Labour’s Turkeys and a Birmingham Christmas

Birminghams Labour Leadership know the strike should have been settled. They know the legal exposure is real. They know the funding excuse has collapsed.

An Olley piece, written sadly, loyally, and without illusions.

I write this with no pleasure at all.

I am Labour by instinct, by history, and by temperament. I still believe, perhaps unfashionably, that Labour exists to give working people dignity, security, and a voice where power would otherwise speak only to itself. I have not drifted away. I have not converted. I am not writing this to impress anyone else.

I am writing it because watching your own side dismantle itself through weakness is far harder than watching your opponents do it through malice.

In Birmingham, Labour’s leadership is voting for Christmas. Not the warm, communal kind. The cold one, where the bill arrives later, the consequences are someone else’s problem, and the damage is permanent.

The strike that stripped the mask

The bin strike has now dragged on for nine months. Nine months of essential workers without wages. Nine months of families living on union hardship payments. Nine months of a Labour-run council choosing silence, secrecy, and attrition over settlement, transparency, and solidarity.

This is not a marginal industrial disagreement. It goes to the very core of what Labour claims to be.

There are now over 400 live legal claims against Birmingham City Council, brought by Unite the Union on behalf of drivers, downgraded workers, former WRCOs, Waste Recycling and Collection Officers, and long-term agency staff. These claims are not speculative. They include unfair dismissal, unlawful inducement under trade union law, failure to carry out collective consultation, redundancy failures, and allegations of anti-union blacklisting.

Unite has been unusually open about all of this. It has named the statutes relied upon. It has explained the legal reasoning. It has disclosed the advice of senior counsel. It has briefed councillors directly. This is transparency of a kind rarely seen in a live industrial dispute.

The council’s response has been the opposite. No figures. No explanation. No disclosure of its own legal advice. Just a closed door and a repeated assertion that everyone else is wrong.

That is not authority. It is a bunker.

Soviet secrecy in a Labour council

There is something deeply unsettling about the way the council is behaving. The refusal to explain even the basics of its legal position. The insistence that it is right, while offering no evidence that it is. The apparent hope that time, exhaustion, or elections will make the problem disappear.

It feels less like local democracy and more like Cold War governance. Information is controlled. Challenge is treated as hostility. Transparency is regarded as a threat.

This is grotesque in a Labour authority. Labour was built on the idea that power must be accountable, not hidden. That working people deserve to know what is being done in their name and with their money.

Instead, millions of pounds in potential legal liability are being sleepwalked into, while the council refuses to say whether it has even calculated the total exposure.

Has the council even worked out how much this is going to cost the people of Birmingham?

Taxpayers should be furious. Labour voters should be alarmed. Labour councillors should be asking themselves what on earth they think they are defending.

The lie of unaffordability

For months, the council hid behind the claim that a settlement was unaffordable. That argument has now collapsed completely.

A new multi-year funding settlement shows Birmingham receiving around £650 million extra over three years. Forensic analysis commissioned by Unite and shared with councillors demonstrates that the council can afford to settle the dispute along the lines of the ballpark proposal already discussed at ACAS.

Legal advice from Oliver Segal KC, also shared with councillors, makes clear that settling would not expose the council to significant equal pay or discrimination liability. The council disputes this, but refuses to explain why, or to disclose even the outline of its own legal advice.

This matters because politics is ultimately about choices.

The choice here is simple. Settle now and resolve the legal claims through a COT3 agreement, a legally binding settlement brokered by ACAS which ends all related employment claims, or refuse to settle and allow hundreds of claims to proceed, potentially costing many millions of pounds, far more than any negotiated deal.

So why is the council still refusing to settle?

Only one of those options looks remotely responsible. The other looks ideological, punitive, and reckless.

Fire and rehire by another name

One of the most revealing aspects of this saga has been the council’s apparent claim that there can be no unfair dismissal or fire and rehire because no one was technically sacked.

That argument betrays either ignorance or bad faith.

Workers were sent redundancy letters. Their roles were abolished. They were told they could accept lower-graded jobs or leave. Meaningful alternatives on equivalent pay were not available. Most accepted the downgraded roles under duress.

That is fire and rehire in law. It has been for years. The case law is settled.

For a Labour council to pretend otherwise is not just legally foolish. It is morally corrosive.

Preparing the ground for defeat

And this is where the politics becomes fatal.

Labour is already on fragile ground. In cities like Birmingham, its hold on the working-class vote is no longer automatic. When a Labour council is seen to downgrade bin workers, ignore unions, hide information, and drag a strike through Christmas, it sends a message louder than any leaflet ever could.

It says Labour no longer knows who it is for.

Into that vacuum steps Reform UK, or any other force willing to point at the chaos and say, they do not listen, they do not care, they protect themselves.

If Labour loses Birmingham in May 2026, this strike will be remembered as one of the moments that made it inevitable.

A loyalist’s warning

This is the part that hurts most to write.

I do not want Labour to lose Birmingham. I do not want Reform running the council. I do not want a city already battered by austerity to be handed over because Labour forgot its roots.

But loyalty does not mean silence. Loyalty means telling the truth before it is too late.

That truth now lands squarely on John Cotton and the leadership group around him. There is still a choice. Talks can be restarted. The dispute can be settled. The legal claims can be closed. Trust can begin, slowly, to be rebuilt.

What, exactly, is being protected by dragging this on?

Or the leadership can continue as it is, voting for Christmas and pretending the carving knife will not come out afterwards.

A harder truth for friends and comrades

There is one more truth I cannot avoid, and it is the most uncomfortable of all.

I know many of the people leading Birmingham Labour. I have worked with them, spoken with them, and shared rooms with them. They are not monsters. They are not Stalinist caricatures. Most are, in private, decent, courteous, and well-meaning people.

And that is precisely the problem.

What we are seeing is not cruelty. It is weakness.

A weakness that allows people who know better to behave worse. A weakness that confuses loyalty with obedience, and caution with virtue. A weakness that allows darker forces higher up the Labour chain, more cynical, more transient, to set the direction while local leaders quietly comply.

Those forces will not be here long. They never are. They rise quickly, exercise influence briefly, and disappear before the consequences land. It is local government that is left holding the wreckage.

So I say this directly to my colleagues and comrades on the council. You did not get involved in politics to behave like this. You did not knock doors, sit through branch meetings, and argue Labour’s case for years in order to preside over secrecy, fire and rehire, and the grinding down of essential workers.

You know this is wrong. You know the strike should have been settled. You know the legal exposure is real. You know the funding excuse has collapsed. And you know, deep down, that history will not accept “I was advised” as a defence.

If you believe the city is already lost to Reform, then at least do not lose yourselves as well. Save your dignity. Speak up. Ditch those whispering in your ears who will not be there when the reckoning comes.

Stand up. Demand transparency. Force the talks to restart. Do what you know is right, even if it costs you position or favour.

It may be too late to save Birmingham electorally.

It is not too late to save your integrity.

And in politics, that is the only thing that truly lasts.