The Labour party’s 14-year leadership in Birmingham has come to an end after Reform, Greens and pro-Gaza independents made significant gains in the UK’s second-largest city.
No party has yet won an overall majority at Birmingham city council, one of Europe’s largest local authorities, with the results reflecting wider political fragmentation across England.
Labour lost hundreds of council seats in England, many to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which made big gains across the Midlands and the north as well as taking seats from the Tories in the south.
Labour was expected to take significant losses in the all-out elections in Birmingham, where 101 seats were up for grabs. The council has been plagued by a series of problems in recent years, from the declaration of bankruptcy in 2023, subsequent cuts to local services and the ongoing bin strike – images of rubbish piled on the city’s streets have made headlines across the world.
The local authority, which is responsible for a £4.4bn budget, has so far lost more than 30 Labour councillors, and gained 21 Reform and 11 Green councillors.
The outgoing Labour leader of the council, John Cotton, said the party needed to “listen carefully to the message” of the electorate, and called on the party to better communicate its vision to voters.
“We know that midterm elections are always difficult for the party of government,” he said. “We need to think about how we start to tell in a more coherent, systematic way, the story of the great things that this Labour government is doing.”
Defending his record in Birmingham, Cotton said he had to take “difficult decisions to bring the finances back into balance” and to tackle “long-standing challenges that have dogged this council for many years like equal pay”.
Cotton, who has been a Labour councillor in Birmingham for 25 years, also called for greater unity in the city amid fears that the success of Reform, Greens and pro-Gaza independents would leave the city ungovernable. In April, a long-standing Liberal Democrat councillor in Birmingham, who lost his seat to Reform, warned the result could be a “somewhat of a bugger’s muddle”.
Nosheen Khalid, an independent candidate who has been elected to represent the inner city ward of Alum Rock, said voters “had enough” of the Labour party and it was “no longer the political home for a lot of people”.
“The Labour party has caused a lot of damage in Birmingham,” she said, noting the bankruptcy and cuts to youth services.
Challenged on whether this election result would lead the local authority to be ungovernable, Khalid said: “Birmingham has not been effectively governed for a very long time.
“It won’t be much worse than it is now, it can only get better when you have representatives who are grassroots.”
Independents have gained 10 seats at the council, some of whom focused parts of their campaign on a pro-Gaza message. Khalid, who was endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn’s Your Party, ruled out working with Reform in Birmingham – which may become the largest party at the council – and called the party “divisive”.
When challenged about the specific focus some independents had on LGBTQ+ issues and Gaza, Khalid denied claims of antisemitism and homophobia. “I can’t speak for other candidates,” she said. “We believe everybody deserves to be treated with dignity and respect and everybody has a place in society.”
Khalid said she wants to focus her tenure on issues such as child poverty, overcrowding and the lack of youth centres.
