If you want a glimpse of England’s future, visit Birmingham. In the July issue of The Critic, Fred Sculthorp depicts the nation’s second city as a blend of migration-driven multiculturalism, swaths of urban decay and its associated social ills, academic and corporate islands of advanced scientific research, and neat enclaves of suburban prosperity. In short, a mixture of good and bad, new and old, native and newcomer, hope and despair, but notably lacking in the civic pride that had marked Birmingham since Mayor Joseph Chamberlain made the city world-famous in the 1870s as a model of urban government.
Under the Chamberlain dynasty (Colonial Secretary Joe, Foreign Secretary Austen, and Prime Minister Neville), Birmingham was first a stronghold of radical Liberalism, then of business-friendly Toryism, and finally of two-party politics — a long and competitive Tory–Labour struggle for dominance in city government. But the Tories last had an overall majority in the city council in 1984, and they last shared power with the Liberal Democrats in a coalition in 2012. That familiar style of England’s municipal politics has since been replaced by a new politics of ethnic bargaining in a city council dominated by the Labour Party, which is itself beholden to Muslim votes representing 30 percent of the city’s population. And rising.
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