Blunt knives won’t tame Birmingham Labour's response to crime is laughable

Adam has lived in inner-city Birmingham all his life, spending his teenage years armed: sometimes with knives, sometimes with guns, always in a gang. And never particularly bothered by the police. “Because we live in poor areas,” he says, “the police don’t do anything.” They’ll arrive after a big shooting, to be sure, “like it’s Christmas,” Adam says, all flashing lights and excitement. But then they leave again, leaving the criminals and their victims to their fates.

England’s second city now outstrips London for its high levels of armed, violent crime. Firearms offences here are almost double that of London. England’s second city used to be the Workshop of the World. But just a 10-minute drive from the Bullring, you’ll find the crumbling terraces of Small Heath, where streets are blocked with abandoned mattresses and smashed-up cars. Where once families thrived amid Victorian civic elegance, now dozens of illegal businesses crowd along the streets in makeshift shacks. And gangs prowl. Jaffar*, owner of one of the area’s few legal businesses, explains that “people here are crazy. I run a proper business and I pay the taxes I owe. But if I say anything about those who don’t, I’ll get physically attacked.”

In January alone, two men were charged with attempted murder after separate attacks here, while another local was jailed for shooting someone in a car park. And if you stand up to the mayhem, you’ll also be targeted. Ahmed* was brutally assaulted by a group of thugs “because I’d talked about people dealing drugs at a community centre”, he says. “I suppose they thought I was on to them. They beat me senseless.”

There are plenty of men happy to do the beating. “The gangs pull in the young kids through drugs, through clothes, through cars,” says Adam. “Young kids see that the way to make easy money is to sell drugs.” Just how easy soon becomes clear, when we’re taken to see rows of all-night “convenience stores” along Coventry Road where drugs are sold openly, even as their owners apparently carry knives. “Buying drugs here is like going into a shop to buy beer,” says Adam. “And getting hold of a gun is like buying chocolate. I can get one in 30 or 40 minutes.”

The gangs’ dominance is just as entrenched in other Birmingham neighbourhoods, explaining the city’s eye-watering violent crime figures. But, according to Ahmed, the hardened criminality is underpinned by underlying disorder. To illustrate what he means, he takes us to Small Heath Park, a short walk from the shanty town off Coventry Road. There’s an ornamental lake and a bandstand, proudly funded by philanthropy back in the 1870s. Now, though, the lake is choked with rubbish. Used syringes and empty cans of nitrous oxide — the now-illegal recreational drug — litter the muddy slopes. Underfoot, the soil is spongy, the result of warrens dug by unchecked rat infestations. The floor of the bandstand is scattered with used condoms: prostitution is rife.

How, then, to understand the anarchy? Government inaction is partly to blame: clear enough at the council level. Having effectively declared itself bankrupt in 2023, the local authority has been forced to enact deep cuts, slashing everything from youth clubs and sports facilities to social services. Yet more austerity is in the offing too, despite a projected 17.5% jump in council tax rates over the next two years.

It’s equally tempting to blame more serious lawbreaking on central government. Last week, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said she was considering Idris Elba’s call to replace pointed kitchen blades with blunter alternatives. A laughable suggestion — doubly so when one considers that Shabana Mahmood, the local MP in Small Heath, is also Keir Starmer’s justice secretary. Unsurprisingly, no one we speak to here thinks changing the shape of cutlery would make much difference, though many argue that a more active police force could be a good first step. “That,” says Adam, “might stop the kids who nowadays will come to your house and shoot it up, because the police never stopped them doing anything before.” Of course, that wouldn’t come cheap, and besides West Midlands Police has seen its budget slashed and officer numbers cut by 700 since 2010.

Taken together, the so-called “broken windows theory” feels relevant here. Developed by the American social scientist James Q. Wilson back in the Eighties, it argues that when low-level disorder becomes entrenched, more serious crime will inevitably follow. “If no one ever gets pulled over,” says Mohammed Ashfaq, the founder of the KIKIT project, which has long worked to try to reduce substance misuse and violence, “people will drive their cars without road tax or insurance, and smoke weed in their cars, driving under the influence.”

Speak to locals, meanwhile, and you get the sense that the underlying sociopolitical tensions here have been heightened by recent arrivals from overseas. In Small Heath, as in other parts of inner-city Birmingham, a long-established Pakistani community dominated. But in recent years, they have been joined by more migrants from Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, a fact their neighbours have started to resent. Mansoor and Ahmed, middle-aged men who were born to Pakistani parents in Birmingham, tell us these newer arrivals are to blame for much of the illegality and chaos. According to Mansoor, one local chain of convenience stores notorious for selling drugs is controlled by members of an Afghan tribal network.

In the absence of the state — Ashfaq says that the police “just haven’t got enough officers” — locals are organising. Mohammed Zahir, a muscular man in his forties who owns a Thai kickboxing gym, looks for ways to divert kids from crime. “Kids are like sponges,” Zahir explains. “If they come into contact with bad stuff on the streets, they will absorb it, especially if they feel there will be no repercussions.” Not that he is naive, noting that some of his keenest students start to learn self-defence because they are scared of the gangs: only for them also to become “terrors” on the street.

No wonder inhabitants are grasping for more durable political solutions. With Labour resorting to blocking knife orders on Amazon, local alternatives are appearing. At the last election, Mahmood beat an independent candidate called Akhmed Yakoob by just 3,241 votes. In 2019, albeit with slightly different boundaries, her majority was almost 30,000. In nearby Yardley, Jess Phillips stumbled home after strong pressure from the Workers Party. As for local government, last year’s elections for the West Midlands mayoralty saw Yakoob poll almost 70,000 votes.

After the general election in July, most reports suggested these insurgents rode the so-called Gaza vote and it’s unarguable, certainly, that mostly Muslim areas of Birmingham were unhappy at Labour’s foreign policy. In the end, though, locals suggest that a fraying social fabric was the decisive electoral factor. “Voters really want to see Labour improving things on the streets in the poorer areas,” Ashfaq says, “and those MPs may struggle next time if they don’t.” Yakoob agrees. “I got 33.2% by highlighting Labour’s failure over local issues,” he emphasises, a platform that covered everything from drugs to gun crime.

In this, there is a lesson for cities other than Birmingham: urban degeneration born from municipal bankruptcy carries a political price. 

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*Some names have been changed.

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