Lewis Goodall

A city which frankly is being left in the dust and behind by comparison to what we're seeing in Manchester under people like Andy Burnham and so on.

and just think why on earth should we re-elect the people under whom this has all happened?

Manchester hasn't gone

Some people have said that Birmingham

is sort of ground zero, if you like, for a new type of sectarian politics.

And indeed, we have seen independents elected at a parliamentary level in the city.

We've obviously got people standing for the council now, Gaza independents.

Has the Prime Minister been an asset on the doorstep?

An absolutely massive majority to sort it all out.

Are people on the doorstep saying, oh, I think Keir Starmer's done a great job?

So you can hear from Cotton there another way in which Birmingham politics feels like such a microcosm, to use that word again, of national politics.

You've basically got, as I say, an unpopular incumbent

without a clear sense of ideological direction, talking in very star-marite terms about, in Cotton's case, the character of Birmingham, you know, talking about unity over division.

But in an era where kind of identity politics and those really sharp-edge kind of identitarian themes are so strong...

The question is whether that really cuts it and whether it just sounds sort of deeply nebulous and inchoate and unclear.

And on top of that, you can sort of see Labour struggling to hold on to the sorts of communities in which it had traditionally weighed the votes, specifically as a result of Gaza, Muslim areas, you know, where Labour have dominated and dominated, particularly in cities like Birmingham over recent years.

And that gap, that vacuum, whether it's fair or not, has created the space for people, the sort of people, these Gaza independents, who many people, as I say, are talking about as being a sectarian force, to rise.

And that's also partly maybe not just Labour's fault.

Because in so many ways, one of the kind of curiosities about modern politics, if we're just going to take the question of the Muslim vote, for example, is that in so many ways, you could argue they should be natural centre-right or right-wing voters.

They should be the sorts of people who are generally socially conservative, pro-business, all of these sorts of things.