Daily Archives: October 27, 2017

The West Midlands have long been a bastion of the least pleasant face of right-wing Labour. Birmingham’s nominally-Labour council has been at the heart of the ongoing dispute over the city’s refuse collections, having made a deal with its workers to then renege on it, threaten them with redundancy and lose its court battle humiliatingly in an attempt to block a union injunction.

Birmingham Labour board tried hard to exploit the rules to prevent the city’s new, pro-Corbyn membership majority having a vote in the selection of council candidates for 2018, until it was effectively overruled by Jeremy Corbyn – and even then it slipped through a measure to block an extra six months’ worth of members.

Birmingham Labour MPs formed a core of the ‘chicken coup’, with many publicly calling on Corbyn to resign after the referendum and claiming he was ‘leading the party into oblivion’ – which, after…