'Deep England' doesn't exist (Steve Eason/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
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I have a sneaking admiration for Heather Wheeler — the Conservative MP who, with wonderful tactlessness, recalled a meeting in “Birmingham or some other Godawful place”. She only said out loud what most of her colleagues must think as they endure meetings in the bland anomie of the International Convention Centre — a building, incidentally, that the Thatcher government objected to because it broke the rules on local government spending. Even those of us who come from Birmingham and love the place would have to admit that the city’s charms are not always obvious to the naked eye.
And yet it is in Birmingham that the two contenders for the Conservative leadership will face each other tomorrow, and it is there again that the winner will address the party at its annual conference in October. So, what makes the current Conservative Party so keen to court the city?
Part of the answer to this question lies in the very incongruity of the association between Birmingham and the party. At a time when the competition for Tory leadership pits a woman who began her career at Shell against a man who began his at Goldman Sachs, Conservative spin doctors want to create some distance from the global capitalist elite. Birmingham is a good place to start. Shell had a small back-office there once but most of its back-office work is now done out of Chennai or Manila. As for Goldman Sachs, I suspect that most of its employees have never set foot in Birmingham — though some of the more erudite ones may recall that there was once a Birmingham stock exchange, which closed in 1986, just as the London exchange took off.
More generally, in the aftermath of Brexit, Conservatives like to see themselves as representatives of “deep England”. Birmingham, an unglamorous city in the centre of the nation, looks like the capital of this fantasyland from the Home Counties. When people, Tories especially, imagine the “real England”, it is almost invariably rural and, to a surprising extent, rural imagery often comes from Birmingham. Think of Tolkien’s “Middle Earth”, a place that seems to derive from the — then semi-rural — suburb of Birmingham in which the author grew up. Radio 4, keen to demonstrate its non-metropolitan credentials, sometimes ships its presenters to Birmingham for a few hours of Today or Start the Week, but practically the only BBC programme that is still produced in the city is The Archers. It was in here that Theresa May delivered her speech of 2016 in which she remarked that “citizens of the world” were “citizens of nowhere”.
Birmingham is also a perfect case study for the current Conservative fascination with “levelling up” the provinces. Joseph Chamberlain, much admired by May’s advisor Nick Timothy, is often presented as having been the incarnation of municipal activism when he was mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s. Later, after he moved to national politics and left the Gladstonian Liberals to join forces with the Tories, he became the incarnation of Right-wing populism.
There are, however, some odd things about Birmingham’s current place in the Tory imagination. The notion that its population is deeply rooted would not survive the briefest glance at the census. If anything characterises the city, it is migration. Work has always drawn people there — from surrounding counties in the 19th century, from Wales in the Thirties (3% of the entire employed population of the principality moved to the Midlands) and from overseas in the period since 1945. Go back a generation or two and the “somewhere” from which Birmingham people come is likely to be Galway, St Kitts or the Punjab. Birmingham Conservatives, by the way, did not always have easy relations with the city’s immigrant population — though were more discreet in the expression of their opinions than their counterparts in neighbouring Smethwick, who became notorious for using a racist slogan in the 1964 general election.
As for “levelling up”, the city’s history shows how vacuous the concept is. Joseph Chamberlain was a powerful local figure who had great resources at his disposal. Birmingham’s rise was engineered by its own local elites, particularly the network of intermarried Unitarian families who gathered around Chamberlain. He did not depend on favours from national government. The current Conservative mayor of the West Midlands — Andy Street — is an amiable and well-meaning man but hardly in the Chamberlain mould. He won his position by a narrow majority: the proportion who voted against having a regional mayor at all, in a 2012 referendum, was larger than the proportion who voted in favour of having a Tory one in the 2017 election. He also has little money to spend: Conservatives in the Eighties stripped local government of much of its financial power. And while Chamberlain ran a small empire of municipal enterprises, the initiatives that come from Andy Street are less tangible — I suspect that most people living in the band that extends from the university to the site of the old Longbridge factory (my mother among them) would be surprised to hear that they inhabit the “Central Technology Corridor”.
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SubscribeWhat is the point of this article ? Reads just like yet another Tory-bashing article by yet another academic with an agenda to push (and it appears a new book to shift). Should UnHerd really be serving the chat show market where authors come on the sofa to do interviews in exchange for free PR ?
There is the usual lack of understanding of why people vote conservative – random generalisations like that there is nothing “natural” about the Tory party. What is this supposed to mean ? And is it any more or less “natural” than the other parties ? And so what if it is (or isn’t) ?
The final sentence almost unknowingly blunders on the only truth in this rather sad effort: “For him and his associates, Birmingham went, above all, with the phrase “self-made”.” Yes – the conservative party is for people who want to make something of themselves. And are happy to get off their backsides and get on with the job. That is a lot more than “the prosperous commuters of Sutton Coldfield and the white ex-car workers (or their widows) of Northfield are now the only people in Birmingham to vote Conservative”.
Quite how someone with such a tenuous grasp of reality gets to be a Professor is beyond me.
It’s what I call a “Nick Cohen article”. Start off with an incorrect assertion and then support it with a few historic anecdotes laced with left-wing arsenic. If you’re lucky you might spin a book out of it.
I want Unherd to keep providing a range of views but many of us subscribe to avoid articles like this which are merely trailers for BBC/Guardian/New Statesman readers with enough spare cash to want to buy the book.
That tenuous grasp is a requirement.
Exactly, the whole thing was twaddle from start to finish. I have never known Birmingham to have been associated with Conservatism in any meaningful way to start with. And also – Thatcherism was a product of Birmingham, because some Marxist loser used the term in 1979. Whatever, Prof.
The article is correct in recording the Chamberlain (Joseph, Austen, Neville) association with Birmingham.
It fails to mention Powell (another Birmingham native and West Midlands MP) – a glaring omission given it’s obsession with “Thatcherism” and the clear influence he had on voting in the region in the mid 1970s.
“Enoch Powell, so intelligent that he made the rest of his party doubt that they were really Tories.”
I suspect the Conservatives are more interested in Birmingham less because it represents some idea of “deep England” (whatever that even means) and more because it is not as affluent as the South but more affluent that the North and has proven its willingness to vote Conservative with the back-to-back elections of Andy Street. It, and the wider Midlands, is therefore a key battleground for the Tories.
Are we also to assume that the inhabitants of any other city would list natural landmarks as opposed to man-made ones? Would Londoners not list Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and Marble Arch as key landmarks? I’m not sure that the phenomenon is Brum-specific, rather the logical result of people living in dense cities that are man-made by definition.
As an aside, Goldman Sachs very publicly opened a new office in the city a year or two ago so I suspect that quite a few Goldman Sachs employees have set foot in the city.
Andy Street was formerly MD of John Lewis, so there’s a bit more to him than just being “well-meaning and amiable”. I suspect he’s contributed more to the public good than this rather condescending academic.
He hasn’t.
“As for Goldman Sachs, I suspect that most of its employees have never set foot in Birmingham”…they opened their first office outside of London there last year. Sloppy.
Yes, but he loves the city, so he doesn’t need any facts.
I had not realised Birmingham had only one Cathedral, one internet search later Birmingham actually has three Cathedrals. None of which were built in the 20th Century. A fairly significant mistake the youngest Cathedral was built in in 1873 but became a cathedral in 1980. That’s a quick look at wikipedia but i doubt anyone’s lying about that kind of information.
I have just noticed the comment below about Goldman Sachs Birmingham office which i find relevant to the lack of knowledge about the city the writer seems to be writing about.
I have to agree with the other commentators here on the style of the article . Especially as I started reading Unherd due to the articles on Flyover Country matters outside of London.
Never having lived near the city i associate Birmingham with Spaghetti Junction and various 2nd division musical acts some of whom i have spent money on.