Few other observers have kept their counsel in the run-up to Aston Villa’s home tie with Maccabi Tel Aviv. Pundits have drawn attention to the Maccabi fans’ previous misbehavior, others have raised concerns that the same fans will be unsafe in what is seen as a partisan city. Most have agreed that the match would not be untroubled if Maccabi fans turned up. Seeing political opportunity, in September, a local MP, the pro-Gaza independent Ayoub Khan, called for the match to be canceled. Then, amid rising concern, local policing bureaucrats banned Maccabi fans from attending the game — citing safety reasons. Amid commentariat fury at perceived antisemitism, Keir Starmer called the ban “the wrong decision”, and his government said it would find resources with which to get fans to the match safely. Birmingham was suddenly the focus of a furious row about ethnic strongholds and ancient hatreds.

Small wonder, then, that Villa Park has also become a magnet to provocateurs, with the pro-Gaza former mayoral candidate Akhmed Yakoob, a self-promoting lawyer who faces a trial over money laundering, holding court in a Villa shirt. Inevitably, Tommy Robinson, too, has hinted he might pitch up for the game. But while the political class has been trying to play this game to its own advantage, the residents are touchy. It wasn’t just the security guards. “Mate, I’m not speaking about that,” said one man on a smoke break near the stadium.

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Birmingham Perry Barr, Khan’s constituency, is particularly economically vulnerable, with people struggling to put food on the table; the city’s financial woes, meanwhile, have left rats picking over the piled-up bin bags. But such quotidian issues have been drowned out by Khan and his ilk allowing the match to become the platform for their Gaza-sympathetic stance. They’ll feel supported institutionally, since UEFA has recently considered banning Israeli teams from competition, and the UN concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. This does play locally, too. Aston has a large Muslim population: over 73% in 2021. And, according to a recent poll, one in four British Muslims rates Israel-Palestine as their most important election issue. Venture down the main Aston High Street and this would seem to be reflected in the sea of anti-Zionist signs and thickets of pro-Palestine heraldry. But Kefentse Dennis, a former local councilor with a pro-Gaza stance, worries that this increased flagging isn’t entirely local or organic. Activists are imposing their politics on the locals, he suggests. “Food on the table is more important here,” he tells me. And the match has become about more than football because Khan, as he sees it, is part of “a political class”.

All told, then, the area is more complex, than some far-off commentators, might assert. Shopkeepers of South Asian heritage run the off-licenses, takeaways and shops that service fans. “I love the football guys,” beams one in a Villa-branded takeaway. And though Palestinian flags fluttered by the Witton Arms, the old-school Villa boozer, broadly the fans think politics and football should be separate.

In any case, it’s not just Palestine flags you notice when walking around Aston. There are Union flags and St George’s crosses too — something that national reporting has overlooked. The whole flagging trend started in the poorer, whiter suburbs of South Birmingham and while it could be a sign of rising sectarianism here, it is also true that flags of any stripe, Palestine or St George, are becoming symbols of disillusionment. “People are sick and tired,” Dennis told me. “They don’t get to feel pride at being British,” he adds. “Flags have given them something to do.”

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Dennis also contends that the reputation of the Maccabi fan base complicates the allegations of antisemitism. In fact, many in the local Jewish community supported the ban along with the police. While it is true that, since October 7, Jew hatred has soared across the West Midlands, it is unavoidable that the Maccabi fans have previous. Notwithstanding the clashes in Amsterdam, in Israel, police have recently had to intervene in their matches. Not long after the fans were banned from attending the game in Aston, the police called off a Maccabi match in Tel Aviv after violent rioting. You might forgive the police for being cautious — just two years ago, almost 50 officers were injured in clashes with visiting Polish soccer fans. They’re aware of the potential on-the-ground danger for both locals, themselves and potential visiting Jewish fans.

In the end, though, it was Maccabi themselves who chose not to bring fans. Late last month, the club said it would not accept its allocation of away tickets. In a statement, it said that “a toxic atmosphere has been created which makes the safety of our fans wishing to attend very much in doubt”. Closer to home, Ruth Jacobs, a representative for the Jewish Representative Council for Birmingham and the West Midlands, confirmed that the Jewish community were kept in the loop regarding police thinking on the match but the incident has been “frustrating, irritating and sad”. “It should have never come to this,” she says.

With or without Maccabi fans there, the police will have work to do —  over 700 officers, will be drafted in. Hours before the match, a pro-Palestine protest is set to take place, with demands for Israeli teams to be banned from international soccer competitions altogether. And local pro-Palestine activists have voiced concern that “bored, masked youths” might decide to cause trouble. “There are worries that this then confirms the pre-emptive media narrative,” Dennis added.

Perhaps for that reason, this is now a city on the defensive. Ayoub Khan, chatty last month, refused to speak to me. Days before the match, his predecessor, Khalid Mahmood was at first happy to speak, and then simply ghosted me. The police didn’t want to get caught up in politics again.

I understand why locals might have a distaste for probing journalists. Muslims, Jews, and Aston as a whole have all been used to justify grand narratives of some sort. Nuanced safety concerns, the truth of community and grinding economic realism are secondary in angry national debates.

Indeed, poorer North Birmingham suburbs have all proved useful for the type of media criticism we’ve seen building around the Villa match. Robert Jenrick turned up nearby, claiming no white faces could be seen. In nearby Erdington, a majority-white area, a Telegraph reporter found a community that didn’t feel like a community because, as she told it, of rising migrant numbers. Damned be the facts of the matter.

But this national weaponizing of local issues has already dealt a powerful blow to a place which will be left reeling long after the final whistle is blown and Westminster loses interest. Politicos in London won’t have to deal with the reverberating tensions, but locals will.

Now compare Burnham to Richard Parker. Politicos are still unsure what even drove him from the spreadsheet anonymity of a career in accountancy to mayoralty of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) a year ago. Certainly, Parker’s pitch for the job didn’t stray far from vague lines on family ties to the region — and being unable to stand by while the Midlands rotted. Boilerplate stuff, topped off with pledges written in a say-nothing Starmerese so diligent they may have come straight from the Labour leader’s playbook. 

Parker’s lackluster style is even more striking given his peers. I don’t mean Burnham here, or indeed Sadiq Khan. Even in the West Midlands itself, there’s Parker’s predecessor Sir Andy Street, who elegantly dovetailed the region’s fortunes with his own personal brand. Mr Commonwealth Games. Mr HS2. Whatever you want to call him, Street was the Midlands for locals and outsiders alike. 

Parker’s failure to follow suit is especially remarkable given there’s so much he could plausibly build a political personality around. In a largely deindustrialized region, housing inequality, transport woes, and low-paying jobs are all urgent problems to be solved. Then there’s the Birmingham bin strike. It may be the responsibility of the local council, but with 26,000 tons of stinking rubbish left uncollected, it’s hard not to see the dispute as the ultimate symbol of Midlands failure. Parker’s electoral victory at least paid lip service to these issues, promising to boost regional skills, explore high street rejuvenation and, given top billing, take buses back into public control. But the wide popularity of these ideas hasn’t protected him from criticism. 

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For one, bus franchising isn’t projected until 2027 at the earliest. A retiring figure, albeit one well-liked by colleagues, Parker doesn’t seem to lead much on policy, only getting excited about housing — a hangover, I’m told, from his exposure to the issue during his accounting years. He’s happy to outsource the blue-sky thinking the mayoral role is known for to less political policy leads. There’s a joke that if you want to know what Parker really thinks, you should ask Rachel Reeves, to whom he lent a holiday home and donated £12,000 in cash the year before he became mayor. 

This closeness to the Treasury runs exactly contrary to the expanding mayoral model’s devolutionary principles. It also comes with risks, not least when the Westminster party’s poll numbers are in the basement. According to YouGov, after all, only 60% of Labour voters in 2024 plan to stay loyal next time. More than that, the latest polling has Reform UK on 30% nationwide, a far cry from the 5.8% the party won in last year’s West Midlands mayoral election. No less striking, May’s local elections saw Farage’s juggernaut pick up two mayoralties, with Labour pushed extremely hard by insurgent mayoral candidates in former Labour heartlands like North Tyneside. In such a landscape, it remains to be seen whether Parker can win in 2028; some insiders already whisper he may not stand at all.

It’s not just Reform that poses a threat to Parker either: his old rival Street retains plenty of popularity right across the Midlands. Many feel his 2024 loss was a repudiation of Tory rule rather than a personal slight, especially given Street himself is famous for his issues-first style. More than that, he lost to Parker by just 0.15% last year. Defeat, then, but one far less resounding than what his party suffered nationally. I know many across the Midlands, both to the Left and Right of Street, who admire his region-first approach. But as the former mayor is busy burnishing his centrist credentials — telling a recent interviewer that he’ll fight for a “moderate, inclusive conservatism” — Reform’s rise could yet stymie the careers of Parker and Street both.

Quite aside from that looming light-blue wave, meanwhile, Street’s tenure was far from perfect. For one thing, HS2 was a nightmare. It’s too early to know if this latest iteration of the Northern Powerhouse could belatedly link London and Birmingham to Manchester, but Street himself certainly failed, and that was despite the help of Burnham further north. For its part, Street’s cross-city rail project was also hit by waves of delays. In contrast, and to give Parker his due, the current mayor has attached his name to a mega-bucks tram project which might finally give him a political identity worth the name. Linking up a proposed “Sports Quarter” in Birmingham with the airport and NEC events space is an unqualified good, especially when the network will travel through some of the city’s poorest areas.

But the region has been burnt by doomed development projects before. Forget HS2: though it rarely makes headlines south of Warwickshire, a long-in-the-offing gigafactory, meant to be built on the site of Coventry Airport, has faced epic struggles too.

For years, people across the Midlands were promised that the huge battery-making facility, designed specifically to power electric vehicles, would secure 6,000 jobs and £2.5 billion in investment. As far back as 2017, Street told the Conservative Party conference that the future growth of the West Midlands would emerge from its car-making past. “It’s a modern industrial strategy,” he said. You could almost see the gigafactory materialize as he spoke.

As it is, nothing much has happened, though those close to Street celebrate his ability to pull in private sector support for his embattled region. Perhaps — Street is certainly an enthusiastic booster for his patch — but apparent interest from Jaguar Land Rover and the Tata Group never went anywhere. Instead, a local manufacturer called Volklec, backed by funds from the Chinese battery sector, turned up instead. Yet even then, a £1 billion investment plan falls far short of Street’s grand words. All the while, the gigafactory itself is nowhere to be found, its promise of prosperity lost among the Warwickshire hedgerows.

In a sense, of course, these challenges aren’t the fault of Parker or Street. For if regional mayors occasionally show the strength of personality to make a difference, the fact is that they are never in complete control of their destinies. After all, even under boosted devolution deals, mayors rely on private partnership for success, a model that pits areas against each other. Tata, for instance, took investment that might have come to the West Midlands to Somerset instead.

A reliance on private cash also emphasizes risible public support. For the long-signaled gigafactory, the WMCA has only offered £23 million to the project. Whitehall might stump up another £65 million, but that’s not much either. “We hardly have the carrots to tempt investors with,” says one WMCA insider, a fair point when funding for projects comes from tightly controlled government pots. It’s impossible, here, not to mention the “Treasury Brain” adherence to environmental legislation and London-centric development logic — which together make it tough for post-industrial sites in the West Midlands and elsewhere to get off the ground.

In other words, then, for the mayoralties to really turbocharge their regions they first need to escape the clutches of Westminster. “Devolution is about driving economic growth, not societal or welfare change,” says Ben Brittain, a former advisor to Street. “You run the risk of low-energy over-promoted accountants or a chair of a council subcommittee as the region’s leader, which does a disservice to citizens of that region.” 

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At this point, it’s tempting to return to Parker. Even people less close to Street than Brittain miss his ambassadorial energy and soft skills: knowing when to bollock, reward, charm, or simply put in the hours to get things done. Of course, it would be unfair not to mention that every local and combined authority still battles austerity, which persists even under the Labour government in Westminster. “There must be a strong relationship between mayoral teams, No. 10 and No. 11, which can unblock a lot,” says Brittain. “But there is no formal structure for that.” 

Here, Parker might point to his relationship with Reeves as crucial to unlocking funds for his gleaming new tram project. But those same links, insiders worry, could be exactly what undercuts regional confidence and, potentially, renewal on the West Midlands’ own terms. Parker, after all, is Reeves’ man. And for a country like England, with its hyper-centralized political culture, it’s equally concerning that Labour may now plan to make its mayors more accountable to the party. What would this mean for Parker, who might need to take on Downing Street if his tramline goes the way of HS2? Then there’s the gigafactory which, as it stands, remains an underused airport. Hardly something to build a political brand around.

Yet in the chilly winter air outside, there’s also a desolate scene, one that wouldn’t be out of place in Dickens. After years of industrial decline, to say nothing of growth-squashing policies from Whitehall, the erstwhile home of Joe Chamberlain has become a stronghold of homelessness. You see them loitering by the station, weather-worn and battered, wandering alone or in small groups. Many sit in tired, ad-hoc conflabs. Some cadge fags or cash. Others share gossip, jokes, or a less-than-ideal bit of shelter. And just as the streets around New Street suffer here, so, all Birmingham does too. 

Since 2019, there has been a 70% jump in homelessness across the city. The most vulnerable rough sleepers, those near New Street, are only the start. There are now over 10,000 homeless children in Birmingham — more than at any other time this century — with over 4,500 families in temporary accommodation. 2023 government stats show that the West Midlands has much higher homelessness rates than the East Midlands (Nottingham and Leicester) and the North West (Liverpool and Manchester). Barrie Hodge of St Basils, a local youth homelessness charity, says those seeking help from the  have rocketed by 22%. 

Ask the average worker, rushing to and fro from New Street, and most won’t give the homeless a second glance. This is not because we’re a callous lot — it’s because we’re used to this scene and many here, too, are struggling to make ends meet. Rent rises in this corner of England are among the fastest in the land, even as employment is down, and less than a quarter of us earn the London median wage of £44,370. Many here just don’t have the cash to help themselves, let alone pass on a fiver to some nameless stranger looking for a handout as they rush to get a train.

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Visit Council House, the handsome Victorian headquarters of local government, and you’d probably hear a similar answer. Max Caller, called in by Whitehall after Birmingham’s effective bankruptcy, has been locally dubbed “Max the Axe” for his ruthless pruning of the city’s spending. The exact figure changes a lot, but hundreds of millions have to be found in cuts, or in council tax rises. Not that it’s surprising. Between financial mismanagement, a botched IT upgrade and an eye-watering equal pay settlement, Birmingham is a city on the edge. Beyond the £400 million headline, which has seen arts funding taken down to zero, and social care slashed. For its part, funding for the department that deals with homelessness has seen cuts of 28%.

You can see the paucity of authority care throughout the city. Beginning at New Street, it’s crept up the A-roads and down our arterial waterways. On canals you’ll find tents. Some are for sleeping; others for shooting up. On major ring roads, traffic lights are increasingly guarded by the most desperate. Suburban retail parks are much the same. For their part, some bus stops are also now homes. One homeless lad, at the Highgate interchange of Belgrave Middleway, had been there for so long that he’d even started tending to the weeds around the road’s intersection. Add to that the mass of people in temporary accommodation, hardly suitable for building stability or accessing consistency in care, and the problem is becoming more complex. “Society,” Hodge says, “is only as successful as the way it treats its most vulnerable.”

Given the desperate state of Birmingham’s accounts, it’s tempting to imagine that these problems could be solved with more cash. But with Rachel Reeves making much of Labour’s tough decision-making — she recently said all government departments need to find 5% in cuts — a wholesale abandonment of austerity seems unlikely. That’s even as the city currently spends about £2 million a month on temporary accommodation for the homeless.

To be fair, the Government isn’t totally oblivious here. Treasury grumbles notwithstanding, Labour has promised an extra £3 billion to build new houses. Beyond opening its wallet, Whitehall also plans to deregulate. All local authorities in England will soon boast “spatial development” strategies, while mayors will be able to take planning decisions without asking London for permission. These carrots come with sticks. Angela Rayner has made much of the mandatory housing targets Labour is set to impose on councils, with local leaders expected to identify ugly greenbelt land (the so-called “greybelt”) for new projects. If places like Birmingham still drag their feet, No. 10 has ultimately promised to overrule them.

These efforts are surely welcome — but in truth risk ending in failure. For starters, the social housing waiting list in Birmingham alone is 23,500 at the last count, and that excludes the 10,000 just waiting to get on the waiting list. Labour’s annual plan to build 300,000 houses nationwide suddenly sounds rather less impressive, especially when combined with immigration figures that, though falling, remain high. Another challenge involves money. It’s all good and well to pump billions into housing, but recall that councils now spend 42% less on services than they did in 2010. Then there’s the question of expertise: Birmingham finished just 40 council-developed units, leaving officials reliant on pricey (and dubious) HMO landlords. Ebenezer Scrooge: is that you?

Solutions are available. Birmingham has the highest number of empty homes in the country. Some of this is due to landlords or owners not being able to afford repairs. But near to where the cash-generating Commonwealth Games were held, hundreds of premium flats, meant first for athletes then locals, remain empty. More council mismanagement. And though elsewhere the council has clawed back control of other empty flats — the aim being to reduce homelessness and ease housing congestion, as well as stopping properties from being used for anti-social behaviour — could cash from the Treasury buy these up faster, mitigating future costs and helping those at risk of homelessness? There is, at least, a blueprint here. In 2020, as Covid-19 took hold, all street homeless were housed within a week, when unused hotels and hostels were suddenly converted to temporary accommodation.

Ultimately though, beating homelessness is about more than immediate tweaks. “The easiest part is putting rooves over heads,” Hodge says. “The hardest part is helping them [homeless] with the realities of life.” Left to their own devices and multiple occupancy residences for the homeless risk being ghettoised, defined by sex work and drug use. Experts like Hodge are eager not merely for more money — but also the targeted prevention of homelessness at source, and the good work and life opportunities to help people get back on their feet. That makes sense: though a lack of council cash is doubtless a push factor for those rough sleepers near New Street, there are pull factors too, from addiction and family breakdown to the cost of living. 

While he therefore wouldn’t sniff at more funds from Council House, and appreciates whatever help he can secure from Victoria Square, Hodge equally wants more thoroughgoing social change: boosted wages; better-paid apprenticeships and entry-level work; salaries in line with rocketing retail rents. These, he says, are the improvements that prevent homelessness in the first place. “Otherwise,” he warns, “you end up throwing money at the problem. It’s like smoking: we have to highlight the risks and hope to prevent [homelessness], but that means the government putting money into something that might not get immediate results.” 

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For their part, Birmingham City Council’s leadership should start being louder. Certainly, local engagement can work: Greater Manchester has recently reduced street homelessness by 52%. In practice, that’s involved a “Housing First” programme to deliver long-term accommodation, and a “Bed Every Night” scheme for more urgent cases. Beyond the specifics, moreover, you get the sense that political engagement can really help here. Yes, Birmingham has an ambitious five-year council plan to reduce homelessness, as well as partnerships across the city. Then again, the only local councillor who dared condemn Caller’s cuts was promptly suspended. More to the point, pressure on Whitehall has proved successful elsewhere. Up the M6, Andy Burnham has been central in lobbying for more central government funding to boost homeless schemes across his combined authority.

Courage from Council House is doubly urgent now. Top homeless charities have written to Reeves to explain that homelessness could rocket still further. And while Lisa Nandy talks a big game on the need for charity, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport sounds ominously like she’s merely regurgitating “Big Society” nonsense of the Cameron era. “The charity sector can pick up the gaps but that’s because statutory services were not supporting or funding services,” is how Hodge puts it, noting that much of the sector’s funding anyway comes from local government. Considering how serious the problem has now become — not just here, but nationally, with over 300,000 people now assessed as homeless — it’s hard to disagree. 

Something, in short, must clearly be done. Especially now, as winter hits, and the homeless in their sleeping bags begin to shiver. Officially, after all, there are now 36 entrenched rough sleepers in the city, and these figures are bound to rise further. In the winter chill, I walk past one man wearing clothes barely more than rags, with a battered sleeping bag scarved around his neck. He’s hunched over, looking for nubs of used cigarettes on the floor. A charitable fiver from a fellow Brummie feeling “good will to all men” might help for a time. But something more substantial is needed too, long after the Christmas lights come down.

Modern parallels are easy to draw. Birmingham City Council’s effective bankruptcy has, after all, resulted in familiar levels of parsimony to the 19th century. Longer term issues centre on Whitehall cuts and a historic equal pay claim. That’s shadowed by more immediate problems, notably a botched IT upgrade and accusations of mismanagement. Estimates vary on the eventual bill but, as it stands, around £400 million in spending cuts are coming. Bin collections will be slashed, street lights dimmed, and youth services cut to ribbons. Libraries, too, are on the chopping block, as is culture. The council plans to take local arts funding down to zero. To make matters worse, residents face among the highest rent rises in England, a situation that’s exacerbated the city’s choking destitution: a new report shows that almost half of local children live in real, sustained poverty. 

Now, as then, a rail project, HS2, has carved up part of the city, cutting off one area from another. Concern over crime doesn’t centre on forgeries these days, but rather the kids as young as 10 sucked into drug running. “Blackest Brummagem” might be too anachronistic to cut through as an epithet for today’s Birmingham, in short, but Dylan Gray, a rapper in the Dickens mould, has his own line. “Brum’s shit,” he rapped on one recent track. “I only say what I see.” 

Gray is hardly the first Birmingham resident to see fault with his Midlands home. In the middle of the 19th century, a small network of monied notables thought the town could do with improvement. With their great industrial fortunes, gained through industry or the law, the city’s bourgeoisie rolled up their silk sleeves and got to work. Why? Partly ambition and self-promotion, with Joseph Chamberlain, industrial magnate and Birmingham’s mayor between 1873 and 1876, a monocle-wearing, orchid-collecting exemplar. 

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Yet if making Birmingham a commercial success was obviously crucial here — explaining, among other things, the Victorian obsession with railways — that also dovetailed with philanthropy. Especially for Quakers like the Cadbury family, but also for more mainstream Christians, Birmingham’s elite saw themselves as public servants. Chamberlain’s mayoralty saw municipal services — gas, water, provision of lighting — all taken into the public realm and owned by the town. Before that, private concerns snatched profits away from locals, even as areas like sanitation were mostly ignored altogether. 

Nor was this merely an area of utility. “Forward” was the motto Birmingham’s civic leaders chose for their town, and nowhere was that aspiration clearer than in architecture. Council buildings were built like Venetian palaces; libraries like churches; central boulevards like Paris itself. “We were shouting that we’re a city-state like Florence,” reflects Professor Carl Chinn, an ex-broadcaster and activist, “a self-sustaining Birmingham”.

The arts were also central to the city’s civic ambitions. Sir Whitworth Wallis, a curator and director, began a best-in-class collection of Pre-Raphaelite works. Encompassing some 3,000 pieces — including stunning works by painters and designers like Edward Burne-Jones — it both bolstered and exemplified Birmingham’s thriving art scene. Wallis was also the first director of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. Partly financed by industrialist cash, and founded in 1885, the council bypassed public funding laws by housing the nascent collection in its own buildings. It’s chutzpah you’d like to see today, though hardly unique for its era. 

Such bullishness could be seen across the public realm — and sometimes the lower classes gained explicitly. Jesse Collings, Chamberlain’s successor, secured free libraries for the city, while the Birmingham and the Midland Institute was established to deliver education to the masses. No less striking, outsiders noticed these successes. Near the end of the century, the Magazine of Art called Birmingham’s collection “the handsomest” around. Harper’s Magazine, for its part, described Brum as the best-governed city on Earth.

By comparison, today’s landscape can feel like a fight for table scraps. Whitehall austerity has resulted in closures and efficiencies across the arts sector for the last 15 years. For Cheryl Jones, founder at the Grand Union gallery, yet another round of cuts risks giving the impression that Birmingham is a cultural wasteland. “We have to talk about the amazing stuff here,” she says, “because if people think there are no arts here, they won’t come.” 

Not that the situation is completely hopeless. At Grand Union, Jones explains how she rents out space for offices, and plans to open a new café. This entrepreneurial approach is clearly successful: the gallery has provided both nominees and judges to the Turner Prize, all without much in the way of council funding or support from some self-satisfied button manufacturer. 

And, to be fair, there is some investment elsewhere too. Officially, the city is excited about the big-ticket development of new BBC studios, just around the corner from where many galleries are housed. But Jones argues this worries “those who are here already” — especially when the Beeb’s arrival will probably mean higher rents nearby. Not to be downbeat, Jones has tried to become an artistic partner to the BBC, with the hope of deepening links with big, flashier projects, and ultimately securing financing over the long-term. All the same, Jones feels future development needs to be planned with the smaller organisations it affects. As she puts it: “That wouldn’t cost much.”

Unlike in the age of the great Victorian oligarchs it can feel like everything from arts to services are an afterthought in Birmingham. Some here feel the council’s ambitions start and end with property development, with little appreciation for what that actually means for the people who live here. Plans for an apartment and retail megapolis, worth some £2 billion, have recently been approved despite sitting on top of historic wholesale markets, and the exact spot where Birmingham was born.

Elsewhere, the historically significant Ringway Centre was recently signed off for demolition, with new towers due to replace the Brutalist giant. It’s fair to say that the Ringway isn’t universally adored, but it does nonetheless represent another era of civic ambition. Half-finished and car-centric projects they may have been — but the city’s erstwhile social democratic leaders still equipped the Ringway Centre with a library. Chinn feels such focus on shiny new private flats is out of kilter with Birmingham’s need for social housing, deepening a split between the city’s administrative class and the people they serve. “The poor get pushed further out and I fear our council bows down to developers,” he says. “We lose our distinctiveness as a city.” 

To be fair, we shouldn’t fully romanticise Chamberlain’s era. As Chinn says, Chamberlain’s developments brought disease through public water, even as his new boulevard pushed out the poor and raised rents. “Chamberlain’s legacy is mixed,” he concedes. “The poor are excluded, and while the great Victorian industrialists did care about Birmingham, it was the place, not the people. That said, since Chamberlain, we’ve not had someone at the top table fighting for Birmingham.”

Yet if we shouldn’t idolise Birmimgham’s imperial heyday, could today’s council learn something from the erstwhile Workshop of the World? Chinn believes so. If, he says, Birmingham once again owned its own water company, its own gas company, its own electric company, it could “stick two fingers up” to London bureaucrats when they arrived demanding spending cuts. 

In this hypothetical Birmingham, certainly, desperately needed public services would stand more of a chance, as would its famed art collection. No wonder other councils are trialling just this approach. One good example here is Preston, with its community wealth-building initiatives. For this to work, though, Chinn believes Birmingham would need a strong leader, fiercely determined to improve the lives of everyday people. They’d also need an ego comparable to Joseph Chamberlain’s, a lover of fresh orchids in his lapel and boasting a supremely unclubbable nature. Yet instead of a Midlands Leviathan, willing to take on the Whitehall establishment, Birmingham’s finances are currently run by a government-imposed overseer. The one councillor to publicly criticise library cuts, for their part, was suspended.

Nor are contemporary businessmen likely to come to the rescue either. Manufacturing, the industry that made Chamberlain rich, still has a presence in Birmingham. But the biggest firms now take money elsewhere: Cadbury is now Mondelez and Jaguar Land Rover is owned by an Indian billionaire. The funding paradigm has changed too. In the second half of the 19th century, local wealth could finance the arts at will, with Birmingham Victorian culture dictating it be donated to the city. Chamberlain himself gave the equivalent of £140,000 in cash to Birmingham’s art gallery. 

But funding and power is more complex now. The many ways Victorian political leaders could raise serious cash for ambitious projects, artistic or otherwise, are effectively forestalled by private business interests or political powers beyond the city’s boundaries. Spending power in Birmingham has fallen 60% since 2010, not least because money from London has dropped off too. In Birmingham specifically, a young population piles pressure on services. With municipal services no longer in the public realm, council tax is one of the few sources of local income. But in the city, that tax is already set to rise by over 20%, while pushing up business rates would heap even more pressure on hard-up local firms. And such a deprived corner of the country, there’s only so far people can be pushed. That’s echoed by other factors beyond the council’s control — not least the suffocating power of the Green Belt.

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By John Myers

It’s easy to see how all this could, once more, foster a retreat from both civic ambition and self. We Brummies risk retreating even further into our Midlands home, lost in a pointless fight with Manchester over London’s attention. Speak to locals, at any rate, and you certainly sense fatigue. “People don’t believe it’s going to change,” Chinn says. “Isn’t that terrible?” But here, at this low ebb, there’s also a grassroots resistance, with arts and culture playing a central role. The city saw a bipartisan backlash after a BBC article framed Birmingham’s £451 million art collection as a saleable escape from our financial pickle. As Anooshka Rawden, a cultural heritage professional, told the Museums Association: “These are assets that belong to the city, not a local authority, and once gone, they’re gone forever.”

Clearly, then, the city’s Pre-Raphaelites can still, at the margins, foster a collective sense of civic ambition. But for that to convert into an actual political programme, Chinn says Brummies should abandon their quixotic campaign for second-city status, and instead focus on what the city can offer in the here-and-now. “The finest stained glass in the world,” Chinn says, “is from Burne-Jones — a Brummie!” Birmingham’s arts cuts have seemingly galvanised interest in Brum’s cultural impact. A recent Observer article, penned by erstwhile Birmingham resident Nathalie Olah, listed the city’s impact on dance, theatre, literature and music. 

Inside the ring road, meanwhile, there are green shoots of progress. Library cuts are being fought by volunteers from kitchen tables, while Jones cheers some collaboration with the council on small artistic projects. Among other things, that involves pioneering a public lighting scheme, pointing locals towards businesses and arts organisations affected by HS2. Chamberlain, who plotted for Birmingham to have publicly-owned streetlights, would surely be proud. “If we can bring different sectors and people together,” Jones believes, “there’s a sense of joint pride and ownership over the place,” adding that various funding pots, notably set aside from HS2 funding, are available for galleries or museums.

These efforts may yet bear fruit. Yet in the short term, what comes next for Birmingham seems depressingly clear. No Victorian funding model, or rich industrialist saviour, seem to be forthcoming. For now, then, Birmingham’s harried population might need to take on their city’s fortunes themselves, like Gray having the courage to state when their city is shit — then take the fight to their equally putrid political masters.