Jonathan Walker looks back on the events which made the headlines during 2011, a year of riots, strikes, phone hacking and superinjunctions.
It was the year that a West Midlands MP took on Britain’s top-selling newspaper – and won.
The House of Commons paid tribute to a grieving Birmingham father whose dignified appeal for calm prevented further violence in a riot-torn city and a local MEP caused David Cameron his greatest political headache yet, by putting Europe firmly back on to the agenda.
West Midlands politicians were centre stage throughout 2011. And the region grappled with a range of important and difficult issues throughout the year, such as how to cope with massive spending cuts, whether Britain needed a new high speed rail line and whether cities such as Birmingham and Coventry would be better off with directly-elected mayors.
But as the year began, a different type of reform was on the agenda.
January
Supporters and opponents of a new electoral system for national elections kicked their campaigns into high gear in January, ready for the referendum in May.
Opponents of the Alternative Vote ran a hard-hitting campaign which insisted that electoral reform would mean fewer incubators for sick babies.
It’s debatable whether that was actually true but it was certainly effective.
In the end, 76 per cent of Birmingham voters voted “no” to AV, while just 34 per cent voted “yes”. Nationally, a clear majority also voted no to the proposed new voting system.
Meanwhile, David Cameron continued to throw his personal support behind plans for creating directly-elected mayors to run England’s biggest cities.
He argued in a speech that mayors “with clout and passion to make change happen” would help regional economies grow.
Mr Cameron stressed that residents in major cities such as Birmingham and Coventry would decide for themselves whether to change the way their local councils were governed, in a referendum in May 2012.
Councils and public services struggled to cope with the effects of funding cuts throughout the year, after the Government published detailed budget settlements for every local authority which showed that Treasury funding for Birmingham was to fall from £932.6 million in the 2010-11 financial year to £827.2 million in 2011-12, a reduction of £105.4 million.
New Labour leader Ed Miliband reshuffled his team in January – giving Birmingham MP Liam Byrne (Lab Hodge Hill) a senior job as Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary.
And Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman, the MP for Meriden, came under fire in January over plans to move some of Britain’s forests into private ownership. Eventually, the Government backed down – and Mrs Spelman had to come to the House of Commons to announce a u-turn.
February
The debate over plans for a new £17 billion high speed rail line between London and Birmingham – which eventually will form the heart of a national network covering the country – continued as Labour’s Shadow Transport Secretary Maria Eagle suddenly announced Labour might drop its support for the line.
She announced in February that Labour could not guarantee it could find funding for the line, known as HS2, if it won the next election in 2015.
But by the end of the year, Ms Eagle had changed her mine and confirmed that Labour did still support the line, which Birmingham City Council believes will bring 22,000 jobs to the West Midlands metropolitan region.
Supporters of HS2 included pop mogul Pete Waterman, who joined MPs such as Gisela Stuart (Lab Edgbaston) in the House of Commons in July to launch a new campaigning group backing the plans.