience. The ICA brings community force and political energy. The Greens bring momentum. Labour still possesses institutional memory, although some of that memory frankly needs disinfecting. The Conservatives continue to represent a suburban and business voice which should not simply be ignored. Reform brings the shock of the new and the warning that huge numbers of voters are utterly exhausted with business as usual. Somewhere within that chaotic mixture Birmingham must now construct a functioning government. Not a perfect government. A working one.

And then there is Paul Tilsley. Democracy has done its job and nobody possesses a permanent right to a council seat. Every councillor serves only with the permission of the electorate. Nevertheless, I must say this plainly: the loss of Paul Tilsley, the father of the council, a Lib Dem, from the chamber is a genuine tragedy for Birmingham City Council. I was never politically aligned with Paul Tilsley, but this was a man who knew his business. He had served the city since the 1960s. He possessed memory, judgement and experience. When everybody else was loudly declaring Birmingham bankrupt to the tune of staggering sums, he was one of the first people prepared to publicly question whether the figures actually stacked up. And do you know what? He may well have been right. That matters. In politics experience is often mocked until the precise moment it becomes desperately necessary. Then everybody suddenly remembers that institutional memory is not nostalgia, it is armour. So yes, democracy has spoken in Sheldon and the result must absolutely be respected. But Birmingham should still pause and say thank you. Thank you, Paul, for your service. And now the new council must begin its work. The voters have done their part. They have shattered the old order. They have refused the easy answer. They have sent a chamber full of competing mandates into Victoria Square and effectively told them to sort it out. So sort it out. Take back control. Clean the streets. Fix the roads. Open the books. Challenge the officers. Respect the voters. And for heaven’s sake, next time Birmingham holds an election, count the votes on the night and keep the website working.