Labour is facing the loss of Birmingham city council for the first time in decades as around 40 pro-Palestinian independent candidates make gains across traditionally safe seats in Britain’s second-largest city, capitalising on a toxic combination of local failure and deep anger over the government’s position on Gaza.
The scale of what is unfolding in Birmingham represents one of the most significant electoral shifts in British urban politics in a generation. In ward after ward with large Muslim populations, candidates running under independent and pro-Gaza banners are on course to win seats that Labour has long treated as untouchable. The prospect of losing control of a city it has dominated for decades has sent shockwaves through the party.
The reasons are not hard to find. Birmingham’s Labour-run council has stumbled from one crisis to the next. In 2023 it effectively declared itself bankrupt after a £760 million equal pay settlement and £100 million lost on a failed IT system. Council tax has been raised by 10 per cent in each of the last two years, government commissioners were brought in to oversee deep cuts, and a bin strike has dragged on for more than a year. Fly-tipping has become a visible daily grievance across many neighbourhoods. For many voters, this is not an abstract political calculation — it is the accumulated frustration of a council that stopped listening.
Harris Khaliq, 34, an IT project manager standing for the Ward End district in the north-east of the city — where three-quarters of the population is Muslim — captures the mood precisely. Knocking on doors, he hears the same complaints repeatedly. “They send an email to report fly-tipping, no reply. They send an email about a pothole, no reply. They feel they’re paying more and they’re receiving less,” he said. Khaliq has also been handing out stickers bearing the Palestinian flag to children outside Thornton Primary School, a gesture that speaks to how deeply the conflict resonates in these communities. “There’s people at such a delicate age growing up seeing a genocide,” he said. “That’s how much they connect to it.”
In Sparkbrook, to the south-east of the city centre, 22-year-old lawyer Raihaan Abbas is standing for the Independent Candidates Alliance, a pro-Gaza group founded by lawyer Akhmed Yakoob and property developer Shakeel Afsar. The neighbourhood is 77 per cent Muslim and the reception on the doorstep has been warm. Yakoob, who accompanies Abbas on the campaign trail, said Labour had long treated these communities as captive voters. “It was like it was their God-given right to get the votes,” he said. “But not any more.”
Both Yakoob and Afsar reject the charge of sectarianism, arguing instead that their communities are simply waking up to the fact that loyalty should be earned. “They were blindly voting Labour because people were telling them to,” Yakoob said. “But now it’s different.” Afsar added that the local elections were being fought on local issues, but that voters could not separate those concerns from Labour’s stance on the international stage.
The government’s recognition of a Palestinian state in September came too late to change the emotional landscape. For many in Birmingham’s Muslim communities, the damage was already done — and the independents were ready to step into the gap Labour had left.
