How to watch the Birmingham elections like an enthusiastic amateur
Sharing my useless knowledge about the city's electoral geography while it's still relevant, so I can make space for new information in my brain.
The main thing you have to understand about Birmingham City Council is that it’s huge.
It’s got over a million people in it and has a bigger population than some EU countries.1 Yet it’s only got 101 councillors. Were Birmingham to have the same proportion of councillors to population as London boroughs like Southwark, it would have something like 250. If it were to have a similar proportion to a city like Manchester, it would have just less than 200.
Richard Vinen in Second City talks about how Birmingham shows so many of the changes happening in modern Britain, from the Industrial Revolution to immigration. That’s still true in the current century. Birmingham was one of the few cities where a majority of voters plumped for Brexit, and the local elections taking place in a few days time will be a fascinating case study of how Britain’s multi-party electoral landscape is playing out on the ground.
I’m not attempting ward-by-ward predictions. Mike Olley has done so. While I don’t agree with all of them, and there’s the odd factual error,2 he captures how the traditional strongholds of the established parties — and not just Labour — are under threat in the city.
There have been some polls conducted so that journalists have some numbers to speculate about. ITV commissioned a More in Common Poll which takes two courageous decisions. Not only does it apply only a uniform national swing, which feels less relevant in today’s climate, but it also doesn’t take into account that independents in Birmingham will be a significant electoral presence in some wards and not others. It feels a bit like making a cake by tipping all the ingredients into a baking dish, and not bothering to stir them before sticking the mix into the oven.
Doing granular predictions is also so hard in our stupid voting system because a small number of votes really does make a massive difference to the composition of the council. In 2022 Labour won 65 seats, and was within a hundred votes in six more.3 It also won a further half-dozen seats by a two-digit margin.4 I realise we’re in danger of entering “Jeremy Corbyn was within 3000 votes of getting into Downing Street” territory, but there’s a huge difference between getting 59 seats out of 101 and 71. Especially when seat numbers could make a huge difference to which parties can form a governing coalition after the election.
Poll Check are doing ward-by-ward predictions based on national swing and demography. If you look at their ward-by-ward predictions for Birmingham you can get an idea of the fragmentation of the party system in many seats. Just look at the state of North Edgbaston compared with 2022:5
There are many other similar examples. Anyone who thinks they can confidently make predictions in these circumstances is either touched by divine guidance, or an idiot. After all, what these back-of-the-envelope calculations don’t really allow for is the strength of local candidates, the incumbency factor and local campaigns, nor the power of tactical voting, which you would imagine tend to favour Labour in this particular seat.
The table below gives Poll Check’s seat numbers for Birmingham, along with their headline figure of the net national gains or losses each party is expected to make. Also in that table, for comparison’s sake, is the number of net gains or losses elections expert Steve Fisher has calculated for each party.
You’ll see that Poll Check’s figures generally under estimate the number of Tory and Labour losses, according to Steve Fisher’s calculations, and massively underestimate the number of Reform gains. But who knows how tactical voting, local campaigns, an incumbency factor and random chance will affect these results.
The other complicating factor is the sheer number of candidates. Across Birmingham there are around 700 standing, and most wards have over a dozen to choose from. How this plays out at a local level is impossible to judge.
To give a couple of concrete examples, let’s take a look at Allens Cross in Northfield. Labour won this seat by 14 votes in 2022, and Paul Smith had been active in the area as the presumptive Reform candidate. He’s now been removed as the candidate, for internal Reform reasons I’m not going to pretend to fully understand, in favour of Eddie Freeman who previously represented Allens Cross as a Conservative. Smith was apparently offered the chance to be Reform’s candidate elsewhere but refused and is now standing in Allens Cross as an independent. Could Smith’s name recognition and work in the ward help him to victory, will it be irrelevant and Reform win this seat, or will instead the split vote allow another party to come through the middle?
Or take for instance Bordesley & Highgate. This ward, right in the middle of Birmingham, contains the Beorma bridge which is pictured at the start of Vinen’s Second City. It’s typical of many inner-city seats, traditionally Labour and won by the party in 2022 by a large majority on a low turnout. Every opposition candidate there four years ago was a paper candidate. There are now four (4) Independent candidates there including one deselected by the Labour Party. Will this plethora of Independent candidates help Labour come through the middle?
Given the fragmentation of national politics currently, it’s possible that there could be wards won on 25% of the vote or less, given that many wards in Birmingham voters will be choosing two candidates and there’s a big chance of splits. Making any attempt at seat numbers is — to emphasise once more — a bit of a waste of time, and there could be some very outlandish results.
So instead, I’m going to describe some of the key areas to watch using, as Denis Healey would put it, adjectives and adverbs. I’ll follow up at some point after the election by seeing what the final results here tell us.
There’s a useful map of Birmingham on the council’s website with the constituency and ward boundaries, whilst the one below shows the political composition after 2022. It has changed a bit since then:
Let’s go party-by-party, starting with the one that has fewest seats currently and working upwards.
Reform UK (0 seats)
That means beginning with a party that currently has no representation on Birmingham City Council at all. Nigel Farage has been talking up Reform’s chances in Birmingham for months. Given the amount of Royal Mail-delivered letters I’ve had from the party in an area that isn’t one of their target seats it’s clearly a well-resourced campaign.
You would expect Reform to do well in the traditional working-class areas of Birmingham which are typically on the edge of the city, in Birmingham’s former industrial heartlands. They include seats in:
Northfield: Longbridge & West Heath, Frankley Great Park, Weoley & Selly Oak, Rubery & Rednal.
Edgbaston: Quinton and Bartley Green.
Erdington: Erdington ward itself, Oscott, Kingstanding, Castle Vale.
Hodge Hill & Solihull North: Shard End.
If Reform win all these seats — by no means a given and I have no idea how well the campaigning is going there for them or anyone else — that would give them eighteen seats, a pretty substantial presence on the council.
There are possibilities for other gains which will be covered later. The extent to which Reform end up with, say, a dozen seats or a much bigger total in the thirties or even forties is dependent on two big factors. First, how electorally significant is their waning in the polls? And second, is there substantial anti-Reform tactical voting in seats where they have an active and visible campaign? That’s something we will only know after polling day.
The Green Party (2 seats)
Currently The Green Party holds King’s Norton South and Druids Heath & Monyhull. Their strategy in Birmingham before this election has been to target smaller single member wards which have low turnout, high deprivation and a new housing development. It’s the sort of typical pavement politics pioneered by the Lib Dems: lots of leaflets, active community focus and ensuring they win the battle of the bar charts. Demographically, these seats are both fertile grounds for Reform. Leafletting for Laurence Turner in King’s Norton South during the 2024 General Election, I was struck by the sheer number of (mostly hand-made) Reform posters. One of the reasons I’m reticent about doing predictions is that I’ve been saying for about a year that the Greens could well lose both of their seats on Birmingham City Council and finish with no representation at all, something that now makes me look rather foolish at best.
Zak Polanski’s election as leader and the Green win in Gorton and Denton has given them momentum.6 They are currently running active campaigns in some of the more liberal, middle-class bits of Birmingham: Brandwood & Kings Heath, Bournbrook & Selly Park (where many students live) and Stirchley, where I’m writing this right now. If the Greens win any of those it would have been a very good night, overturning some of the biggest Labour majorities in the city. To underline the point about weird results: the Greens took a seat from Reform in a by-election in Thanet just a few weeks ago, going from fourth to first. So don’t rule out more surprise Green gains across Birmingham that are impossible to foresee currently.
Independents (13 seats)
It’s reflective of the, well, eventful nature of Birmingham politics recently that none of the thirteen independent candidates were elected as such in 2022. As mentioned above, there are a plethora of Independent candidates of many different sorts:
Candidates who were deselected or left their party and are seeking re-election: Quinton, Harborne, Stockland Green, Oscott, Holyhead, Kingstanding, Frankley Great Park (only Simon Morrall in the latter was a Conservative; the rest were Labour). Also worth mentioning is Zhor Malik, the sole councillor to be deselected by Labour in 2022. He then defected to the Conservatives and is now standing in his old seat of Balsall Heath West as an Independent. Generally I’d assume that the idea of a personal vote is one of the most over-rated concepts in politics, but an Independent win in any of these seats could be an illustration of its potency in local elections, where voters are perhaps more likely to vote for the candidate they like rather than just voting for the same party.
Labour candidates who were deselected and are running in a different ward to the one they represent currently: Aston, Bordesley & Highgate and Handsworth. As discussed above with reference to Bordesley & Highgate, it’s hard to tell whether these candidates will have any wider traction or take votes off each other. Something of the sort happened in Ward End in 2022’s locals and also Hall Green in the last General Election, where a split independent vote let Tahir Ali come through the middle. It’s definitely something to watch in Yardley (of which more later) which seems to be an area in which the Workers Party are standing plenty of candidates following their strong showing in the General Election.
Independent candidates running on a generally anti-Labour, pro-Gaza ticket on a platform similar to Akhmed Yaqoob in the West Midlands Mayoral race in May 2024. Ayoub Khan won in Perry Barr whilst Independent candidates also nearly took four other seats from Labour at the General Election two months later: Ladywood, Hodge Hill, Yardley7 and Hall Green. Again, I have no knowledge of how this is playing out on the ground so it would be silly to speculate.
Put all this together, and you could easily see an Independent block in Birmingham which at least matches or even surpasses its current total.
Liberal Democrats (13 seats)
In 2022 the Lib Dems made the most net gains of any party. They picked up seats in both liberal middle class areas (Moseley) and the inner-city (Aston). It’s worth noting that this latter gain was by Ayoub Khan, who ran as a Liberal Democrat before standing as an Independent in the General Election.8 Last time the Lib Dems were part of a coalition administration in Birmingham they benefited electorally in inner-city seats from their opposition to the Iraq war. Under Ed Davey, they are trying to pursue a slightly different voter coalition. That means perhaps focussing less on the inner-city seats, and more in traditionally Conservative middle-class areas. Next door to me in Bournville & Cotteridge the Lib Dems been campaigning, and a seat with a similar demographic is Edgbaston ward, which the Tories only narrowly held on to in 2022. If the Lib Dems win either of these seats they would have had a stonkingly good night.
Having said that, I think it could be tricky for the Lib Dems in Birmingham because of potential trouble in their traditional heartland in the city: Yardley. John Hemming was MP there until 2015 and as Mike Olley notes it is the sort of area that Reform could make gains in. I’ll note that Ed Davey did visit Birmingham so must be reasonably confident of a good showing in the city, though it’s disappointing that he didn’t play chess whilst he was here.
Conservatives (21 seats)
Tories have always traditionally done well in Birmingham, but May 2022 was an awful time for seeking elected office as a Conservative. After that election, Birmingham’s Tories were down to their lowest seat total in decades. Normally the battle for control of Birmingham has come down to a string of Labour/Tory contests in the marginal seats of Northfield, Edgbaston and Erdington. As we’ve already seen, Reform is very much parking its teal-coloured tanks on this particular lawn. Tory group leader Robert Alden will be hoping that his entrenchment in the local community counts in Erdington ward itself. What will be genuinely interesting is what happens in Sutton Coldfield, a traditional Tory bastion. If the Greens win Sutton Trinity and Reform win Sutton Reddicap, say, we’ll be in truly uncharted territory.
The more optimistic take for the Tories says that 2022 basically took them to their floor in Birmingham anyway, so they’re unlikely to lose many seats. Poll Check currently predicts them to end up as the largest group on the council. If this works out, maybe Kemi Badenoch will take a train to New Street later next week for a victory lap.
Labour (50 seats)
That brings us to the ruling party in Birmingham. I’ve stressed throughout that predictions are a mug’s game, and many of my friends are standing as candidates so I don’t want to say too much. Let’s just limit ourselves to some general thoughts.
Labour always faces a tricky battle in Birmingham because it is fighting battles on all fronts. As mentioned above, there are the odd Reform/Green, Reform/Lib Dem or Reform/Tory marginals, but generally in Birmingham Labour is fighting a battle against every single Opposition Party.
The factor that makes this election particularly difficult for Labour is the timing of the vote. Since the move to all-up elections in Birmingham, Labour has been quite fortunate in when the election was held. In 2018, not only had sufficient time passed since a bin strike but also the electoral coalition Labour had under Jeremy Corbyn was well-suited for Birmingham: younger, liberal, graduate-educated and ethnically diverse. Local elections were not held in May 2021,9 at the height of Johnson’s vaccine bounce, but instead during the height of the Partygate scandal in 2022 when Labour were comfortably ahead in the opinion polls.
Morgan McSweeney’s general strategy since 2022 was to take this coalition for granted and triangulate to win over Reform and Conservative voters, only to manage to alienate both blocks of the electorate completely. Add to this that these elections, for all sorts of reasons, could not come at a worse time for Labour in the city. Many — but not all — of the seats I’ve mentioned at risk in this election are some of Labour’s safest seats in the city. The fact that they are even in play is causing what Holly in Red Dwarf might call “brown trousers time” for Labour in Birmingham.
Now Labour does have a decent campaigning infrastructure in Birmingham, and has a chance of grinding out victories across the city. But it really is so uncertain that you could ask a random number generator to pick a score between 0 and 50 and make a plausible case for saying that Labour will win that many seats in Birmingham.
The truly terrifying thing, as we come to the end of this piece, is that I’ve written a lot about how much electoral danger Labour is in Birmingham and not once mentioned bins.
Birmingham has around 1.1 million people, bigger than three EU states and almost the same size as Estonia.
John Cotton, Labour Leader and the nicest man in Birmingham Politics, is standing in Glebe Farm & Tile Cross and not Garretts Green.
These were: Aston (x1), Bartley Green (x2), Edgbaston (x2) and Kingstanding (x1).
These were: Allens Cross (x1), Castle Vale (x1), Oscott (x1), Pype Hayes (x1) and Quinton (x2).
These figures are taken from Poll Check on Tuesday April 28th, as are subsequent ones cited in this piece.
Pun unintended but left in anyway.
Technically this was the Workers Party rather than an Independent but they are both running on vaguely similar platforms.
It’s also a good excuse to link to “dategate”, one of the stupidest political scandals of all time.
But Labour did lose two by-elections in Quinton and Oscott, traditional marginal seat bellweathers and the Birmingham equivalent, say, of Pennsylvania or Basildon.