This article was first published in The Critic. Everything I publish elsewhere is shared here, as a gift to the nation. But if you want the full picture become a paid subscriber. It’s a few quid a month, such is the price genius is reduced to.
I ask out of personal concern; as a councillor myself, I have mostly been preoccupied with recent changes to North Yorkshire’s bin collections, an upcoming planning committee and a dispute over an overhanging hedge.
But I’m now worried, following news from Birmingham City Council, that I’m doing it wrong. Recently, Birmingham City Council illuminated the Library of Birmingham — one of the city centre’s most prominent buildings — in green and white on 14 August to mark the eve of Pakistan’s 77th Independence Day.
Not all nations are welcome to such displays of pride, however; following the appearance of England and Union flags across city neighbourhoods — described by those involved as a “patriotic move” — the council issued a warning against displaying flags on public streets. It added that any flags removed during street lighting upgrades would be taken down solely on safety grounds.
But a report from the Birmingham Dispatch calls this into question; in a community WhatsApp group for Northfield — one of the whitest areas of Birmingham, where many of the flags have appeared — Social Justice, Community Safety and Equalities Cabinet Member Jamie Tenant suggests the council has banned the flags on political grounds, saying; “there’s a couple of people spoiling for a fight for political reasons so taking it slow and steady so not giving them what they want.”
Flags are clearly important to Birmingham Councillors; bins, less so. The Birmingham Bin strike has been ongoing for 6 months, and shows no sign of ending. Private bin collections are now common. Rat infestations are widespread, and the stench of rotting, uncollected refuse has been inescapable over the summer.
The pattern of councils failing in their basic functions, and instead preferring to spend time signalling support for sectarian interests wildly outside their remit is not new. Earlier last year, in a move that shook the world of geopolitics, Liverpool City Council officially recognised the Republic of Somaliland; Liverpool is so broken it has been run by central govt for the last 3 years. It has 140,000 on the social housing waiting list, some of the most deprived areas in Britain and the worst GSCE results.
Not all councils are equal, however. The recent Bell Hotel judgement for instance, was secured by Epping Forest District Council. Holly Whitbread, the Cabinet Member for Housing & Community — and local member for the Bell — wrote in ConHome recently about her council’s decision to pursue legal action after the hotel reopened earlier this year as an all-male facility. “We pursued every democratic lever to secure its closure”, she writes, but “the Government treated our community with contempt”.
Once the Conservative-led council found their calls to Labour-controlled national government were falling on deaf ears, they started legal proceedings against the hotel owners for violations of planning regulations. Since, councils led by the Conservatives, the SNP and Labour — and all ten Reform councils — have promised to follow the same path, threatening a major unravelling of the asylum system.
In neocommunal Britain, as I recently wrote in these most august pages, politics will increasingly be driven by demographic influence. This extends to local politics as well as national; the Somali population of Liverpool, presumably largely from the Isaaq clan, want recognition of Somaliland, but cannot secure it from the UK government, and so lobby their local council instead. The residents of Epping, unable to get national government to listen to their concerns about immigration, turned to planning control “as one of the few democratic safeguards still able to impose boundaries.”
As these examples show, the priorities of local government will be shaped more and more by such demographic pressures. Migration and international affairs are of course both outside of the remit of local councils, but it scarcely matters; neocommunal politics will play out less through persuasion and more through confrontation, sometimes by wielding the narrow levers within local — and therefore, more direct — control. As Britain heads further down the road of neocommunalism, many councils will increasingly become vehicles for a simple struggle for dominance between competing interests.
What is to be done? It’s a hard line to walk; the political incentives for using councils as vehicles for sectarian causes are largely baked in. Reform — who can be seen as a neocommunal party for white British communities — have at least announced policies related to the core functions of the councils they now control. The prospects of Your Party or the Gaza Independents taking control of councils, who as yet have scarce policy outside of the Middle East, is more concerning.
Things may have to get a lot worse before they get better. In July’s issue of The Critic, when I wrote about the increasing South Africanisation of Britain, I defined one of the key elements of the process as “collapse of public infrastructure and services — often due to corruption or managerial incompetence.”
The irreducible job of councils is to keep the streets clean, the lights on, the vulnerable housed, the ratepayer’s money spent with measurable return — and, yes, the planning laws enforced. A council that prefers to focus on removing flags instead of the rubbish piled on its streets is the definition of managerial incompetence (or at least it would be, were it not the revealed preference of those governing the city). Birmingham may be the blueprint for many of Britain’s councils; Epping may be the other. Councils will have to choose for themselves.