Dear Patchers — Tomorrow, Britain goes to the polls. On The Dispatch we’ve covered some of the local constituencies of interest: Dudley was the site of a totemic Conservative victory in 2019, which now looks like it could flip back to Labour. Halesowen and Stourbridge could also switch. Even Sutton Coldfield, the truest of blue Birmingham seats, might just be up for grabs — a cast of characters are certainly having a go. In all these areas, Reform UK has been making inroads — with Dudley’s defending candidate, Marco Longhi, pleading unsuccessfully with them not to split the right.
But to finish our coverage this week, we’re looking at the seat at the heart of Birmingham itself: Birmingham Ladywood.
It’s hard to overstate just how safe a seat Ladywood is — or at least, should be. In 2019, Labour’s Shabana Mahmood hoovered up 79% of the votes. The Conservatives came second… on 11%. That majority — 68% of the vote — was the 7th largest in the country.
And yet, the sitting Labour MP is facing trouble, on issues both at home and abroad. We found that local discontent with Labour has been growing. And the issue of the conflict in Gaza — bringing with it an entirely new force, Akhmed Yakoob, into the fray — has trashed old electoral certainties. Marwan Riach, from Electoral Calculus, estimated that Yakoob got significantly more votes in the constituency than Labour’s Richard Parker in the recent West Midlands mayoral election. Should turnout among Labour supporters be low, while highly motivated Yakoob supporters get out and vote, an upset is possible: some bookies are only offering odds as short as 4/9 on Yakoob.
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Brum in Brief
🎓New Brum Uni Chancellor: Sandie Okoro OBE, a lawyer and equality rights champion, has been appointed as the new Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, succeeding Lord Bilimoria of Chelsea CBE who steps down after a decade in the role. Okoro is currently Group General Counsel of Standard Chartered and in her new role follows in the footsteps of names including the Right Honourable Joseph Chamberlain and the Right Honourable Anthony Eden, the Earl of Avon. She previously graduated from the University with a degree in Law & Politics. Full story.
🚄HS2 travel hopes: West Midlands Trains, under the name London Northwestern Railway, has applied to extend existing services between London and Crewe/Manchester via the West Midlands. If their bid is successful, trains from Lichfield, Tamworth and Atherstone could run to Manchester city centre and Warrington from 2026. It’s all part of new route bidding after the northern leg of HS2 was scrapped. Ian McConnell, managing director of West Midlands Trains, said: “With platform space at Euston at a premium, the best way to provide new journey opportunities to Manchester is simply to extend existing services.” All the details.
✋‘Racial abuse and spat at’: 250 security guards across the Midlands are taking part in a national strike over pay which will last until Saturday. The guards work for outsourcing firm G4S with many in position at job centres, where they report bad conditions. Zahid Abbas who works at Kings Heath JobCentre, told the BBC he is spat at and racially abused at work. “The pay that they are paying us, bog-standard minimum wage, it doesn’t make sense,” said Mr Abbas. GMB, who the guards are unionised with, said the company’s latest pay offer was too small to ballot member with 90% of members currently paid minimum wage. G4S say their latest pay offer is above inflation. Compete picture via a click.
🍻Best cider pub: A little further afield than our usual reach but it is good news and one we wanted to share. That is, there is a new holder of the best cider pub in the West Mids. The Bailey Head in Oswestry has been awarded this title by CAMRA while still being up for a chance of winning the West Midlands pub of the year. Co-owner Duncan Borrowman said the award came as a shock. “We massively upped our real Cider range a year ago but we never expected to win this”, he said. Full cider-y story here.
🕺Free dance for men: Austin Dance Theatre All Male Youth Company is delivering a series of introductory dance workshops for male/male-identifying dancers aged 12-21 with no experience necessary. The first workshop happened last night but for the next two Tuesdays there are still spaces at The Mac for these tryouts. Sessions will involve contemporary dance, acrobatic movement and breakin’. Full details.
🎤‘Scummy mummies’: For ‘less-than-perfect’ parents there is a chance to kick back, relax and hear tales from other fallible folk about the nature of being a mum and looking after kids. All led by comedians Elle Gibson and Helen Thorn. Expect tales about pelvic floors, fish fingers and farting — as well as a guest appearance from local politician Jess Phillips. Book here.
The first Gaza question came before Shabana Mahmood’s team could start door-knocking. A South Asian woman in a silk dress approached and asked Labour’s candidate for Ladywood calmly if it was true she hadn't backed the Palestinians in Israel’s assault on the territory. Mahmood replied, politely and carefully, that "I've always been supportive of the Palestinian cause" and "there's a lot of misinformation going around".
The woman said thank you and went on her way, and the rest of the session around Nechells’ Bloomsbury Estate passed off without incident. Mahmood told campaigners she felt “quietly confident” about the Labour vote despite perceptions around the party and Gaza — “there's not a lot you can do about foreign policy” — and stepped into one woman's lush front garden to compliment her on her sugar snap peas. Residents had a mixture of views — a bare-chested man accused the party of lying, saying one thing and doing another; while in another flat a Somali mother said: “It's a hard decision. Everything's a mess with the council, there's lots of rubbish [on the streets]. But we will still vote Labour because they have a chance to be in government”.
But not all canvassing has been so civilised. The next day in Alum Rock police were called twice, after — according to Mahmood’s team — protesters “went far beyond exercising their right to free speech.”
Welcome to Birmingham Ladywood. The constituency covering the city centre, it’s one of the urban seats Roy Jenkins called “floating kidneys”, with boundaries often shifting to make up the right population size. The latest changes don’t help Mahmood — she loses North Edgbaston, where her office manager is a councillor, and gains Alum Rock, home to Birmingham’s reputedly most dedicated pro-Palestinian campaigners. The Electoral Calculus website at one stage even put Independent challenger Akhmed Yakoob within less than 5 percentage points of Mahmood – a dramatic turnaround from 2019 when Ladywood was Labour’s seventh safest seat.
Forty-five percent of over-18s in the redrawn Ladywood are Muslim, analysis by Matt Singh/Number Cruncher finds. Keir Starmer’s LBC interview affirming Israel “had the right” to cut off water and power to Gaza is a touchstone for campaigners and voters. No matter that Mahmood has a long record as a Palestinian rights advocate who has backed boycotts of Israeli goods. For some, the sense of betrayal that she didn’t vote for a ceasefire last November is more acute.
The strength of feeling can partly be explained by parallels with the independence struggle in Kashmir, from where many Birmingham Pakistani families originate (it was here that the Kashmir-focused People’s Justice Party won council seats off Labour in the 2000s). And partly it is a cause that unites many Muslims. Migrant rights campaigner Salman Mirza describes support for the Palestinians as the “sixth pillar of Islam”. He told the Dispatch that Birmingham’s Muslims “are prepared to suffer economically and let Labour lose to make a principled point that we should not be funding a genocide — that's a testament to how they put humanity above their own needs”.
The karahi restaurant summit
Gaza provided the conditions for brash solicitor and TikTok influencer Akhmed Yakoob to come third in the West Midlands mayoral election with 69,000 votes and announce he would contest Ladywood (see last week’s investigation into Yakoob here). But one question that hasn’t been answered is how has Yakoob become the only candidate to run in Ladywood on this ticket, when so many are deeply concerned about this issue?
