Four years ago, I saw something on a computer screen that I have never forgotten. The UK was six weeks into lockdown, and I was working on a series of Guardian videos based on raw footage from around the country, most of which had been filmed on people’s phones.
We had made contact with a community activist from Alum Rock in central Birmingham – and he had captured an unbearably vivid signifier of what people there were faced with. First, he showed us a car park outside a mosque, where six or seven rectangular white tents had been put up. Then, he pulled back the flap that formed one of their front doors to reveal a sight that left him silent: stacks of coffins, each awaiting a janazah, the Muslim funeral.
In June 2020, Birmingham was identified as the UK’s “coronavirus capital”: the first local authority area in the UK to register more than 1,000 deaths from Covid-19. Just under a year later, I went there to report on the pandemic’s aftershocks – among them, a 15% rate of unemployment and the sudden closure of the palatial John Lewis store opened only five years before. Talking to people, I got a sense of both lingering trauma and an amazing drive to somehow keep going; in 2022, that same indefatigable spirit was displayed to the wider world when the city consummately hosted the Commonwealth Games. But then came yet another huge blow.
Most of us now know the basics. In 2023, Birmingham city council – which is controlled by Labour, and is reckoned to be Europe’s largest local authority – effectively went bankrupt. There were three key reasons: massive cuts in funding from Whitehall, the cost of the belated resolution of the council’s gender pay gap, and the mind-boggling mishandling of a new IT system. In the midst of the rising need for council services – much of which was rooted in all the dislocation and disaster of the Covid crisis – all this spelled disaster. Now, many of the city’s services must be either hacked down or done away with, in pursuit of savings of about £300m over two years. As far as anyone understands it, this is the deepest programme of local cuts ever put through by a UK council.
All of this has been widely covered in the national media, but what has not quite come through are the visceral injustices that sit at the story’s centre. Payback for the failings of politicians and bureaucrats is falling most severely on children, whose provision will be cut by £52m in 2024-25 and £63m in 2025-26. Among other savings, the council is ending its annual £8.4m contribution to an “early help” service that provides families in crisis with everything from emergency financial assistance to advice on breastfeeding, and thereby threatening its survival. For kids aged over 16 who have special educational needs, there will be no more taxis or minibuses to schools and colleges: as part of a quest to claw back about £7m a year from transport costs, they are being offered such grim consolations as “personal travel budgets” and something called “independent travel training”.
What is happening to other areas of spending is almost as shocking. A £4.8m youth services budget is being cut by almost half. The council’s spend on the arts will now be zero. Eleven community centres are being sold off. On and on it all goes, through highway maintenance, street lighting, recycling, bin collection and street cleaning. The twisted punchline is an increase to council tax of 21% by 2026, which will surely be received by people as a stark example of the modern British malaise: that everyday sense of endlessly paying more, but getting less and less.
Birmingham may be an outlier, but comparable stories are playing out all over England: in Nottingham, Somerset, Hampshire, Leicester, Bradford, Southampton and more. The House of Commons levelling up, housing and communities select committee puts English councils’ current financial gap at about £4bn a year, which could have been filled more than twice over by the money Jeremy Hunt used for that almost meaningless cut in national insurance. He seems to still think that councils must sink or swim: even more depressingly, he and his allies in the rightwing press have reprised old and stupid rhetoric about millions supposedly being wasted on “consultants” and “diversity schemes”.
And Labour? Last weekend, the shadow chancellor, Rachel Reeves, was repeatedly asked by the Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips if she would fix councils’ crises once Labour was in power. But she would only offer her usual words about the awful problems she would inherit, and vague claims that changes to the planning system and increased business investment may eventually feed through to money for local services. I admire the optimism of people who think she is secretly preparing some kind of national rescue package, but I cannot quite shake off that eternally insightful Maya Angelou quotation: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Continuing austerity does not just kill people’s services; it has long since warped most political debates about what we should expect from the state. In lots of places, squalor, mess and festering social problems are now seen as the norm. So too is a scepticism about people’s need for help, which is endlessly encouraged by politicians and people in the media. That absurd opportunist Lee Anderson made his name by claiming that food banks were “abused” by people who didn’t need them. Now, the Times columnist Matthew Parris claims to “not believe in ADHD at all” and says that autism is “a much abused diagnosis”, while other voices insist that parents whose disabled children get some dependable help from their local councils are the possessors of “a golden ticket”. In both cases, the insidious process is much the same. First, services fail. Then, casting doubt on the resulting pain and letting the people responsible off the hook, there are loud suggestions that levels of need may not have been that great in the first place. As a result, austerity can be recast as efficiency, a move that always appeals to politicians, of whatever party.
My other big worry relates to public trust, or what remains of it. Birmingham offers a case study in something almost completely missing from the national conversation: the fact that four years after the arrival of the pandemic the suffering people endured seems to count for almost nothing. In 2020 and 2021, lots of comparisons were made to this country’s experience of the years after 1939. Keir Starmer, in fact, said that what we had been through meant people were “looking for more from their government – like they were after the second world war”. Is his new message to Alum Rock – and lots of other places – that even a modest version of 1945 is off limits and, having suffered, people will simply have to watch their councils crumble, and suffer again? Desiccated fiscal arithmetic offers no help with that challenge: this is a moral rather than a mathematical question, and it needs an answer.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist