Shell-shocked Birmingham Conservatives are at each other’s throats, fearing a collapse of their seven-year city council coalition with the Liberal Democrats, given the scale of last week’s hammering dished out to Tory candidates at the local elections.
Urgent inquiries are under way to find out why the performance in Birmingham was so poor, when across the country the Conservative share of the vote held up and even increased in some areas with the party making a net gain of more than 80 councillors in England.
Tory council leader Mike Whitby has been maintaining a low profile and is refusing to comment on the election, which saw a resurgent Labour Party pick up 14 seats, including six from the Conservatives and seven from the Liberal Democrats.
If Labour’s surge is repeated at next year’s elections, the party will easily win an overall majority in the council chamber.
The Birmingham Post has learned that two Birmingham Tory councillors laid the groundwork before the elections for a leadership challenge to Coun Whitby, although a feeling that party unity is needed at a difficult time is likely to see both pull out.
The group is expected to endorse Coun Whitby’s leadership at it’s annual meeting paving the way for him to become shadow mayor of Birmingham – with all the powers of a mayor – when the Localism bill becomes law at the end of the year.
Other developments underlining the turmoil sweeping through the Birmingham Conservative Party include an unprecedented public attack by former Tory councillor Gareth Compton, who accused his colleagues of teaming up with the Liberal Democrats to pursue “quasi-socialist policies”.
Mr Compton, chairman of the Erdington Conservative Association, wrote on a Tory-supporting website complaining that the coalition failed to pursue a single Conservative policy and had nothing distinctive to offer.
He went on: “Why have we not privatised a single significant service? Why did we cling to the outdated and quasi-socialist belief that the council should have a finger in every local pie, from airports to municipal banks?
“Why have we allowed the unions to employ people at our expense and to dominate the workforce as if this were still 1978?
“Why are we borrowing money to build a vanity library? Why are children’s social services still in crisis? Why are we actually opposing academies?
“The reality is that we gained seats on a national swing and we’re losing seats on a national swing because we have done nothing, not one jot or tittle, to persuade the voters that it’s really worth keeping us running the city. We’ve done nothing distinctive and continue to offer nothing distinctive.
“Even Labour Sandwell managed to privatise the refuse service. In Tory Brum, it’s still a council-run, union dominated, expensive and inefficient service.”
Mr Compton said the coaliton had “hurled money” at children’s social services, but the department was still under-performing.
He was replying to an article by Conservative Home website’s local government editor Harry Phibbs.
The article accused Birmingham’s Tory-Lib Dem coalition of pursuing “socialist” policies including opposition to city academies, restricting competition and advocating a municipal bank.
Voters would doubt whether a Conservative-led council would be any different to a Labour-led council, he suggested.
