Some scenes from a trip to Birmingham, England’s second largest city, 120 miles from London but only 75 minutes from Euston Station by train. I had been here once before, in 2001, and was struck by the vitality of the city’s downtown, a stark contrast with my old home town of Detroit. It contains many grand beaux arts buildings from the nineteenth century as well as many sparkling new buildings, including a giant convention center where the city’s votes will be counted Thursday night and Friday morning. The great historical figure in Birmingham politics was Joseph Chamberlain, a screw manufacturer and longtime mayor, a leader of the Liberal party in the 1870s and 1880s who split with Prime Minister William Gladstone over Irish home rule (Chamberlain was against) and who as Colonial Minister in a Conservative government played a critical role in the Boer War of 1899-1902. Chamberlain was the father of Austen Chamberlain, the only Conservative party leader between 1902 and 1997 who was not prime minister, and Neville Chamberlain, who was prime minister in 1937-40.
The Ladywood Arts and Leisure Centre. It’s a circa 1960s building, with a faded mural of children playing in a park, with a large gymnasium-auditorium room similar to those in American schools of the same period. Here, on 40 tables, each labeled with the name of an electoral ward, postal votes are being tabulated. Local volunteers are checking the signatures and dates of birth with those on the electoral register, and putting them in appropriate containers to be counted on election night; surprisingly, there’s no authentication required on the registration application. The Daily Mail has a front-page story on postal vote fraud, and as Daniel Hannan writes in his Telegraph blog in 2005 a judge ruled there was “massive, systematic and organized fraud” in Birmingham. As a result, the Labour party in Birmingham is not relying on postal votes this year, but the Liberal Democrats are. Some of the 40 tables are quiet; the votes have all been counted. Around the Bordesely Green electoral ward table hover multiple party observers, mostly of South Asian descent; this is a heavily Pakistani area, where the Liberal Democrats have promoted postal voting in an attempt to unseat a Labour MP. Am I watching fraudulent votes being processed? Quite possibly, although the presence of observers from multiple parties suggests that some of it is being detected.
Birmingham Edgbaston Labour headquarters. Edgbaston was an affluent neighborhood of Birmingham in Joseph Chamberlain’s time and, surprisingly, still is: large houses in the leafy streets around Birmingham University sit just a mile or two south of downtown. The MP here is German-born Gisela Stuart, a strong opponent of the European Constitution and a backer of Tony Blair’s on military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq. Edgbaston tends to report its results early, and on election night 1997 Stuart became a national celebrity when she was the first Labour candidate to defeat an incumbent Conservative, in a district that had never gone for Labour and by a whopping 49%-39% margin. She won 49%-37% in 2001 and 43%-38% in 2005. Boundary changes have made the district a little more Conservative, and opinion has shifted away from the Labour party; by standard criteria, this is a district that should flip back to the Conservatives this year. Stuart hopes to avoid being swept under. “My values are Labour,” her election materials proclaim. “But I think for myself.” She underlines that by mentioning her votes against her party on the European Constitution and the “10p tax rate” and by her active involvement in local issues; she publicly denounced Gordon Brown for not calling an election in November 2007. She hopes that she can win by running 3% ahead of the party line. The tiny rooms in her cramped headquarters in a nineteenth century row house are crammed with perhaps a dozen volunteers making phone calls, with messages based on responses to some 250 volunteer canvassers; Stuart doesn’t do the canvassing herself because she says British voters are too polite to tell her to her face that they won’t vote for her. She’s concerned about illicit voters, particularly illegal immigrants from places like Somalia and Yemen. She is waiting for a drop-in visit from Peter Mandelson (now Lord Mandelson of Hartlepool and Foy), a brilliant New Labour strategist who has had his ups and downs in the 13 years of Labour government, who was forced to resign twice (unfairly, in my view) amid press furor and who served ably as Northern Ireland minister and European Union trade minister; he was close to Tony Blair and despised by Gordon Brown, but when Brown got into trouble, he called Mandelson into government as Business Minister and effective Deputy Prime Minister and chief spokesman for the party in the campaign. So why is Mandelson visiting Gisela Stuart’s headquarters and apparently without an entourage of TV cameras? To buck up her volunteers, I suppose, and to give a spring of energy to what amounts to an American-style personal campaign. And because, I am guessing, because Edgbaston will again report early on election night, and if Labour manages to hold on to this seat, symbolically important because it was the first New Labour gain in 1997, that will dominate the TV commentary for several hours on what will be a long, long election night. A Stuart victory will suggest that Labour will do well and lend some legitimacy to any attempt by Labour to form a coalition government and hang on to Number 10 Downing Street past Friday.
Hartington Street, Birmingham Perry Barr. This is several miles northeast of downtown Birmingham. You can see the minarets of a mosque a half-mile away; the stores include halal butchers, restaurants with names like Saqib Kebab. It used to be heavily Caribbean, now is more South Asian. Ten years ago, Labour MP Khalid Mahmood tells me, this was a high crime area in which you couldn’t walk without body armor; now community policing has made it safe, and police have mobile phone numbers and emails for many community leaders and can get in touch if there’s any sign of trouble. Mahmood campaigns in the heavily Asian southern half of his constituency in front room meetings, with 15 or 20 people, mostly family and friends. As he’s going into a barber shop on Hartington Street to catch up on the latest talk, he is accosted by an angry man who looks more Arab than South Asian, who shouts, “How can you be with Labour? They’re killing people.” One of his aides runs up to the man and has to be restrained; the taunter continues angrily, “You’re a bad MP,” and after two minutes walks away. Mahmood is an engineer, a graduate of Birmingham City University, who was encouraged to get involved in politics in the late 1990s by longtime Birmingham Council head Sir Dick Knowles; he is the first Muslim elected to Parliament in England, in 2001. His main electoral competition comes from the Liberal Democrats (he beat a Lib Dem 47%-27% in 2005), but the opposition on the streets, he says, is from “people sent out against me” by the Moslem Political Actions Committee or the Islamic Council of Britain who target Muslim MPs and who put up “posters against me—not who to vote for.” Mahmood abstained in the House of Commons vote on whether to go to war in Iraq, “but once the soldiers were there it was my duty as an MP to support them.” His critics say the U.S. and the U.K. are killing people; he points out that “extremists are blowing up people in markets and streets.” He believes the response to Muslim extremists can’t be addressed so much by governments as by religious education. “The knowledge of people here is limited on religion,” he says. “Extremists come and heat them up. We need to get more people with a religious understanding to deal with it.” When the heckler has gone away, Mahmood is greeted warmly and embraced by men on Hartington Street, where obviously he is a familiar figure and he seems unfazed. “We have to fight terrorism within,” he says. “We’re British first.”
These scenes from Birmingham don’t seem to have much to do with the big looming question in Britain’s national politics: will the Conservatives be able to form a lasting government? But there are some interesting lessons, I think. Postal vote fraud is not, it seems, a product of the Labour or Conservative parties, but more of people backing the Lib Dems or fringe parties. An energetic and distinctive MP can hope to run at least several percentage points ahead of her national party. And a Muslim politician with roots in the community, despite the opposition of extremists and fundamentalists, can prevail while proclaiming stoutly that he is “British first.” Interesting trends, and relevant not just for tomorrow’s politics but for politics in the years ahead.
