First poll, selection rows, Corbynistas and Gaza - why Birmingham's General Election is a must watch
Don't look away - this is going to be one hell of an election campaign.
Don’t mind me, bent over double in the corner here, trying to catch my breath. As we kick start the second of six weeks in this extraordinary General Election season, I’m already struggling to keep up. I really should have hit the political gym more often.
There have been a staggering number of developments, locally and nationally, which combine to make this easily the most fascinating election of a generation, with Birmingham and the Black Country at the heart of the action.
We’ve a lot of ground to cover today - hence the delay in publishing today’s newsletter. From unexpected Labour resignations and the selection rows that followed, a bitter Conservative refusing to give up his job without a fight, two more by-elections at the city council, and a growing awareness within Labour that ‘this Gaza thing’ might actually cost it some of its most prized assets, it’s all been going on this week.
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Today I’m bringing you exclusive insight into the first major new poll of the campaign and it envisages an electoral wipeout for the Tories - according to Electoral Calculus, not even Andrew Mitchell in Sutton Coldfield will survive the cull.
I’ll also bring you more exclusive updates from the Reliance camp, a collective of left wing activists inspired by Jeremy Corbyn who are mounting strong challenges across the city.
And finally, advance warning of a special subscribers edition tomorrow, with my full, first interview since the West Midlands mayoral election with Andy Street. You won’t want to miss it. Subscribe now to ensure you get to read the interview in all its glory - from reflections on what might have been, to what comes next.
First, let’s get up to date on all the shenanigans in this most dramatic of weeks.
1. The red wall of Birmingham is now officially a Labour battleground
Despite protecting majorities of 10k to 30k apiece, Labour members across the country are now being pressed to ‘help out’ in places like Ladywood and Perry Barr, Hodge Hill and Yardley to ensure they don’t slip into Independent hands. It’s quite a state of affairs for a party that is hoping to secure a landslide.
2. A new wave of Jeremy Corbyn inspired Independent candidates on way
To add to Labour’s woes, a bunch of new Independent candidates are about to be unleashed on the city, with strong links to Jeremy Corbyn. They will pose a different challenge to that offered by Akhmed Yakoob and his George Galloway-endorsed allies. As I write the two camps are negotiating a constituency-by-constituency deal to avoid splitting the protest vote.
I’ve been speaking to Umar Yasin, who was the man behind last year’s controversial and heavily criticised ‘wall of shame’ that called out city MPs and councillors over Gaza, contrasting their faces with those of dead Palestinian children. Some of those targeted had to have extra security as a result. Read on to hear why he thinks the new Reliance collective, made up largely of disillusioned ex Labour members on the left, could cause an upset.
But before we get into that, here’s a rapid round up of the goings-on over the last couple of days.
At the start of the week, all of the Labour candidates were in place in Birmingham - by Wednesday two had quit. Labour lost veteran Birmingham Selly Oak MP Steve McCabe, who suddenly decided he didn’t want to go through all this again, at the age of 68; and then 30-year-old Alex Aitken, installed over a year ago as candidate for the target seat of Northfield, decided at the 11th hour that he was not ready or able to push through to Parliament.
Aitken also quit his city council seat of Kings Norton North; and soon after Labour colleague Kirsten Kurt-Elli also announced she was resigning her Northfield ward role, both for personal reasons. I wish them both well. By-elections for both their council seats will now be held on July 4th, same day as the GE.
The sudden loss of two potential MPs left Labour in a pickle. What to do? The party decided to replicate the approach it’s taking elsewhere and parachute in trusted NEC-backed outsiders who it said can ‘hit the ground running’.
Colonel Alistair Carns, a heroic royal marine who won the Military Cross in Afghanistan, and GMB union senior official Laurence ‘Larry’ Turner are on their way to Brum after being deemed the most capable out of the available candidates of running their own campaigns.
Also swooping in will be Antonia Bance, who will represent Tipton and Wednesbury. The decision to bring in ‘outsiders’ has had a mixed initial reaction.
On X, the website formerly known as Twitter (RIP), the new candidates’ credentials were deemed not to count for a lot by some Labour activists as they aren’t Local People. Someone should have retorted that it wasn’t a Royston Vasey sketch but instead several pointed out the party’s rules and processes meant there had not been enough time to let local members pick from a selection of candidates.
Not true, came some respondents. It’s all part of controlling Keir Starmer’s attempt to ‘purge the left’ and neutralise the voice of members. See also the rows over Diane Abbott and Faiza Shaheen. Why not look at people who had previously applied for roles and passed due diligence - the likes of Sharon Thompson, Nicky Brennan, Tom McNeil, Gerard Coyne among them?
Back came more comments highlighting examples of ‘outsider’ MPs who had served the area with distinction - not least the late Jack Dromey in Birmingham Erdington. While the arguments rumble on, the Labour hierarchy believe their plan is the right one. They are trusting that their candidates can marshall the troops behind them for the rapid battle ahead, and that securing a Labour Government will trump all other concerns.
Elsewhere in the region, Gurinder Singh Josan, a former Sandwell councillor, a member of the Labour NEC and a trustee of Hope not Hate, was selected for the new seat of Smethwick. This was greeted warmly by many local Labour members but not so much by supporters of former Chingford & Woodford Green MP Shaheen, who was deselected over an alleged anti-Semitic tweet by an NEC disciplinary panel that Josan sat on.
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Labour’s angst was not eased by the outcome of a city council by-election in Kingstanding. Incumbent Rick Payne, a Conservative, had resigned after being caught out posting racist messages on social media, as Insiders will know from my original expose. Voters returned fellow Conservative Clifton Welch with a near 6% swing away from Labour.
In Solihull, Julian Knight, angry at how he’s been treated by the Conservative party over sexual assault allegations, is fighting on to retain his MP status. The party selected its official candidate last night to stand against him in the new Solihull West and Shirley constituency. The nod went to Neil Shastri-Hurst, a former Army soldier and medical officer, who has worked in the NHS as a surgeon and been a barrister since 2018, which is quite some CV. He fought the North Shropshire by-election in 2021. All eyes will now be on Knight to see if the party’s selection is one he can get behind after all.
But his fury ahead of the selection was palpable and he didn’t sound in the mood to back down. “Solihull deserves more than a whips appointed candidate who doesn’t get the issues. I will be campaigning on local issues - when the election is over and Rishi (Sunak) has proven a disastrous campaigner so in a Parliament dominated by Labour, Solihull would be best served by an Independent.”
Electoral wipeout for the Tories - what does the polling show?
Electoral Calculus, a leading political forecaster around since 1992, has just released a large-scale national poll with Find Out Now. It has a sample size of over 10,000 and its fieldwork was conducted between 20 May and 27 May.
Its staggering results predict that Labour are on target to win 476 seats nationally, and the Conservatives are set to be reduced to just 66 seats.
The model uses MRP (Multi-level Regression and Poststratification), a relatively recent innovation in polling science, which they say gives a more accurate picture of individual seats than traditional uniform-swing models.
They are projecting a major shift in the West Midlands.
The main headline is that out of the 24 parliamentary constituencies in West Midlands county (excluding Coventry), the Conservatives are on track to lose all but four seats. This would be a major swing towards Labour, who are predicted to pick up 10 seats in Greater Birmingham and the surrounding areas from the Conservatives, if current trends hold until election day.
Perhaps the most eye-catching predicted result is in Sutton Coldfield, held by Andrew Mitchell, which they predict is set to swing to Labour. The Conservatives have won in Sutton Coldfield in every election since 1945, and received over 60% of the vote there in 2019. The predicted Labour victory in this seat would require a huge swing, and mark a historic loss for the Conservatives.
Labour: 20 Seats (Up 10 on 2019)
Conservatives: 4 (Down 10 on 2019)
However…a note of caution. The pollsters accept that in areas with strong Independent candidates the outcome is as yet more uncertain. More on a new Independent challenge below.
According to Electoral Calculus, the following seats are predicted to switch from Conservative to Labour (or are new seats largely created out of Cons held ones):
Birmingham Northfield => Labour
Dudley (former Dudley North) => Labour
Halesowen (former Halesowen and Rowley Regis) => Labour
Stourbridge => Labour
Sutton Coldfield => Labour
Tipton and Wednesbury (former West Bromwich West) => Labour
Walsall and Bloxwich (former Walsall North/Walsall South combined) => Labour
West Bromwich (former West Bromwich East) => Labour
Wolverhampton North East => Labour
Wolverhampton West (former Wolverhampton South West) => Labour
Conservative holds will be in:
Aldridge-Brownhills
Kingswinford and South Staffordshire
Meriden and Solihull East
(with Solihull West and Shirley, formerly Solihull a likely hold depending on Julian Knight’s position)
Martin Baxter, Founder & CEO of Electoral Calculus, said: “Our latest MRP poll will be more unhappy reading for the Conservatives, who look likely to lose over two thirds of their seats in Birmingham and the surrounding areas. Just one month ago we saw Andy Street narrowly lose out in his bid to remain Mayor of the West Midlands, and we predict a continuation of the trend towards Labour in the general election.
“A strong showing in the West Midlands would put Labour firmly on track for a large majority in Westminster, a region which has proven to be a key battleground in previous election cycles. The Conservatives will be hoping to regain voters who have recently switched to Reform, but we are yet to see substantial evidence of this occurring as things stand. However, with a long way to go until election day, this will be something to look out for as the campaign progresses.”
“We want Labour in power but for Starmer to be a weak Prime Minister”
Rewind to last autumn, in the aftermath of the first Israeli offensives into Gaza in the hunt for Hamas following the October 7 terror attacks. A high sided van toured the poorer neighbourhoods of inner city Birmingham. It carried the faces of little Palestinian children, alongside the faces of local Labour councillors and MPs.
The pictured local politicians were accused of ‘staying silent’ while children like these died in the onslaught in Gaza. The ‘wall of shame’ van triggered a police investigation on the grounds its contents amounted to a hate crime, but no action resulted.
The man behind it was Umar Yasin, a lawyer. He says it was the catalyst for a coming together of others of the same mindset, angry over the situation in Gaza, and concerned that their Labour councillors and MPs were not speaking out about it with sufficient volition.
Their anger was fuelled by the now infamous LBC interview by Keir Starmer, in which he appeared to green light Israel withholding food, drink and aid to Gaza as a bargaining tool. It will forever condemn him in the eyes of Yasin and others, no matter how vocal he now becomes over the crisis, or how critical he is of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Yasin is not contrite about the impact of that van and its accompanying posters - for he says it kickstarted a movement. “Look, many residents in our city are third and fourth generation immigrants, many of them Muslims. Since my granddad’s generation we have largely loyally voted Labour, without question,” says Yasin.
But the Gaza crisis flipped a switch, he says. “For Labour councillors and MPs to happily stay in the Labour party over the last few months, we think is unacceptable.”
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