Thread: Bring out your Birminghams Brummie Bins

A new plague on the horizon this Summer..



The UK is fuvked

How many bins do you fill with empties per week?

Look on the bright side of this a Labour mp from Birmingham is trying to get a new airport built in Kashmir.
Because its to far for his constituents to travel to the main airport in Pakistan.

You numpties clearly know nothing about it.

Well, it is TD.

The council are trying to cut the collectors wages by 8k per year.

But go ahead - make it all somehow about race.

It'd be great if someone could collect TD's racist twats and take them to the dump where they belong.

Blame Birmingham’s absurd equal pay bill for this waste fiasco.

This bankrupt Labour-run council is facing a £760 million legal bill for paying ‘male dominated’ areas of work more than ‘female’ ones


Mark Littlewood

02 April 2025 10:45am BST



Rubbish piled up on the streets in Sparkhill, Birmingham.
Rubbish piled up on the streets in Sparkhill, Birmingham. Credit: Anita Maric /SWNS

“Birmingham is a dump.” In my visits to England’s second city in recent years, this has been a common refrain from my fellow travellers. It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what they mean, but for some time now Birmingham has given the impression of fraying at the edges. This powerhouse of the industrial revolution has, one might conclude, seen better times.




Today though, Birmingham has quite literally become a dump. Seventeen thousand tonnes of rubbish remain uncollected on its streets. This has been a boon for the growing local population of rats and maggots but is rather less appealing to 1.2 million human residents who are now facing a serious public health crisis.




How did one of our nation’s greatest cities come to be in such a dire state, a situation so bad we would be shocked to come across it in even the poorest regions of planet Earth?

For the Deputy Prime Minister, Angela Rayner, the reason is simple. Fourteen years of Tory neglect and austerity are the key factors at play. Given this is Labour’s go-to explanation for virtually all human ills, we should be unsurprised that this is how they come to terms with Birmingham’s desperate plight.

In truth, there are a range of interwoven causes.

In the immediate term, picket lines of trade unionists are preventing refuse trucks going into depots. That dispute was sparked by the council’s decision to abolish the role of the person responsible for safety at the back of a refuse collection lorry – a move which Unite, the trade union representing the workers, said would see staff pay reduced.

Going back further, the Labour-run local authority is bankrupt. Last year, it emerged that the council had managed to throw away about £90 million on a botched IT installation – a sum of money so vast you’d be forgiven it was mandatory for public officials to waste huge sums of money on such systems.


The root cause however is a judicial ruling which landed the council with a £760 million equal pay bill tipping the council into bankruptcy.

The court ruled that male-dominated areas of work were being better remunerated, with opportunities for larger bonuses, than those with a predominance of women. As the work was apparently “similar”, this apparent injustice merited a remedy that has brought the local government apparatus in the city to its knees.


The word “similar” here is having to do a lot of work. How is a court – rather than an open market – supposed to weigh up the appropriate wage packet of a teaching assistant compared to a bin man? In what ways are these jobs really “similar” at all? They both involve getting out of bed, going to your place of work for a set period of time and applying your skills to solve the various tasks in front of you, but that doesn’t make them meaningfully comparable.

Taking a flight to Geneva is similar to taking a flight to Berlin. The prices aren’t fixed to exactly match. Ketchup is similar to mustard – you use these sauces to add flavour to your food – but a jar of each will cost you very different amounts. Playing rugby has some similarities to playing football, but you will earn much more if you’re an elite performer at the latter.

Allowing courts to determine which rates of pay are legally compliant is what has led to the current disaster in Birmingham. It is great news for the few thousands who are getting a fortune in back pay. Less good for the wider population who are now living under a mountain of rat-infested rubbish.

THE TELEGRAPH

This road’s residents know why their Labour-run council really imploded.

One side of this street lays clear, while the other sees bins stacked one-metre high – who’s to blame is clear as day

Abigail Buchanan

02 April 2025 8:00pm BST



Chelworth Road, where one side (under Tory local governance) is clear, and the other (run by Labour) has fallen victim to a bin strike
Chelworth Road, where one side (under Tory local governance) is clear, and the other (run by Labour) has fallen victim to a bin strike

The quiet Birmingham suburb of Walkers Heath is not a tale of two cities, but rather a tale of two councils. A snapshot of Chelworth Road, which lies on a local boundary, from earlier this week shows Birmingham’s bin crisis laid bare.

On one side – managed by the Labour-run Birmingham city council – black bin bags are dumped in piles six high, their rotting contents leaking onto the street. On the other, where litter is collected by the Conservative-led Bromsgrove district council in Worcestershire, the pavements are clear and it is business as usual.

THE TELEGRAPH

.... and talking of pakistan ...



Labour ‘dropped grooming gangs inquiries to avoid offending Pakistanis’

Sir Trevor Phillips says Government’s response to scandal is ‘utterly shameful’ and ‘obviously political’


Home Affairs Editor
Related Topics

09 April 2025 1:26pm BST



Sir Trevor Phillips

Sir Trevor Phillips says Labour risks providing an ‘open goal’ to Right-wing critics of the party’s policies on immigration Credit: Geoff Pugh for The Telegraph
Labour dropped its plans for five local grooming gang inquiries for fear of offending its Pakistani voters, Sir Trevor Phillips has claimed.

Sir Trevor, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, said Labour’s response to the grooming gangs scandal was “utterly shameful” because it was “so obviously political” to avoid offending a particular demographic of voters.

The broadcaster, who previously stood to be a Labour candidate for London mayor, said the move risked providing an “open goal” to Right-wing critics of the party’s policies on immigration.


His comments came after the Government dropped a commitment to provide £5 million to support up to five initial inquiries modelled on the previous judge-led one into grooming gangs in Telford.

Jess Phillips, a Home Office minister, announced that “following feedback” the Government would adopt a “flexible approach” where the money would be available for local councils to use as they wished to support grooming gang work.

She said that this could mean full independent local inquiries, but could also mean “more bespoke work, including local victims’ panels or locally led audits of the handling of historical cases”.


The Conservatives accused Labour of watering down their response to the grooming gangs inquiry in an announcement just 45 minutes before Parliament broke for recess.

Kemi Badenoch, the Conservatives leader, said her party would push for another vote on setting up a national inquiry into the scandal.

She posted on X: “If Starmer refuses to initiate a national inquiry, the public will suspect a cover-up.

How can the very councils that failed to stop the rape gangs be trusted to investigate their own failures?

We will push for another vote so Labour is compelled to do the right thing.”

Home Office sources said it was “patently false” to claim they had watered down its commitment and insisted that the change did not necessarily mean that five inquiries would not go ahead but ministers had decided to not be prescriptive following the local consultation.


Speaking on Times Radio, Sir Trevor said: “What the Government is doing on [grooming gangs] is utterly, utterly shameful. Utterly shameful. And it is so obviously political. People in government who are responsible for this, who are in other ways completely decent people, should really be ashamed of themselves.

“Because it’s so obvious that they’re not doing this because of the demographic of the people involved, as Katie Lam, the Tory MP, said yesterday, largely Pakistani Muslim in background, and also in Labour-held seats and councils who would be offended by it.

“That’s clearly the reason that they’re not pursuing this. And it is utterly shameful, given what has been done to these children by these men. I cannot tell you how cross I am about it.

“I think part of the problem is that the centre-Left has put all sorts of barriers around what it can talk about, what it may speak out about.

“In the same way as we have this problem here, in the United States, the Democrats have had almost nothing to say about, for example, immigration, had nothing very much to say about some of the barriers on freedom of speech on campuses and so on, because they’re embarrassed by it.

“And it has presented an absolute open goal to people like Trump and JD Vance [the US vice-president]. That’s the problem.”

‘Tools they need to tackle problem’
Lisa Nandy, the Culture Secretary, rejected claims the Government had watered down plans for inquiries into grooming gangs, after it was confirmed councils will be able to choose how to use a £5 million national fund.

“We haven’t [watered them down]. What we’re doing is working with local areas to make sure that they have the tools that they need to be able to tackle this problem. If they need the tools to do proper inquiries, we’ll make sure that they are available,” she said.

“We know that the most important thing is that local services have proper systems in place to understand what is happening in their areas and to be able to act very very quickly to recognise the warning signs and to move fast”.

On Tuesday, Ms Phillips said the Home Office was developing a new best-practice framework to support “local authorities that want to undertake victim-centred local inquiries or related work”.

A Home Office spokesman said: “It is wholly wrong to claim the government is cancelling local child sexual abuse inquiries – we will pursue justice for victims without fear or favour, and claims we would not do so to avoid offending any group are false.

“This government is taking decisive action to finally tackle grooming gangs – strengthening the Child Sexual Exploitation Police Taskforce, giving victims more powers to have their cases reviewed and making it a criminal offence to cover up any report of child sexual abuse.

“We have also commissioned a rapid national audit, led by Baroness Casey, to uncover the true scale of grooming gangs in the UK today, including looking at ethnicity. And we are providing £5m to help support local inquiries so we can deliver the meaningful change victims deserve.”

where the money would be available for local councils to use as they wished to support grooming gang work.

an unfortunate turn of phrase, but one which unfortunately rings very true. the rape gangs and those in authority who facilitated them ( local councils, social services and the police too afraid of being branded racist or being subjected to "islam style" reprisals )will now get off scot free.

Originally Posted by cyrille

You numpties clearly know nothing about it.

Well, it is TD.

The council are trying to cut the collectors wages by 8k per year.

But go ahead - make it all somehow about race.

It'd be great if someone could collect TD's racist twats and take them to the dump where they belong.

Should the people who made the Netflix crime drama "Adolescence" be taken to the same dump? I understand it was based around a crime by a young black guy but Netflix made the perp white. Perhaps it was too politically incorrect to make the perp black. The finger can always be pointed at white males.

Very thought provoking thread Joe. Turd world country. What a damn shame when you gotta compare your country with Pakistan. wow

they multiply fast.

... as do a lot of the inhabitants of birmingham.

I blame the politicians, the politicians and guess what, the politicians. I'm done with the royal family as well

Originally Posted by taxexile

In the immediate term, picket lines of trade unionists are preventing refuse trucks going into depots. That dispute was sparked by the council’s decision to abolish the role of the person responsible for safety at the back of a refuse collection lorry – a move which Unite, the trade union representing the workers, said would see staff pay reduced.

Unions again.

They're on strike.

Of course it's 'unions again', you dim prat.

The only dim prats are the rank and file who think that the unions are doing this to protect their pay.

Originally Posted by DrWilly

The only dim prats are the rank and file who think that the unions are doing this to protect their pay.

Well of course you're against Unions.

The Birmingham I once loved is gone, replaced by rats, rubbish and rampant violence.

State dysfunction, sharply segregated ethnic enclaves and the collapse of civic pride give us an unhappy foretaste of sectarian Britain

Madeline Grant
12 April 2025 6:00am BST



Rubbish bags lie on the street, as the strike action by Birmingham bin workers represented by the Unite union enters its fifth week in Birmingham
Rubbish bags lie on the street as the strike action by Birmingham bin workers enters its fifth week Credit: Hannah McKay


‘Greatest of all the mansions of the Dwarves was Khazad-dûm, that was afterwards in the days of its darkness called Moria.”

Some of J R R Tolkien’s most tragic prose in The Lord of the Rings is reserved for the descriptions of the lost land of the Dwarves. Once a proud testament to craftsmanship and enterprise it has become, in the time of Middle-Earth, enveloped by a grim darkness which belies its former glories. These lines invariably come back to me when I consider Birmingham. And it is a city I think of a great deal, and with affection, because it was there that I, like Tolkien, spent a number of happy childhood years.


Usually the first thing people say to me when I say I lived and attended school in Birmingham is “it doesn’t sound like it”. True, the Brummie accent never left an impression on me; I went to a nice school and my parents, in true Hyacinth Bucket style, sent me to elocution lessons.

Still, I maintain it’s a seriously underrated accent. Many, including the creators of Peaky Blinders, mistake “Brummie” for its harsher Black Country cousin. The real Brummie, to my mind, is a subtler, more rhythmic lilt. Not that this prevents it from being routinely voted “Britain’s worst accent”.

In our own darkened days, however, the first thing people say when you mention Birmingham isn’t the accent but the bins, the mounting rubbish and rats taking over the city.

Though Birmingham Council’s bankruptcy is largely due to back-payments settling an equal pay dispute, it has also suffered catastrophic mismanagement; overspending on one IT project to the tune of £100 million. The rape gang inquiries aren’t the only ones being shelved: the Government also cancelled a vital investigation into Birmingham Council’s financial mismanagement, perhaps for fear it would prove too incriminating.


It wasn’t always thus of course. The city was once a byword for prosperity and sound leadership; one magazine in the 1890s described Birmingham as the “best-governed city in the world”. As recently as 1961, Birmingham households earned more, on average, than London households. It was a centre of metallurgy, and a focal point of the Arts and Crafts movement.

Alas, long before the advent of “cat-sized rats” Birmingham’s accolades tended to be uniquely depressing. The city boasts some of the UK’s highest rates of crime and homelessness. It has produced a disproportionate number of convicted Islamist militants and Islamic State fighters. Apart from Birmingham Art Gallery, with its renowned collection of Pre-Raphaelite art, and the metallurgy of the Jewellery Quarter, I can think of few positive things at which Birmingham could now be said to be country, let alone world-beating.

In part then, the state of Birmingham is a chicken-and-egg situation: is it the result or the cause of a diminished civic pride? I suspect it is both; all a vicious cycle of decline. All this is especially sad because of how steeply this decline has occurred. To say that the Birmingham of the past was proud of its civic space would be an understatement.

It embodied in bricks and mortar a proud industrial spirit and municipal identity, as street names like Corporation Street and Navigation Street attest. Grand buildings and landmarks were named after great industrialists and engineers like Matthew Boulton and James Brindley. Even our school trophies were named after Quaker benefactors.

Ghostly reminders of this pride are still there. Look up above the dilapidated shop level and you’ll often see beautiful Victorian detailing. More than perhaps anywhere in Britain, Birmingham is a monument to what we have lost. There are echoes of the Dark Age Britons who lived alongside Roman ruins with little clue as to who built them or why. To see crowds smoking spliffs and lounging around the Hall of Memory war memorial on Centenary Square is upsetting on a primal level.

It is worth saying that much of the blame for its state lies not with the present council but past ones. Specifically, the malign utopians of the 1960s who felt that only by absolute erasure of the past and reconstructing physical space in a new and barbarous image could they create the progressive “civilisation” which they craved.

There had been signs that their work was being slowly reversed. The city centre has improved dramatically in recent years with the regeneration of New Street station and the gutting of the grimy Brutalist library, which I will forever associate with having my phone, iPod and laptop stolen while revising for A-levels.

While the new library is scarcely more aesthetically pleasing, resembling a pile of Christmas presents, it is at least clean and neat. J H Chamberlain’s original Central Library, which stood between 1882-1974, must rank alongside Euston Station as one of the most stunning buildings to have fallen prey to the evils of 20th-century town planning. Google it and weep.

Last year, Andy Street came within a whisker of winning a third mayoral term, which, given the size of the anti-Tory swing, is surely testament to his fundraising abilities and positive vision for the city.

However, the regeneration hasn’t happened uniformly. Birmingham’s centre is quite small compared to other major cities. As Birmingham gradually expanded into a mega conurbation, it gobbled up neighbouring settlements along the way. So moving away from the centre, you’ll find village greens and medieval churches. You will also often see vast piles of rubbish and flytipping which long predate the bin workers’ strike. Parts of inner Birmingham, like Handsworth, have resembled the currently afflicted areas for years.

Elsewhere, segregated communities live cheek-by-jowl. A stone’s throw away from hipster Digbeth is Small Heath, with an 86 per cent Muslim population; deprived Sparkbrook adjoins affluent Moseley. Walking around the city can be a jarring experience. A few streets can take you between places that feel like different worlds.

The scale of the demographic change is dramatic and present in large and small ways. The annual Eid celebrations have become increasingly “in-your-face”, often associated with anti-social behaviour, nuisance and noise. The Five Guys outlet at Fort Dunlop recently dropped alcohol and pork products from its menu in a bid to become “halal certified”. Such changes suggest not so much polite co-existence as the flexing of cultural muscle; gradual, sometimes obnoxious, incursions into daily life.

Before going to Birmingham I had never seen a full-face veil; but in certain enclaves they are ubiquitous and have been for some time. Increasingly, you see not only adult women dressing modestly but young girls too. These are depressing developments, like the segregated communities, suggesting immigration without integration.

On nights out in the city centre, cars driven by South Asian men would routinely pull up and their passengers would ask us to get inside. I was only about 14, wearing a school uniform and walking home when a taxi pulled up and the driver leered at me: “I’ve got a place for your body.” Such exchanges were common and became almost a running joke. Looking back on it now, it is all extremely sinister.

The Commons representative for Moseley, one of the villages absorbed by the conurbation, where Tolkien spent much of his youth and which helped inspire the landscapes of Middle Earth, is Tahir Ali, a Labour MP. Mr Ali has devoted considerable energy to causes like petitioning for a new airport in Mirpur, Pakistan, even as the rubbish piles mount. In Parliament he recently demanded a special blasphemy law outlawing the desecration of religious texts. Rather than telling his colleague in no uncertain terms where to get off, the PM gave a characteristically weaselling non-answer. It is both a measure of Labour’s fright, and a foretaste of the unhappy sectarian future awaiting British politics.

You wonder what on earth Tolkien would have made of all this. I’m not sure even The Lament of the Rohirrim would cover his despair.

THE TELEGRAPH

but its not all bad.

birmingham still has something to be proud about. did you see the four bald villa meatheads fighting and seemingly beating the entire PSG ultras at the match in paris last weeek.

This has bin going on for far too long, it wheelie has.
No this is not rubbish or trash talk, I refuse to accept that there is no compromise.
All that rubbish about they should be made to picket up.
Ok I'll put a lid on it.

Bin strike activists plot new pro-Palestine party

Union campaigners in Birmingham aim to supplant Labour loyalties by forming group opposing conflict in Gaza

Amy Gibbons
Political Correspondent
Related Topics

17 April 2025 4:51pm BST


Birmingham bin strike activists are plotting a new pro-Palestinian party in a “break from Labour”.

Campaigners for Unite, the union behind the bin crisis, have urged colleagues to consider joining forces with “lefty Greens”, other trade unionists and “free Palestine activists” in a new coalition.

In a Facebook post on Wednesday, Unite’s community branch in Birmingham raised the prospect of a new pro-Palestinian party to represent “real workers”.

Birmingham is one of several areas where pro-Palestinian candidates squeezed the Labour vote last year amid frustration over Sir Keir’s stance on the war in Gaza.

Jess Phillips, the Home Office minister, narrowly clung on to her seat in Birmingham Yardley after an influx of support for the pro-Gaza Workers Party, which placed a close second.

Shabana Mahmood, the Justice Secretary, also held off a challenge in Birmingham Ladywood from Akhmed Yakoob, a controversial TikTok lawyer who was running on a pro-Palestinian platform.


THE TELEGRAPH

A NEW LOOK FOR THE BIN COLLECTORS THEN.

"councils will be able to choose how to use a £5 million national fund."

Hmmmm wonders wheres that will goesssss