Local elections focus: Birmingham’s embattled Con-Lib coalition
Local politics is undeniably similar to the Westminster dynamic in Britain’s second city.
The Conservatives don’t have an overall majority, so they combine with the third-placed Liberal Democrats to keep Labour out of power. They’re forced to vote through devastating public spending cuts worth about a quarter of their revenue. The opposition, while kicking up a big fuss, don’t seem to have many practical alternatives on offer. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Yet this isn’t the national government. It’s the state of play on Birmingham city council, where £212 million of spending cuts – resulting in an expected 2,500 expected job cuts – were approved by the Tories and their unhappy Lib Dem allies on Tuesday.
The dynamics are strikingly similar. Which is why it’s going to be so interesting to see what happens in Birmingham when a third of the council’s 120 seats go up for election on May 5th this year.
At present the Conservatives hold 45 seats. Labour are on 41 and the Lib Dems on 31, with Respect holding three wards.
A large chunk of the seats which could change hands this May are Labour-held, making it extremely difficult for them to take overall control of the council. The leader of the opposition is Sir Albert Bore, who confidently predicts Labour will emerge as the largest party. He hopes to take seats off the Conservatives in the south of the city, repeating similar feats in 2010. “It’s the extent to which we can take seats from the Liberal Democrats that will in the end determine what the net gain for us is,” Bore says.
The Lib Dems are, unsurprisingly, a little downbeat. They’ll be experiencing what it’s like to be a party in government nationally this May for the first time in decades. It’ll be exacerbated by the fact they’re in exactly the same position at the local level. “We’re not expecting a disaster,” one local Lib Dem campaigner said. “But Labour are on the front foot, not the back foot. What Liberal Democrats have to do is keep reminding people of what they have been able to do locally.”
The challenge remains the same: convincing voters that the changes Lib Dems are achieving are worth being in power for.
Bore points to a string of recent Lib Dem failures as evidence that the third party nationally will not fare well in May. “I think we will see that national picture very much played out in May at the local elections,” he predicts.
“We’re seeing it played out in local government by-elections at the moment where in many places the Tory vote has held up to a good degree, but the Lib Dem vote has collapsed. I think that is a scenario which is quite possible here in Birmingham.”
Phil Parkin, the deputy leader of the Conservative group, believes Bore and co feel a sense of entitlement when it comes to running the city.
“I think Labour are expecting to be running the city council soon,” he says. “There’s a bit of a feeling amongst them that it’s their turn – [that] this is the cycle of events and things will change. I don’t think it’s going to follow that route at all.”
Parkin says voters have been reassured by the council’s pledge to keep the city clean, continue weekly bin collections and save as many leisure centres and libraries as possible. “People accept there’s a problem and accept something needs to be done,” he claims. But he concedes it will be “tough”.
“We’re campaigning very hard, the Liberals are campaigning hard, we are not generally picking up from people they’re rushing to go and vote Labour,” Parkin says.
“There are a lot of people who remember what the city was like under Labour.”
There’s a big clue in that statement, explaining why Bore is so confident that it won’t be until 2012 at the earliest that he stands a decent chance of returning to power.
Labour went for broke in terms of expanding Birmingham in the 1990s. Both local Tories and the Lib Dems believe that everything else was “starved” deliberately. “We were in a desperate state,” Parkin continues. “They left us with tens of millions of pounds of deficit. We were going to be taken over by the government and [one department faced threats of being] put in special measures.”
So it’s no surprise that Bore is so confident that the coalition will re-form after the local elections. It’s lasted since 2004, after all. Six years of cooperation mean it doesn’t have the same fledging uncertainties which the national coalition has experienced in its first ten months. Instead, the Tories and Lib Dems are united by a historic contempt for Labour’s legacy.
Labour may find themselves held back by the fact they can’t offer much by way of an alternative. Again, the national picture is mirrored. As the Tories complain on the national stage about Ed Miliband’s failure to come up with an alternative to spending cuts, so in Birmingham Bore’s amendment lacked detailed alternatives. He pledged to provide extra support for elderly residents in need of care services, more resources for respite care and a significant reduction in cuts for youth services.
Parkin, who says this response was “effectively done on the back of a fag packet”, insists that the coalition has done its utmost to ensure its package of cuts is as fair as possible.
“There are some very difficult challenges ahead, it’s certainly not been easy,” he says. “But we feel we’ve come up with a package that is fair, does support the most vulnerable and does acknowledge this is taxpayers’ money and we’ve got to spend it wisely.”
Even if there is not a shift in power this May, all sides acknowledge the real battle will be fought in 2012. And, as is occurring in Westminster, the speculation will all be about whether the Lib Dems can stomach the cuts they are forcing through.
There are already warning signals being sounded. The Liberal Democrats’ leader on the council, Paul Tilsley, added his name to a letter to the Times newspaper sent by senior Lib Dem councillors complaining about cuts which “will have an undoubted impact on all frontline council services including care services to the vulnerable”.
“They brought the cuts in – and that will begin, I think, to affect their morale, particularly when they see the change of seats in May this year,” Bore says.
Any disquiet there is now could get much worse after May. And if recent by-election results are repeated across the country, the parallels between local and national seen in Birmingham could intensify to critical proportions.
