Author Archives: Roger Harmer

Help turn Birmingham gold!

By Roger Harmer | Wed 6th May 2026 - 8:47 am

We are now a day away from the Birmingham City elections, which promises to be a momentous appraisal of the last four years of Labour rule in the second city. The party are set to lose not just their majority, but huge swathes of seats as residents have their say on the catastrophic failures presided over by the ruling group.

Labour knows this, their disingenuous ploy to pretend to settle the bin strike – which has left areas of the city piled high with bags of rotting rubbish, fly tipping, and rubbish strewn streets for over a year – has spectacularly backfired amongst voters who are asking “why should we vote for them to fix a problem they created themselves?”

The anger is palpable.

We offer an alternative. For the last few months we have fought the biggest campaign we have ever run. Our hard working campaigners have knocked on thousands of doors, delivered pallets upon pallets of literature, and have been improving their communities by reporting potholes, fly-tipping, and (in the case of one candidate) shovelling piles of used nappies from in front of a residential block.

Reform thinks that they are going to win control of the council, so we have worked hard to spread our message of hope and ambition to ensure that residents know that they have a voice in the chamber working hard for them already. Our manifesto – promising investment in our roads and communities as well as our plan to end the bin strike – has been received positively by residents and the media and is translating into support on the ground.

Posted in Op-eds | Tagged 2026 local elections and birmingham | 4 Comments

Huge opportunity for the Liberal Democrats in the 2026 Birmingham City Council Elections

By Roger Harmer | Sun 4th January 2026 - 8:55 am

In what is likely to be a dramatic set of local elections this May, Birmingham is poised to be one of the most notable, with huge opportunities for the Liberal Democrats.

Think of Birmingham City Council and it’s likely the words ‘bankruptcy’ or ‘bin strike’ will come to mind. While these have done huge damage to the city, they are just a couple of the worst examples of Birmingham Labour’s failures. For example, the council has suffered badly from the botched implementation of a new IT system, now 4 years late with cost overruns of more than £100m. These failures have had a hugely damaging impact on the city. Birmingham’s relative levels of deprivation and child poverty, already bad, have worsened significantly in recent years.

Birmingham does have huge potential, thanks to ongoing major investments linked to the coming of HS2 and plans for a new multi-billion pound Sports Quarter led by the owners of Birmingham City. The opportunities to unleash the talents of our young city on the world are huge, but this will clearly require a change of leadership in the Council.

Be of no doubt, Brummies are fed up of the Labour Party. The combination of national unpopularity and local failure will be toxic for them at the ballot box in May. Already the signs of change are notable. Labour lost a vote in November’s Full Council and while largely symbolic it highlighted their losses through defections and our recent by election gain in Moseley. These have taken their numbers down from 65 out of 101 Councillors after the 2022 elections, to 53 now.

The question is not whether they will go, but who will replace them. There is clearly a risk that we jump out of the Labour frying pan into the Reform fire or the chaos and division of Your Party. By contrast, we are offering a positive platform of change focusing on getting the Council running efficiently, listening to communities and delivering core services well.

The 2026 local elections will see a 6 or even 7 party system operating in the city, so organisation and targeting will be particularly important, with seats likely to be won with as little as 25% of the vote. As well as ourselves and Labour we have one of the few remaining urban Conservative groups and a couple of Greens. Significant new challenges will clearly come from Reform and in the inner-city areas; the Your Party / Independent movement will challenge, though they may break into different factions.

The Liberal Democrats have seen steady growth in recent years. in the 2022 all up elections we grew from 8 to 12 and in Moseley made the only by election gain by any party in the current term. We represent all types of ward, from inner-city Aston, to middle class Moseley and the more suburban areas of Yardley. The hard work of our councillors and campaigners stands in stark contrast to what many communities have experienced under Labour.