I caught a councillor out as a racist and it's just the start of the story
PLUS: West Midlands Mayoral Campaign heats up
Welcome to the first ever edition of Inside Birmingham with Jane Haynes (that’s me). It’s so good to see you here, your interest means a lot. Today’s edition is free but please consider subscribing for future reads.
Since announcing I intended to launch the newsletter this week I’ve been wracked with indecision about what you’d most like to read about. An obvious candidate was the West Midlands mayoral election campaign that has swung into action with a vengeance.
There’s less than three weeks to go until polling day (May 2nd) when voters here can be among the first to show their disdain or apathy over the current state of the nation. Please use your vote!
I’ve been chatting to the good folk at Centre for Cities about what’s at stake - you can listen back to what I had to say here.
I’ve also been hobnobbing with the national Labour hierarchy, thanks to a steady stream of members of the shadow cabinet hotfooting it to the West Midlands to boost the chances of their candidate Richard Parker.
He’s had a lot to say about getting a seat in the heart of government, franchising buses and upskilling young people.
I’ve been riding on trams with Andy Street and dissecting his promises on jobs and affordable housing, among other things; and stole enjoyed free grub at a recent mayoral husting in Moseley with most of the candidates. (By the way, if you want to enjoy a witty rewind by someone else, check out this blog).
You’ll be delighted to know, for sure, that there’s another few hustings to go at yet, including one I’m involved in that you don’t even need to get out of bed/off the sofa to imbibe. Get your popcorn ready as we hear from all six candidates in a special virtual live event on Tuesday 16th, which we will be broadcasting across all our regional facebook pages (Birmingham, Black Country and Coventry). Tuesday 16th is also my birthday, which I hope confirms my commitment to bringing you the best from the political zeitgeist.
If you’ve got a killer question you want me to pose, do drop me a message. If it’s really good I’ll steal it and pass it off as my own, obviously. Then join me live from 2.15pm. If you’re lucky enough to have a daytime job or somewhere better to be, it will be recorded to play back at your leisure.
You’ll also be thrilled to learn I’ve been analysing the data, crunching the numbers, interviewing the candidates and digging into their manifesto pledges to create my own Mayoral Election Dossier. It’s nearly done, but not quite. Check out your inbox this time next week when it will be dropping your way, first and exclusively. Don’t make your mind up until you’ve read it, is all I can say.
Exposing Racist Tweets
But it was another local politician who has dominated my news week. From a tip off and evidence gathered by anti-fascist organisation Hope Not Hate, I spent my weekend digging into the secret life of a local Conservative councillor. As well as deliberating on planning applications and picking up case work for Kingstanding residents, Rick Payne also happened to be posting and sharing far right tropes and racist commentary on X, formerly Twitter.
Many of the messages were abhorrent, repeating tired tropes about Muslims, the religion of Islam and immigrants. It’s hard to fathom why Payne, 59, a family man, a trainer of automotive apprentices, a public servant in a superdiverse city, and an army veteran, was moved to think in such a way, and then speak so hatefully on a public forum. He’s cited mental health issues in his statement of apology, in which he also claims he sometimes didn’t know what he was writing or tweeting.
Even in the likelihood that, as his local Conservative group leaders have said, he witnessed horrors in his army service overseas that have scarred him, he should have known better. “I've worked in mental health services for 15 years, seen a lot of things that would terrify a lot of people, from organic degenerative conditions, chronic mid disorders to acute psychosis and trauma. None of it made people say racist things,” said one mental health professional.
Payne was publicly exposed for his vile tweets on Tuesday evening, just hours before the end of Ramadan. Within 24 hours he had resigned. As he comes to terms with the consequences of his actions, it’s clear this is not just about one man and his stupidity. There are thousands of Ricks out there, sadly.
I spoke to two Birmingham stalwarts who have been at the forefront of the anti racist fight. This is what they had to say about the context of Payne’s comments.
From Malcolm X to Rwanda
Jagwant Johal has made anti-fascism and anti-racism his life’s work, standing on the shoulders of giants like his father, Avtar Singh Jouhl, whose story is told in stunning detail here. (Among its highlights are that time Avtar greeted Malcolm X in Smethwick so the American activist could see for himself the ‘colour bar’ that segregated pubgoers into white and ‘other’ - later declaring the hostile reception the group received as ‘worse than Harlem’.)
Jagwant co-founded BRIG (Birmingham Race Impact Group). One thing he’s grown tired of is journalists like me asking him if things have got ‘better’ for people of colour since the dreadful, largely lawless, pre race equality era up to the 1980s, when people could be beaten up in front of police officers or banned from housing on a whim.
“They always want me to say it’s better, and in many ways it is, but it’s also depressingly unchanged. It is a constant battle,” he says. Of Payne’s downfall, he has no sympathy, and even less for the party colleagues and hierarchy of the Conservative Party, and its right wing sidekick Reform UK.
“People are emboldened when they see political leaders or influential figures making comments and creating policies that are interpreted as racist. It is normalised,” he says. Inside an echo chamber like the one Payne likely tweeted into, there’s validation and encouragement, and a doubling down of views.
Twitter and other platforms do nothing to stop them either, he says, rightly. Against that backdrop, Jagwant is fearful of what’s immediately ahead. “We are about to go into the most racist General Election I can recall,” he said, with the Gaza war, the Rwanda policy, the state of the NHS and public services, and a widening social injustice gap all likely to be race-linked battlegrounds.
HOPE not Hate’s 2024 State of the Nation report, published last month, agrees. The document is subtitled Pessimism, Decline and the Rising Radical Right and it focuses on the rise of a largely right wing, populist movement, strong on anti-immigration and anti-elite rhetoric.
Lines between traditional Conservatives and the far right have blurred massively through this Parliament, with what was once ‘extremist’ commentary now fuzzily mainstream, concludes the report, and things are set to worsen. In an essay on the topic, Hope Not Hate founder Nick Lowles writes: “Anti-immigration is just one part of a wider “war on woke” that has often resulted in influential members of the Government using language on a range of issues that is indistinguishable from that used by far-right extremists. Central here is the way that they have attempted to “other” whole groups in society they see as enemies, presenting themselves as anti-elite and demonising some of the core institutions of British society.”
It’s a view shared by Saidul Haque-Saeed, who is lead organiser at Citizens UK Birmingham, a community organising collective. His dad, then an imam, arrived in England alone in the 1970s to take up a temporary post, leaving his family behind in Bangladesh, and the racism he experienced was confronting, to put it mildly. “Dad would walk down the street and someone would flip off his hat, spit in it and put it back on his head. He had poo through his letter box. People would walk up and drag him by his beard. It must have been horrific.”
In so many ways, things have changed for the better since then, he says, citing local collaborative actions and laws that enshrine people’s rights. But while the overt violence might have reduced, the crushing normalisation of racist commentary persists, especially online, and not only between white people and ‘everyone else’, he adds.
“There are multiple layers of racism between ethnicities or nations too,” he says. It all adds up the same, to bigotry. “We speak so infrequently to each other in person now, properly talk about things, that people’s views can just fester in online spaces,” he said.
When Birmingham’s history is written, the Payne resignation might at best garner a footnote. Set against decades of discrimination and landmark seismic moments like the 1980s riots, murders and brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement, it will barely register. Payne, hardly known before, will return to anonymity once the headlines fade.
But change happens in tiny increments and small moments, says Jagwant and the people at BRIG. They recently set the city a 10-year challenge to become ‘anti racist’, with major organisations and businesses pressed to sign up to pledges around the make up of their boardrooms, adding new job and training opportunities and creating zero tolerance work spaces. Birmingham City Council too is working to enshrine the case for ending racism in its doctrine ‘Everyone’s Battle Everyone’s Business’.
Imagine if this small moment resulted in the local Conservative group and the wider circle of Conservative MPs and local members now coming out with one voice to condemn the content of those messages, and their national context. Imagine if a remorseful Mr Payne was now inspired to join the anti-racist clamour, eager to learn why what he thinks, and said, is wrong, and how he can make amends.
It only really takes a few words. There is no excuse for racism.
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