Dear readers — could Reform win half the seats in Birmingham at the next general election? Is it simply too soon to tell? It might well be, but a new poll by communications consultancy More in Common suggests that if one was called today, Birmingham MPs — especially Labour’s — would take a thrashing. In today’s Politics Edition, we take a look at their projections.
Elsewhere, we tried to find out more about Cllr Waseem Zaffar's new housing initiative (and its links with a controversial exempt accommodation provider) and muse on MP Andrew 'thrasher' Mitchell's recent, somewhat retro, trip to the Falkland Islands.
Enjoying this edition? You can get two totally free issues of The Dispatch — including our Monday news briefings and the weekend read you're perusing right now — every week by signing up to our regular mailing list. Just click the button below. No cost. Just old school local journalism.
Brum in Brief
🚧 Birmingham City Council has rejected plans to raze the Bullring markets and replace them with blocks of flats. Under the proposals by Howells’ for their Edgbaston Street Gardens scheme, which would sit within Leandlease’s £1.9 billion Smithfield regeneration project, four buildings of either 700 flats or 1,540 student units would be erected. The owners of the site, Hammerson’s, who also own the Bullring shopping centre, are in favour of the plans but at a meeting of the planning committee last week, members unanimously rejected them. They had twice previously been deferred to allow for discussions around preserving the future of the market and those conversations resulted in an extension of the council’s lease on the site from September 2025 to March 2027. As reported by Architect’s Journal, Councillor Gareth Moore said at the meeting that despite the extension, ‘I don’t think we have the guarantees that a 900-year-old market will be continuing…If we had more of a concrete plan in terms of [securing its future] I’d be more inclined to support it.’ A spokesperson for Hammerson told the BBC that the refusal was ‘deeply frustrating’.
🎹 Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) performed their final Birmingham gig on Saturday night, despite lead singer Jeff Lynne suffering from a hand injury after a taxi crash in London. “I've had a guitar in my hand all my life but not tonight,” Lynne told the audience at Ulitita Arena, reports the BBC. ELO was formed in Birmingham in 1970 by Lynne and keyboardist Roy Wood – they split in 1986 but Lynne reformed the group as Jeff Lynne’s ELO in 2014. The original members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 and in 2020, Lynne was awarded an OBE for services to music.
Quick Hits
🖼️ Ikon Gallery has announced a new exhibition of children’s artwork, featuring contributions from over 800 pupils at 16 regional primary schools. Workshop of the World is open 10-23 July, and it's free to see.
💷 An official Oasis merchandise pop up shop has opened at the Bullring selling branded bottles, hoodies and other ephemera in homage to the recently reformed 90s band. Confusion reigns, however – BirminghamLive reports that due to a missed delivery, many items do not have price tags.
🚨 The BBC reports that West Midlands Police have seized over 12 illegal ebikes in Birmingham city centre. One bike had been modified to reach speeds of 70mph — well over the 15mph limit.
In today's round-up of recent political news, Kate catches up with a few familiar faces and conducts the shortest interview of her career.
New polling projects big wins for Reform in Birmingham: A recent poll by More in Common has projected that, were a general election to be called today, Reform UK would win the most seats, with 290 in a hung parliament. Presented under the heading “Reform has eroded Labour’s 2024 gains” the data suggests, only a year after their election, Keir Starmer’s party has become incredibly vulnerable to the right wing populists. Drilling down at a local level, the model suggests that half of all of Birmingham MPs would lose their seats to Nigel Farage’s party, including Erdington, Hodge Hill and Solihull North, Yardley, and Northfield, as well as Sutton Coldfield, the seat held by Conservative MP Andrew Mitchell.
Of course, the usefulness of any model like this is pretty questionable. Another election could be four years away, at which point people’s actual voting intentions may change (for example, if Farage genuinely looks set to become PM, there is likely to be some tactical voting between those opposed). While overall polling gives a fairly clear picture, predicting individual seats this far out is pretty meaningless. But that doesn’t mean many local MPs won’t be nervously looking over their shoulders.
Talking of Mitchell: I interviewed Andrew ‘Thrasher’ Mitchell ahead of last year’s general election, in which he was surprisingly endorsed by Bob Geldof. Post-election, he briefly became shadow foreign secretary during Sunak’s last few months as leader of the party.
But since Badenoch’s rise to the top, he’s once more on the back benches. He’s been filling his time with a recent trip to the Falkland Islands, where he enjoyed strolling among the many Margaret Thatcher statues and drinking Iron Lady beer. Despite his fearsome reputation as a younger man, it seems Mitchell has mellowed with age, and has come to accept his reduced status in Parliament. “I was described by the Falkland’s government as a ‘Tory Grandee’”, he writes in an article for ConservativeHome. “Which as everyone knows means ‘an aging old Tosser' on the way out.”
At the other end of the spectrum is George Finch, the new interim council leader in nearby Warwickshire. At the tender age of 18, the university student is now responsible for a £500m council budget. Some have expressed concerns, but as Finch pointed out to The Telegraph “Mike Tyson was the youngest heavyweight boxer of the world”, aged 20.
Why is Birmingham City Council working with Dawson Housing? On Monday morning, the Dispatch attended the second ever meeting of Creating Second Chances, a new initiative by Lozells Labour councillor Waseem Zaffar. It aims to improve the temporary and exempt supported accommodation sector to, as Zaffar put it to the Dispatch, “offer a consistent point of contact and referral for those in need” via monthly events.
We’ve written about the scheme, which is currently in a six month pilot, before, where we noted that a prominent partner in the Creating Second Chances network is Dawson Housing. But the accommodation provider has very close links to another provider who has come under sharp criticism: Reliance Social Housing. Dawson CEO Amer Ijaz was also the CEO of Reliance between 2020 and 2024, during which time it faced crackdowns by the Regulator of Social Housing, the Housing Ombudsman and was named and shamed in Parliament by Shabana Mahmood MP for “failing my constituents and exacerbating the issues within the exempt accommodation sector”.
