In Dudley, the Black Country Party mounts a challenge

Pete Lowe vapes now. Just last year, he smoked cigarettes. On 5 July 2024, when Labour won a clean sweep of the three Black Country parliamentary seats, Lowe — then local party group leader — would regularly step outside the count at Stourbridge’s Crystal Leisure Centre for a taking-stock smoke break. He emerged for a final time, loudly jubilant, near dawn. A celebratory mood, unsurprising for a man with four decades of service to a party that had just won a landslide. 

But 12 months on and vaping is far from the most drastic change in Lowe’s circumstances. In March, the Lye and Stourbridge councillor dramatically quit Labour after 41 years, over benefit cuts. Cllr Steve Edwards (Brockmoor and Pensnett) was booted by Labour a month before for dissent. By the end of March Cllr Karen Westwood (Brockmoor and Pensnett), Cllr Karl Denning (Castle and Priory), Cllr Matt Cook (Brierley Hill and Wordsley South), and Cllr Peter Drake (Coseley) had all followed Lowe out the door, forming an independent Dudley council grouping, headed up by Lowe: The Diggers (an extension of ‘Dudley Independent Group’ and perhaps also a nod to the 17th century radicals). 

The informal group quickly calcified into a bona fide local political vehicle: The Black Country Party (BCP). Lowe was to be the leader, Westwood his deputy, and the other ‘Diggers’ were founding members. Ideologically, the party is ‘anti-austerity, community-led’; if you were to place them on a political spectrum, they’d be towards the socialist end. Dudley has a topsy-turvy political history, often dominated by the two traditional parties, but that doesn’t mean the BCP hasn’t got a chance. 

In Dudley, frustrations with both the Conservatives and Labour run high. The populism of Reform is already gaining traction. Could the BCP offer a different kind of populist swing at the traditional heavyweight parties in the area? Or, with its socialist messaging, is this just a last gasp tribute act to 2010s Corbynism, with a Dudley overlay?

I’m intrigued enough to head to the party’s official launch, on a sunny July Friday evening, at Katie Fitzgerald’s community club in Stourbridge. There’s an energised atmosphere, both outside in an awning-draped pretty garden, and inside in a rough-and-ready events space, which drips with humidity. A rough headcount suggests fifty or so people. Most would appear to know each other. There’s easy familiarity between those dressed up smartly for the occasion and others, straight from a day’s labour in Dewalt workmen’s trousers. One woman is sporting a steampunk tophat while a young lad has gone for the sort of flowing shirt John Lennon would be proud of. Exactly the sort of mix you’d expect at a left-wing big night out.

Familiarity notwithstanding, Dudley is a difficult political area. Last year, with Labour riding high in the polls, Starmer set his sights on winning Dudley Council, but fell short. Though Labour would go on to claim the parliamentary seat, total Reform and Tory votes outstripped those collected by current MP, Sonia Kumar. And despite Dudley sometimes being called a ‘red wall’ area, both UKIP and BNP have made temporary inroads at the council level over the last two decades. If BCP fancies its chances, it will likely have its work cut out.

That history goes unremarked upon tonight at Fitzgerald’s — minus potshots at Starmer. Instead, the Black Country itself is front and centre. The area’s chainlink heraldry is at the heart of BCP’s new logo, which is plastered on walls and on party merch, criss-crossed by Pride-flag bunting. Later, a shout of “not West Midlands nor Birmingham but the bostin’ Black Country” gets huge cheers. Lowe — wearing a BCP shirt and a straw trilby, clutching his vape and multiple bottles of local beer, Bathams — is doing the rounds like a proud dad at a wedding. There is a close-knit feel: those who have known each other for years gossiping about trade unions and eating samosas. Lowe messaged me enthusiastically before the bash: “It’ll be [a] rebel HQ night of radical music and spoken word… come along and bring some friends.”

Such energy extends to his BCP launch speech. It’s Lowe’s crowd and he gets cheers when bounds on stage and starts emphasising BCP’s topline foci: anti-austerity, working class centring, support for the Birmingham bin strikes, arts and events spaces, pubs, Palestine, and taxing the rich. “I thought that choice was in the Labour Party for 41 years, but I stand on stage no longer a Labour Party member. Let’s be clear; that choice was simple because I didn’t leave the Labour Party, the Labour Party left me,” he proclaims.

Lowe is full of fighting talk. He tells those gathered that the BCP is winning the 2026 local election, when a third of council seats will be up for grabs. Then, former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn appears via pre-recorded video, smiling out from a big screen. At the beginning of the month, former Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana bombastically announced she and Corbyn will be heading up a brand new political party. By the time of the BCP launch, Corbyn has offered support but has failed to confirm if he is indeed part of the project.

No answers are forthcoming in this cameo though, just well-wishes. “I look forward to meeting you all in the not too distant future, meanwhile have a bostin’ evening,” digital Corbyn says. There’s rumours he’ll show up in-person in Dudley next month. Wall-shaking cheers follow his words regardless. Compere Ian tells the crowd that something weird happens to time in Fitzgerald’s — but is this really 2017 again, the last noticeable peak of socialist popularity?

I catch up with Lowe over a beer in Fitzgerald’s garden, a mural of Martin Luther King overlooking us. BCP will be hyper-local, he assures me, with messaging changing ward by ward, although the party’s core principles will remain consistent. “In my ward, I can talk about Gaza,” he says. “In others, we might emphasise jobs or austerity.” 

Is this realpolitik? After all, the Tories hold a seat in Edwards and Westwood’s working-class, high-poverty ward, where voters are on the record with concerns regarding cash and migration. Progressive internationalism, Lowe might feel, is not the winning ticket here. Still, it seems a lesson learned from 2019, when coaches of young professional Londoners (Corbynistas in media parlance) were bussed in during the general election to (unsuccessfully) door-knock in the area.

The Corbyn links are certainly eye-catching. Lowe is open about his regular chats with the Islington MP, but stresses the BCP also has connections with other independent leftwing groupings in London, the Potteries and Nottinghamshire. 

And he’s adamant that any Corbyn party interface won’t be top-down politics. “It’s federalised and properly democratic,” he tells me. “The time for change [in approach] is now.” Could political recalibrations in the Black Country, therefore, be a proving ground for a newly revitalised, federalised left-wing politics, rooted in local concerns but with national impact? It would certainly be a step change from what Lowe and his BCP mates feel is centralised, Westminster control in Labour. 

The prospect is already making ripples in the West Midlands. Just a week or so after Sultana and Corbyn finally publicly announce that yes, a new party will be formed, Coventry Labour councillor Grace Lewis, resigns from the party, reading from a similar playbook of disgruntlement that Lowe did when he stepped down. Lewis throws her backing behind the as-yet unnamed Corbyn/Sultana project, saying: “change doesn’t come from Westminster…it comes from the ground up.”

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Walking through Stourbridge’s centre after the BCP launch, I see evidence of the issues that all locally active parties say they want to change. The prominence of an outlet for Chinese car retailer BYD is almost a cruel reminder of the West Midlands' much-diminished vehicle manufacturing past. Outside a late-opening Tesco Express, a group of aimless 30-something lads mess around like young kids; inside, every single spirits bottle is wrapped in security-tagged netting. Empty bars blare music into the streets. Earlier in the evening, my South Asian-heritage Uber driver confides that there’s too much migration, not enough integration. 

I want another take on populism, and call up Andrew Southall, who stood as Dudley’s parliamentary candidate for Reform last year. He tells me his party, polling highly nationally, will focus locally on: health, bins, value for money and public services. BCP are covering similar ground, just from a different perspective; their councillors have already filed motions on free parking, using the Black Country flag, saving local pubs and funding local sports. The populists are chasing the same voters, their messaging not totally discordant. Indeed, my reporting here last year found, in messaging at least, Reform and BCP are both on the money with what voters are frustrated with.

As such, Southall reckons Reform will be the second biggest party in Dudley by next year but that the BCP might do well. “If [the BCP] get their act together, they could get five to eight seats,” he says, adding that a broader progressive alliance, with other left movements, has the potential to threaten other parties even more. 

There’s no love lost between the two, though. Southall describes Gaza-supporting leftwingers as disrupting the latest Reform town centre stall. “Smacking [the table] and screaming,” he says. On the BCP side, back in Fitzgerald’s, one supporter tells me that “Reform is a threat”. “It’s up to us to stop them,” she adds. For Labour’s part, both Reform and the BCP are a growing thorn in their side. “I don't believe the Black Country Party or Reform offer the solutions to Dudley's problems, which are long-standing and complex,” says Councillor Adam Aston, Lowe’s successor as Labour group leader. As it stands though, Dudley Council is currently blue: Patrick Harley’s Tory grouping continues to control the local authority, despite recently being slapped with a government improvement notice.

Back in the merry atmosphere of Fitzgerald’s, such realities seem very far away. There is no opposition here. Indeed, this is a night solely for the BCP, and its tight-knit, Bathams-drinking leftwing support. Only time will tell if, locally at least, Lowe and co will have the same impact as the populist right is enjoying nationally, and if there’s an immediate future for socialism — Corbynist or not — in 2025 and beyond. But, for the first time since the dark days of 2019, for the gathered, there’s the hope of a burgeoning leftwing infrastructure to tap into, as well as hyper-local electioneering nous. And if that fails, well: they’ll always have Black Country pride.