The Week Birmingham Asked Who Is Actually In Charge
Birmingham’s voters have broken the old political settlement. The question now is whether the new politics can do something even harder: govern.
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.
Last tonight
ERDINGTON
Turnout 36.9% (31.7%) +5.2%
Conservative 43.2% (53.4%) -10.2%
Labour 19.3% (38.6%) -19.3% (sic)
Reform 18.1% (0%) +18.1%
Green 17.5% (4.5%) +13%
Liberal Democrats 3.5% (2.4%) +1.1%
Workers Party 0.7% (0%) +0.7%
Trade Unionists 0.6% (1.1%) -0.5%
The ward lies to the south of Sutton Coldfield and is a mix of private and moderately wealthy housing to the east and social housing, including large blocks of flats to the north and west of a much run down High Street. It has a strong Conservative tradition. The Tory group leader came second in the poll here, in a two seat ward. The Tories were re- elected in both seats but with a much reduced % of the poll. This did not matter because Labour lost exactly half of its votes. Reform and the Greens were the recipients of the decline of the Labour and Tory votes. However, there should be some caution here and elsewhere regarding the rise in the Green vote. It should be noted that in two seats wards in 2022 the Greens only fielded one candidate, except in places they were certain of winning. Thus it is not a case of comparing like for like. Reform did well in the ward but would probably taken second place if it had fielded two candidates with English surnames. Instead it fielded one Muslim candidate, who got more than 300 votes (31%) less than their other candidate. The differential between these two candidates was thus much higher than for all same party candidates at this election. The Liberals here, as in most of the city, failed to get more than a few hundred votes. They, as in much of Great Britain, concentrate their vote in a limited area meaning that here in Birmingham they either come first or on or near last in the polls.
One aspect in my overall review of voting will be the vexed issue of the size of wards and whether or not the Boundary Commission for England has a bias in the drawing of boundaries. It has long been known that it requires less votes to elect a Labour MP than a Tory one; a lot less. While efforts have been made to change this situation in recent years this remains the case. Ward boundaries affect constituency boundaries. But ward boundaries have an added problem when you are dealing with two councillor wards and one councillor wards. In Birmingham it is not the case that one councillor wards have half the electorate as two councillor wards. Thus a councillor might be elected with 600 votes in one ward and 3000 votes next door. The statistics for this will be examined in my review.
EDGBASTON
Turnout 38% (31.5%) +6.5%
Conservative 42% (46%) -4%
Green 26.5% (5.5%) +21%
Labour 14.8% (41.5%) -26.7%
Reform 10% (0%) +10%
Liberal Democrats 6.5% (13.9%) -7.4%
In most of Southern England the Liberal Democrats are the alternative to the Tories. Hard as it may seem to Brummies the place where I was a child and lived most of my life has never ever had a Labour MP but that does mean that it did not try. In the landslide of 1945 it came within 500 votes of achieving the impossible. There was, as in every constituency, a residual Labour working class socialism. But that has long gone. The working classes in the South, outside London and a few ethnically diverse or student towns, turned Tory in the Thatcherite wave. They, with middle class Toryism, kept the Conservatives party in power for decades. But in 2026 that alliance was fractured. But it was not there the Labour Party that reaped the benefit. It was the Liberals. And, despite the Labour landslide, the Liberals came back from the dead in the shires of southern England. It is its rise which gave Labour its “loveless landslide”. Here, in the Midlands, people often forget the tradition of working class Toryism. Newspapers, like the Daily Express, propagated the message with its banner “For King and Empire”. That nationalist working class Toryism fell apart before 2026 with not just the so-called “Boris wave”. The Conservatives became the party of a largely Middle class home owning moderately wealthy class, which is reflected in the vote in Edgbaston and in Sutton Coldfield. The patriotic working class Tories have moved on and found their home in Reform. They have been joined by the “red wall” let down by Labour. In Birmingham it is not the Liberals but the Greens that have benefitted from disenchantment middle class with the ruling parties, while the working class white vote has gone Reform. Thus in Edgbaston the Conservatives retain power because of a property owning middle class. Reform did well in the council and social housing to the east of the road into Harborne. Students voted Green and the Liberals were no where to be seen. As for Labour its vote fractured to both the Greens and Reform, by a guesstimate in Edgbaston of 2 to Green and 1 to Reform; though in other wards the reverse is true. Where this leaves Labour is the reason for the present struggles in Labour. Turn Left and it loses more votes to Reform; turn right and it is a godsend to the Greens. Stay where you are and, as in Plato’s analogy, the horseman who rides two horses is bound to crash!