Reform UK says Britain is broken. Birmingham tells another story

This week, Reform UK gathered thousands of supporters at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre to present itself as a government-in-waiting. This was not a sudden interest in Britain’s second-biggest city: Reform has repeatedly used Birmingham for national campaign launches and conferences, committing considerable resources to making it a showcase for its advance.

Birmingham – young, working-class, multiracial and almost evenly divided between residents recorded as white and those from Black, Asian, mixed and other ethnic groups – is precisely the kind of city Reform leader Nigel Farage’s politics portrays as a warning: a place where an older Britain has supposedly been displaced by an alien new one.

In May’s local elections, Reform became the largest single group on the Birmingham City Council, winning 23 of 101 seats.

The party’s growing presence in Birmingham, however, is not proof that multiculturalism has failed. It is a warning about the feeling of abandonment spreading across Britain.

Reform’s gains in the city demand serious attention. They should neither be minimised by those repelled by its politics nor inflated into a popular mandate the party did not win.

Birmingham is not one electoral community. It is a mosaic of neighbourhoods with different histories, class compositions and political instincts. According to an analysis of the 2021 census , 48.6 percent of residents identified within the broad white category and 51.4 percent within Black, Asian, mixed or other ethnic categories. But citywide diversity does not mean every ward is equally diverse, or that ethnicity is the only lens through which people vote.

Reform’s strongest performances were concentrated in particular outer-city wards which are poor and less diverse. Meanwhile, the Green Party won the largest number of votes across the city, but due to Britain’s first-past-the-post system, got only 19 seats. Labour collapsed to 17 seats (down from 65), the Conservative Party got 16, the Liberal Democrats 12, and 14 went to independent groups and candidates. The overall result of the election was fragmentation, not a far-right conversion.

Being the largest group in the council has not translated into power for Reform either. The party has found no partners. The city is now run by a collaborative minority administration of Liberal Democrats, Greens and the “Better Birmingham” Independents group, with a Liberal Democrat leader and Green deputy.