Election 2010: The battle for Birmingham Edgbaston
It is Birmingham’s most marginal constituency and is also seen as a national barometer for the General Election. Jane Tyler visits Edgbaston to find the political contest hotting up.
In May the biggest test at Edgbaston will not be on the cricket pitch but in the polling booth.
The constituency is Labour’s most vulnerable seat in Birmingham and number 39 on the Tories’ hit list.
Because of the kind of voters it contains, it is also regarded as a bellwether seat – one which indicates the mood of the nation.
When the political map is a sea of red, Edgbaston has a Labour MP; when Britain is true blue, so is Edgbaston.
It is therefore one Cameron’s team has to win if they have any chance of forming the next Government.
And with a slender 2,349 majority, that is entirely possible.
The incumbent MP, Gisela Stuart, is anxiously looking over her shoulder as the Conservative’s hopeful Councillor Deirdre Alden is snapping at her heels, hoping for a second bite at the cherry after narrowly missing out in 2005.
The General Election fight between the pair is already hotting up, with a bitter row over copyright and a smear campaign. Mrs Stuart got in hot water for using social networking site Twitter for suggesting Mrs Alden and her councillor husband and son may have claimed a £150,000 council allowance, which turned out to be false.
Ms Alden then fought back, suggesting Ms Stuart had used her picture in an election leaflet without obtaining copyright.
When Ms Stuart won Edgbaston in the Labour landslide of 1997 it was a shock, as it had been Conservative since 1945.
It is also one of the few British seats to have returned a woman MP in every election since 1945.
So, rather bizarrely, the Liberal Democrats have picked a male city councillor, Roger Harmer (Acocks Green), as their candidate.
Not only does he face an uphill battle because of his gender, politically he stands little chance of being elected as the Lib Dems have always finished third – their last Edgbaston MP was George Dixon in 1886.
On the face of it, Edgbaston looks like a walk in the park for the Tories.
The constituency is made up of the four wards – Quinton, Bartley Green, Edgbaston and Harborne – and all of its 12 councillors are Conservative.
It has parks aplenty, thriving shopping areas, the famous cricket ground, the King Edward’s schools, the University of Birmingham, and the new super hospital.
But it also has pockets of deprivation with council estates in Quinton’s Welsh House Farm and Bartley Green.
There is also a growing and spreading red light area on the Gillott and Rotton Park Road side of the Hagley Road and drug-dealing at night around Edgbaston Reservoir.
Another worry for David Cameron is that people vote differently in general elections than they do locally.
So the 57-year-old Alden is not taking anything for granted and campaigning as though her life depended on it.
