In the land that gave us Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” and “there’s no such thing as society”, the provision of even the most basic public services is becoming a problem.
Mountains of rubbish have been piling up on the streets of Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city, as a bin crisis rumbles on into its seventh month. Intermittent strike action started on January 6 with 12 walkouts planned across four months, but the situation quickly spiralled when the trade union Unite announced an indefinite all-out strike on March 11. That strike could continue until December, assuming the government doesn’t fire the workers first.
This is Birmingham. Yesterday a new pay deal was rejected by bin men and the @unitetheunion.
The misery will continue. pic.twitter.com/YjZkfMW2Mz
— David Atherton (@DaveAtherton20) April 15, 2025
Birmingham is kind of close to my heart. It is the closest large city to the small Midlands town I grew up in and where my parents still live today. It underwent significant urban renewal in the first two decades of this century but now faces unprecedented financial strains.
While I haven’t had a chance to visit the city, or the UK for that matter, since the bin crisis erupted, reports from friends and family suggest the more affluent parts of the city, including the centre, have been less affected. As Plutonium Kun notes in the comments below, this is probably largely down to higher rates of car ownership, with many people driving to recycling depots to get rid of most of their waste (or possibly fly-tipping).
This chimes with The Guardian‘s April 18 report, “‘The Posh Areas Get Cleared’: Bin Strikes Illustrate Birmingham’s Wealth Gap“:
“It’s very frustrating that the posh areas get cleared and we’re just left, very frustrating but we expect it,” said Peter Thomas, outside his home in Ladywood, against a backdrop of overflowing bins.
Across neighbouring postcodes in Birmingham, the gap between wealthy and deprived parts of the city has been noticeable for residents ever since the bin strikes began last month…
Students living near Edgbaston reservoir said a lack of wheelie bins made the situation worse, despite having had a recent bin collection. Some of those who do have access to wheelie bins have added padlocks in the hope of deterring neighbours from using their bins.
Daniel Struczynski, a chef and culinary arts management student, said: “It’s awful because at the end of the day when we want to put rubbish out we have to put it on the streets and within like 12 hours the bags are all opened, the rubbish is all over the floor.”
He added that it made it a prime target for rodents. “You see rats throughout the night going through them and then crows throughout the day and sometimes even foxes walking around the road.”
The spark for the strike was the city council’s decision in January to remove Waste Recycling and Collection Officer (WRCO) roles which Unite claims would result in 170 workers losing up to £8,000 a year. For some workers that would be the equivalent of losing roughly one quarter of their salaries, says Unite — at a time of persistent moderate-to-high inflation in the UK. Birmingham City’s Labour-run council denies this claim.
Now in its fourth month, the strike could upend long-standing relations between the UK’s governing Labour Party and Unite, one of the country’s largest trade unions. Unite just suspended Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner and is even considering severing ties with the Labour Party altogether. The trade union also suspended the leader of Birmingham City Council, John Cotton. Unite boss Sharon Graham delivered scathing critique of Labour’s “shambolic mismanagement” and anti-worker policies:
Yet again workers are being asked to pay the price for the incompetence of this Labour council and Labour government. It is little wonder workers are deserting Labour in droves when they seem to be hell bent on attacking workers and leaving the super-rich totally untouched.
This should not be happening under a Labour government that promised a new deal for working people. It turns those promises into a complete joke. But let me be clear, the threats won’t work. Angela Rayner and John Cotton’s shambolic mismanagement of this dispute just makes it more likely that the strikes will continue into Christmas and beyond.
While this may all amount to mere bluster, if Unite were to server ties with Labour, the reverberations could be significant. Unite is the largest trade union affiliated to Labour. According to the Electoral Commission, it has donated over £400,000 to the party this year. What’s more, it is threatening to abandon Labour at a time that approval for Starmer’s government just hit an all-time low of -43 — a net drop of 54 points from the peak of plus 11% after Starmer’s landslide victory just over a year ago.
For the moment, the biggest beneficiary of Labour’s collapse appears to be Nigel Farage’s Reform party. As in many countries in Europe, the main establishment parties appear determined to off themselves on the altar of neoliberalism as well as through their dogged support for the war in Ukraine and for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. At the same time, they are stepping up their authoritarian attacks on freedom of speech, of assembly and to protest.
Labour has decided to self-immolate rather than redistributing a tiny bit of wealth.
Grimly fascinating. https://t.co/4NT82xkcnp
— Philip Proudfoot (@PhilipProudfoot) July 13, 2025
Starmer’s “landslide” victory last summer, as we noted at the time, was not owing to a groundswell of support for his vision or policy proposals — before the elections the UK public viewed the Labour Party under Starmer even less favourably than under Ed Miliband — but because support for the Conservative Party had all but disintegrated. Now, it is support for the Labour Party that is collapsing.
Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader who was stabbed in the back by Starmer, is in the process of creating a new left-wing party in the UK that could perhaps pose a threat to Labour’s electoral prospects. According to a poll last week, one third of Labour supporters would consider voting for a Corbyn-led party. And if unions like Unite were to disaffiliate themselves from Labour (still a big “IF”), they would be free to endorse candidates representing another party.
🚨 BREAKING. THIS IS BIG! 🚨
Unite conference votes overwhelmingly to re-examine relationship with @UKLabour and suspend @AngelaRayner from Unite membership over Birmingham bins dispute.
More to follow… pic.twitter.com/rWVvhlFXly— Unite the union: join a union (@unitetheunion) July 11, 2025
Another Broken Pledge
Unite’s decision to ditch Rayner and Cotton was made in an emergency motion at its conference in Brighton at the weekend, which condemned both the UK Government and Birmingham City Council for criticising bin workers who have taken industrial action in Birmingham. In a scathing message Unite leader Sharon Graham accused the deputy PM of backing a “rogue council” that had smeared its workers while seeking to “fire and rehire” the striking bin workers.
As the name suggests, “Fire and rehire” refers to the act of dismissing workers and hiring them back straight away — on worse terms. This practice became more commonplace amid the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic as companies sought to slash their labour costs. The most notorious case was that of P&O Ferries, which fired 800 of its workers in 2022 and then reportedly used an agency to replace the fired staff.
Labour pledged that it would ban fire-and-rehire in its 2024 election manifesto, but it pledged a lot of things it hasn’t got round to doing while doing a lot of questionable things it never pledged to do (accelerating the roll out of digital identity, maintaining military support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza while seeking to criminalise public opposition to the genocide, intensifying the dismantling of the welfare state, increasing national insurance contributions…).
On Wednesday, Birmingham City Council pulled the plug on negotiations. Around 130 workers on Birmingham bin crews face redundancy. Labour had previously pledged to outlaw fire and rehire. Though this is being watered down. pic.twitter.com/o4IhMQbXsw
— Taj Ali (@Taj_Ali1) July 11, 2025
As the veteran journalist Peter Oborne warned in 2023, a year before Starmer’s election victory, “you would be very unwise to believe a word Starmer ever says.”
It would be very unwise to believe a word that Keir Starmer ever says.” ~ Peter Oborne.
Keir Starmer has to be the most unlikeable Prime Minister in my lifetime. And he’s got some stiff competition. He’s a compulsive liar, conceited, drunk on power and a sanctimonious hypocrite. pic.twitter.com/295sejUZKs
— James Melville 🚜 (@JamesMelville) June 3, 2025
Birmingham: Ground Zero of UK’s Local Government Funding Crisis
Over a century ago, Birmingham was described by Harper’s magazine as the best-run city in the world. Today, it is one of the worst-run cities in the UK. In September 2023, Birmingham City Council, which prides itself on being the largest local authority in Europe, serving over one million “customers” (not residents or citizens but “customers”), issued a 114 bankruptcy notice, paving the way for the largest programme of cuts and asset sales yet for any UK local authority.
The BBC explains:
Councils technically can’t go bankrupt – but they can issue what’s called a section 114 notice, where they can’t commit to any new spending, and must come back with a new budget within 21 days that falls in their spending envelope.
And when they do, it often means an impact on residents with severe cuts to frontline services.
Councils are required by law to have a balanced budget each financial year and provide “Best Value” to residents.
But more and more councils are finding it harder to do so.
Thirteen section 114 notices have been issued since 2018 – compared to just one before, in the year 2000. Two of those notices were due to misallocation of funds, however, rather than financial challenges.
There are myriad reasons why Europe’s largest local authority ended up hitting the wall in September 2023 — including the fiscal fallout from COVID-19, the ongoing cost of living crisis and the Tory government’s decade and a half of crippling austerity, the brunt of which was borne by local authorities and which Starmer’s Labour government has done precious little to reverse.
All of these factors left Birmingham City Council with years of falling income and rising costs. But one factor has taken the lion’s share of the blame: equal pay.
In 2012, the UK’s Supreme Court ruled in a case brought by 174 former Birmingham Council employees that Birmingham City Council had contravened equal pay legislation by failing to provide bonuses to predominantly female positions such as cooks, cleaners, catering and care staff that it had offered to predominantly male positions such as bin men, street cleaners, and grave diggers.
4/ Because they lost the case, Birmingham Council have had thousands of equal pay claims brought against them.
So far, they have paid out £1.1 billion to former employees in equal pay compensation.
They estimated further liability in the region of £650m and £760m. pic.twitter.com/Uy8K0Ws9Zx
— Lara Brown (@lara_e_brown) April 8, 2025
Another factor, that has received a lot less attention, is Birmingham City Council’s hugely costly implementation of Oracle Fusion – a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP), finance, and HR system — that essentially doesn’t work three years after its launch. According to The Register, “the estimated total cost has gone from around £19 million ($24.07 million) to £108 million ($137 million), with schools taken out of scope.”
Because most of the council staff lacked the necessary IT training and expertise, the implementation of the ERP system has been a catastrophic failure that has hindered rather than helped the Council’s financial management and its operations. A report in January found that two-and-a-half years after going live, the Oracle system was still not “safe and compliant” and had “effectively crippled the council’s ability to manage and report on finances.”
In Other Words, Yet Another UK.Gov IT Success Story
Yet it is a story that has been conveniently drowned out by all the focus on the equal pay ruling. An Oracle-based scandal would have been a very different kind of scandal in which senior Council heads may have actually rolled.
Also, Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, currently the second richest man on the planet, is the biggest donor to the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. As we have documented in previous posts, Tony Blair and his associates wield outsized influence over the Starmer government while Ellison’s firms, including Oracle, continue to win lucrative government contracts.
Admittedly, the disastrous financial package imposed on Birmingham City as well as the subsequent program of cuts and asset sales, totalling £149m last year and £195m this year, with adult social care and child services so far bearing the brunt, all took place under the Tories’ watch (in central government). That was after successive Conservative governments had denied local authorities funds and the means to raise them, leaving councils in the UK facing a £6.2 billion shortfall as of February 2025.
Since 2010, the Tories’ cuts in central government funding have left councils more reliant on local revenue sources such as council tax and business rates. As a result, both residents and businesses have faced a growing tax burden. Another problem highlighted by the pressure group Unlock Democracy is that these revenue streams are highly uneven, with poorer areas generating less income:
Even with some redistribution, this has widened inequalities between regions, leaving many councils unable to meet basic needs.
Since 2011 central government funding for councils has shrunk by nearly a third in real terms. Overall spending has also shrunk by a third on average in the same period. As Unlock Democracy notes, George Osborne, “the architect of Conservative austerity in the first half of the 2010s, was ideologically committed to a sizable shrinking of the state.” And he was brutally effective in bringing it about. With their coffers rapidly running dry, more than half of local governments expect to go bankrupt in the next five years, reports Tortoise Media.
All that being said, Birmingham City Council has been under Labour majority control since 2012, and if the Oracle disaster is any indication, it has not been doing a very good job of it. What’s more, the Keir Starmer government has been in office for over a year now, and despite the seeming constraints imposed on its spending by the bond markets, it could plug the UK’s local government funding shortfall — if it wasn’t so wedded to the politics of austerity, privatisation and its absurd fiscal rules that prevent it from addressing these kinds of challenges.
As Richard Murphy notes, these fiscal rules “pretend to impose discipline, but the truth is they’re always suspended in a crisis, and they’re always rewritten if the government can’t meet the criteria they’ve set out in advance. In other words, these rules are about as flexible as a rubber band.”
In the meantime, the UK’s local authorities continue to bleed money. Most of the focus in the media is on the growing costs of basic services that are breaking the bank while far less attention is paid to the ongoing role of austerity. The result is that in the land that gave us Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative” and “there’s no such thing as society”, the provision of even the most basic public services, including waste collection and clean drinking water, is becoming a problem.
As Murphy helpfully reminds his readers in another blog post, local councils were at the beating heart of transformational change in the UK, becoming the primary providers of schools, local transport, social housing, electricity, clean water and sewers:
In other words, they were at the forefront of the transformation of society, often using locally subscribed capital to fund local development via bond issues that turned the savings of local people into the future that they desired for themselves and others.
And now? They have been reduced to rumps of service that live under perpetual threat of further cuts, utterly dependent for funding on central government that is intent on denying it to them.
And that applies to Starmer’s Labour Party almost as much as it does to the Tories. In the absence of meaningful support from central government, more councils will inevitably fall into financial distress and bankruptcy. As they do, they will have to sell off their many of their most treasured assets, including land and housing stock, for well below market cost, just as Birmingham did. It is one last plunder in a country that has been plundered almost dry.
Thank you, Nick.
A couple of months ago, tv crews from France’s TF1 and France 2 featured.
One good thing to emerge from this sorry affair is the left has begun to see through the charlatan Angela Rayner.
Further to this trip last year, https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/2031509/angela-rayner-safari-ethopia, I know the official who organised it and accompanied her. Rayner embarrassed her hosts by getting drunk and showing them her tattoos. She also stunned them by not being able to speak grammatical English. The natives could not believe that one of His Majesty’s Secretaries of State was of such, er, quality.
The hellscape of Brum, coming to other councils. Visualize food shortages that drive locals to poach the King’s Rats and Crows. Not that outlandish anymore. 1/2 /s
I lived in Birmingham for a few years in the 1990’s. The Council was always somewhat unique thanks to its very large size compared to other English urban councils – this gave it a political heft other Councils never had. From what I recall, it was reasonably well run. Unfortunately, its always suffered a bit from Second City Syndrome, whereby it was always trying to one-up London and usually just wasting money. That said, on my last visit a couple of years ago I was surprised at how good parts of the city centre looked (that said, it could hardly have been worse than it was back in the early 1990’s). The new tram (West Midlands Metro) had clearly brought a lot of benefits.
I suspect the noises Unite are making to stop supporting Labour are just that – noises. Like most public sector Unions, the core activists are generally a lot more radical than the overall membership, which would be much more centrist Labour. But things are changing so fast politically I guess anything could happen.
The reason better off areas are looking cleaner during the waste collection strike is probably simply car ownership – from what I hear from friends there, people are generally driving to recycling depots to get rid of most of their waste (or possibly just fly-tipping). In those areas with a strong community, like the Moseley area, there are apparently a lot of local initiatives to keep the place clean without overtly strike breaking – but other areas are not so organised.
I do not believe Sharon Graham is a bullshitter.
The hire and refire proposal by Birmingham Council, intending to reduce liabilities, has plenty of comparators in many other equal pay disputes between local authories and unions.
That many were Labour controlled has always reflected badly on the party in its compliance with the Equal Pay Act of 1970.
Glasgow lost its entire long lasting battle against equal pay when it was directly Labour controlled, which commenced during the Blair era, and when Holyrood also had a Labour administration. The SNP have had to pick up on that mess, though not doing especially well in facing that reported bill of £770m.
In fact, Labour losing control of Glasgow was probably partly down to the highly patriarchical local Labour group’s attitude to its female workforce. They lost the local election to the SNP immedaitely after the legal decisions.
Unite potentially distancing itself from the Labour Party has plenty of precedence – only eleven major unions are now affiliated. The exclusion of Rayner from Unite is not performative.
There is still huge residual anger against Labour MPs pushing through the disabled/PIP benefit cuts bill, fudged at the last minute, and Jess Phillips’ (Birmingham Yardley) claim to have cried at her local surgery over this bill did not prevent her from voting for it. Like Rayner, she is seen as another traitor.
Starmer has every reason to be concerned about losing seats in the Midlands next time around.
Union members have long has the choice of paying or of opting out of Labour Party political levies within their subscription fees, whether centrist or not.. Personally, I never opted into the Labour political fund, after it became optional.
RE: the Oracle bit
Is there any organization that does have the proper IT staff to implement these overpriced Oracle monstrosities? A nonfunctioning Oracle system that went way over budget and doesn’t work three years in sounds extremely familiar….
That’s not to let the authorities off the hook, or to single out Oracle. There are plenty of other companies that produce overpriced crapified software. It ought to be clear at this point that these massive platforms that promise to do everything with all their bells, whistles, doodads and gewgaws don’t even come close to living up to the hype. And yet management with little or no IT training keeps buying them anyway, because all their MBA buddies are doing it.
But when it comes to budget shortfalls, the Oracles of the world never have to take a haircut for going over budget, and the workers get the shaft instead. Funny how that works.