From progressive municipality to knuckle-dragging failure in a century and a half

 It is sad to see a great institution brought low by a wilful failure to move with the times. Birmingham Online summarises it:

Birmingham City Council leaders have today announced the city is all but 'bankrupt' as its failure to cut out discriminatory pay practices for years comes back to haunt it.

Local authority trade unions, council officers who should have known the legal position and councillors themselves all share responsibility. What were they thinking of, seeking to skirt equal-pay legislation and agreements, not to mention morality, by the use of bonuses? Surely they knew they would be brought to account eventually.

It is all a contrast from the days of forward-thinking Liberal Birmingham of the 1870s. Form the Journal of Liberal History:

The reforms in municipal services that Joseph Chamberlain introduced during his three-year mayoralty of Birmingham in the mid-1870s marked a turning point for British Liberalism as well as in the governance of industrial cities.

Municipal, or gas-and-water socialism it was called; and it signalled, if not a departure, at least a deviation from the principles and fundamental policy of Liberalism that Gladstone was instilling in the Liberal party at the national level.

Chamberlain began in 1874 by inducing the town (Birmingham had not yet received designation as a city) to buy out its two gas companies, till then in private hands. The next year he used the profits from this consolidation of service to enable the town to buy out the local water companies. In this case his objective was not further profit but reduction in the price and improvement in the quality of the city’s water supply, in the interests of public health.

These measures, the validation of their extraordinary financing and accounting by Chamberlain’s earlier success in business as a metal manufacturer, and the forceful leadership with which he pressed his proposals forward won dazzled approval from the ratepayers and both parties in the town council. But that bipartisan support broke down when he pressed on with an improvement scheme for centre of Birmingham that combined clearance of the inner-city slums with their replacement by a broad artery for commerce and attendant legal services. It was named Corporation Street in honour of the governmental power that brought it all about. Opposition was aroused by the huge debt with which the scheme encumbered the town, to be turned into a profit only slowly as the leases of the shops and offices on Corporation expired and their ownership reverted to the municipality. Furthermore, regardless of its boldness in other regards, the scheme made woefully inadequate provision for the housing of the dispossessed slum dwellers. The costs and limitations of the improvement scheme were accentuated by the onset of what came to be known as the great depression. Still the improvement scheme along with the municipalisation of gas and water aroused much more pride than dismay in the town and won admiring approval in Britain but abroad. For a while Birmingham was heralded as the best-governed city in the industrial world.

Birmingham has recent action to be proud of, such as making a success of the Commonwealth Games taken on at short notice. Let us hope that the city can be rescued from its current mess and that such initiatives can continue.