Crisis in Birmingham Labour: When Control Trumped Common Sense
Birmingham Council House, Victoria Square. Once driven by local democracy, the beating heart of municipal pride, now a silent witness to Labour’s inept internal management.
By Mike Olley, Editor – Midlands GRIT
It’s a funny old thing, politics. One minute you’re leading the biggest council in Europe, full of swagger and slogans about “change”, “renewal”, and “modern Labour”. The next minute, councillors are leaving in droves, your membership is seething, and your regional director is wondering how the hell it all went wrong
.That’s exactly what’s happening right now inside Birmingham Labour. A party not so much tearing itself apart as quietly bleeding out.
The big press have caught the headline bit, of course. Four Birmingham Labour councillors have dramatically quit the party. That’s the surface story. But the truth runs far deeper. What’s happening isn’t just a few bruised egos after a selection scrap. This is a full-blown rebellion, a rejection of Labour’s regional stitch-up and a revolt against the culture of control that’s been imposed from the top down.
And, as usual, the leadership doesn’t seem to grasp the scale of the damage.
The Official Story and the Reality Beneath It
The headlines focus on four councillors resigning publicly. But GRIT has established that’s merely the tip of an enormous iceberg.
In reality, roughly a third of Birmingham Labour’s councillors and selected candidates have either resigned, been deselected, withdrawn from the next election, or are seriously considering standing as independents or with rival groups.
It’s a mixture of four camps:
• Those who’ve already resigned from Labour altogether.
• Those who’ve stepped aside quietly and refused to stand again.
• Those who remain on paper as Labour but are privately disillusioned and edging towards the exit.
• And those who were effectively deselected, replaced by handpicked candidates chosen through opaque regional processes.
Add that up and you have a movement, not a moment.
At the centre of it sits Sam Donoghue, the Labour Party’s Regional Director for the West Midlands. He is the man who oversaw, co-signed, or at the very least rubber-stamped, the selection process that has now alienated half the city’s local party.
It’s worth remembering this is not the first time such a stunt has been pulled. Around four years ago, a previous regional director ran a similarly heavy-handed process, sidelining local members and setting the rot in motion. Donoghue’s operation has simply deepened the damage.
The Process That Broke the Party
Now, to be fair, Donoghue didn’t act entirely alone. The National Executive Committee (NEC) was formally involved in shaping this year’s Birmingham selections. But the effect was the same. Local party members, the lifeblood of Labour democracy, were frozen out.
There were few, if any, local shortlists. Hardly any genuine hustings. No proper ward-level votes. Candidates were effectively appointed by administrative process rather than chosen by local members.
It makes you wonder what you pay your membership for these days if you’re a Labour Party member, because you certainly don’t get a say in much.
When I was first selected as a councillor in 1991, the process was refreshingly simple. Local members drew up a shortlist, you made your pitch, and they voted. It was democratic, transparent, and often brutally honest. But it worked, because it gave members ownership.
Now it’s all done by email chains and spreadsheets, somewhere between Birmingham and Labour’s national HQ on Victoria Street in London. A bureaucratic echo chamber where local knowledge and loyalty count for nothing.
The All-Up Gamble
To make matters worse, Birmingham now operates what is known as “all-up” elections every four years. That means the entire council is elected on one day, every seat in play at once.
When I was elected, the system was very different. There was a four-year cycle, with one year off and elections held in the other three, each time for a third of the council. That staggered system gave the party breathing space, a chance to rebuild and adapt between contests.
Now there’s no such safety net. If Birmingham Labour mismanages its selections or alienates its members, the consequences hit all at once, across every ward. And that’s exactly what’s happening.
The Grassroots Revolt
What Donoghue and his NEC counterparts have failed to understand is that you can’t run politics like payroll. People need to believe in it.
I’m hearing from candidates still knocking doors that the mood on the doorstep is brittle. Voters aren’t slamming the door in Labour’s face, but they’re hesitating. “We’re undecided.” “We’ll see.” That sort of polite evasiveness hides a deep weariness.
The city council’s bankruptcy, the bin strikes, and the general perception of chaos have all left a bad taste. The feeling out there is that Birmingham Labour simply isn’t working. Not for residents, not for workers, and certainly not for its own members.
Add to that the national picture, where polls show growing frustration with Keir Starmer and his cabinet, and you’ve got a perfect storm. Labour heads into 2026 already wobbling.
Sam Donoghue should have seen this coming. Birmingham isn’t a management problem to be solved from above. It’s a living, breathing political community. You can’t just parachute in candidates, bypass the locals, and expect the activists to roll up their sleeves out of blind loyalty.
When I was first elected, I had fifteen to twenty members out with me two or three nights a week, for weeks on end. They weren’t doing it because they were told to. They were doing it because they’d chosen their candidate. They felt invested.
That connection is gone now. And it’s showing.
Even senior party figures in Westminster, I’m told, are deeply concerned about what’s happening in Birmingham. And that was before this latest wave of resignations broke.
The Consequences of Control
Birmingham Labour is now staring down an unprecedented crisis. Losing around a third of your political base isn’t bad luck. It’s bad management.
Meanwhile, a rival movement led by old Labour figures and grassroots organisers is already taking shape. It’s quietly picking up disaffected councillors and activists who no longer recognise their party.
And you can hardly blame them. Say what you like about the Corbyn era, but it at least inspired belief. Starmer’s machine, by contrast, looks like a consultancy firm pretending to be a political party.
Birmingham was once Labour’s crown jewel, diverse, determined, fiercely loyal. But that loyalty has been stretched to breaking point. If the local activists and ward secretaries who’ve carried the red flag for decades no longer feel trusted, Labour’s 2026 campaign in this city will be a shadow of what it once was.
The rot isn’t ideological. It’s bureaucratic. A party run by administrators instead of campaigners was always going to run itself into the ground.
The Silence from HQ
In fairness, I wrote to Mr Donoghue directly, in his official capacity as Regional Director, asking for his comments on the resignations, the risk of defections, and the wider handling of the candidate process.
He hasn’t replied.
That silence speaks volumes.
Perhaps he’s busy fielding calls from Victoria Street, or trying to persuade the NEC that everything’s fine. But when your councillors are resigning and your activists are walking away, you’d think a word of reassurance might be in order.
Instead, there’s the usual official quiet. The sort of silence that tells you the ship isn’t steady, it’s listing.
The Bigger Picture
What this whole sorry episode really shows is how far Labour has drifted from its own foundations.
It used to be a movement. Now it feels like a management exercise. The people who once built it — the local organisers, the union branch secretaries, the street-by-street campaigners — are being treated like employees instead of partners.
You can’t motivate volunteers by cutting them out of the process. You can’t inspire loyalty by issuing orders from the top.
And you certainly can’t rebuild a city’s trust when your own party is being smothered by its own bureaucracy.
Sam Donoghue’s selection experiment was meant to tidy things up. What it’s done is rip out the heart of local democracy and alienate the very people Labour depends on.
Final Word
Politics is about people. Always has been, always will be. You can’t run it from a spreadsheet, and you can’t fake conviction with corporate messaging.
Sam Donoghue may have thought he was modernising Birmingham Labour, making it neat, compliant, and efficient. What he’s actually done is squeeze the life out of it.
And the worst part? He’s taken a once-proud local movement and turned it into Labour’s biggest liability.
If the party doesn’t wake up to what’s happening here, Birmingham won’t just be a local embarrassment. It’ll be the canary in the coal mine for Labour nationally.
Because when the bureaucrats take over, belief is the first casualty.