Birmingham-style bin strikes could spread across Britain, union warns
Birmingham-style bin strikes could break out across the UK as workers demand higher pay, a trade union boss has warned.
Clare Keogh, the national officer for local government at Unite, said members were angry that Birmingham city council had failed to surrender in the dispute, which has left the area overrun with rats and triggered comparisons to the Winter of Discontent in the 1970s.
She said there was 'massive potential this will escalate' and warned strikes could break out 'up and down the country'.
It came as the Tories called on Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, to hand back £10,000 she has been given by Unite, one of the Labour Party's biggest overall donors.
Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow local government secretary, said: 'If she were on the side of British people she would think about giving back the money.
'But instead she has refused to take action to take on the bully boy tactics of Unite, as she is a paid-up member and in their pay.'
Birmingham city council was forced to declare a major incident after some 400 Unite members launched an all-out strike last month in a dispute over pay and jobs.
The industrial action has caused misery for residents, with more than 17,000 tons of household waste piling up in the streets. Some claimed neighbourhoods were being plagued by rats 'as big as small cats' as picket lines blocked bin lorry depots.
'Anger is growing'
Another strike involving Unite refuse workers, which has led to recycling sites being closed, continues in Sheffield, and Ms Keogh told the i newspaper that more ballots for strike action in other areas were being considered.
She said: 'In Birmingham, and many other councils we've seen over the last few years, our members have been prepared to walk out, saying 'this just isn't good enough and we're not going to take any more cuts'.
'That anger is growing and we're seeing that in the increasing number of strike ballots that we're taking forward. I think if the Government doesn't get a grip on it, that will definitely escalate.'
Unions have submitted pay claims for local government workers across England, Wales and Northern Ireland for the next financial year. Pay talks are continuing in Scotland.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
The truth about the 1984 miners' strike
On 6 March 1984, I found myself smack-bang in the middle of the largest industrial dispute in post-war history. As the son of a fifth-generation miner whose bedroom window looked out onto Pye Hill Pit in Selston – the remote Nottinghamshire mining village I called home – I couldn't help but be caught up in the miners' strike. And over its 363 days, I watched with bemused anger as a series of nods, winks, slights of hand and outright lies were fashioned into a hard and fast history. On one side we had the National Union of Mineworkers' (NUM) principled president Arthur Scargill and the striking miners, fighting to save British mining. On the other side, Nottinghamshire's moneygrubbing scabs, intent on murdering Old King Coal – aided by Margaret Thatcher and the rozzers. Admittedly, the media didn't spell it out quite so plainly, but there were enough headlines and emotion-heavy images to make sure we all got the message.
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America
Photo montage by Gaetan Mariage / Alamy When I met Patti Smith soon after Donald Trump's first victory, she said she'd ended up next to him at various New York dinners over the years, back in the Seventies, when he was pitching Trump Towers. 'We were born in the same year, and I have to look at this person and think: all our hopes and dreams from childhood, going through the Sixties, everything we went through – and that's what came out of our generation. Him.' Smith's sing-song voice was in my head at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on one of the final nights of Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour. Springsteen was born three years after Trump and will also have sat at many New York dinners with him. Those with half an eye on the news would be forgiven for thinking that Bruce has been lobbing disses at the president from the stage between his hits, but his latest show is heavier than that: a conscious recasting of two decades of his more politicised music, with a four-minute incitement to revolution in the middle. Here is a bit of what he says: 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring. In America right now we have to organise at home, at work, peacefully in the street. We thank the British people for their support…' Clearly few in the US are speaking out like this on stage, and Trump has responded by calling Springsteen a 'dried-out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)' and threatening some kind of mysterious action upon his return. Springsteen, the heartland rocker, was never exactly part of the counter-culture, though he did avoid Vietnam by doing the 'basic Sixties rag', as he put it, and acting crazy in his army induction. Yet he has become a true protest singer in his final act. He wears tweed and a tie these days, partly because he's 75 and partly, you suspect, to convey a moral seriousness. When I last saw him, two years ago, I thought I saw some of Joe Biden's easy energy. Well, Bruce still has his faculties. The feeling is: listen to the old man, he has something to say. Springsteen's late years have been something to behold. At some point in the last decade he stopped dyeing his hair and started to talk in a stylised, reedy, story-book voice. The image of the America he seemed to represent shifted back from Seventies Pittsburgh to Thirties California: the bare-armed steelworker became the Marlboro Man, and in 2019 there was a Cowboy album, Western Skies, with an accompanying film in which he was seen on horseback. His autobiography Born to Run revealed recent battles with depression. And it is depression you see tonight in Liverpool – in the wince, the twisted mouth, the accusing index finger; in his entreaty to Liverpool's fans to 'indulge' his sermon against the American administration, delivered night after night, to scatterings of applause. It is a depression I recognise in older American friends who fear they're going to the grave with everything they knew and loved about their country disappearing. But depression is also the stuff of life, of energy. Springsteen has been particularly angry since the early Noughties, since the second Bush administration, but this is his moment somehow, and his song of greedy bankers – 'Death to My Hometown' – is spat out with new meaning in 2025, an ominous abstraction. The father-to-son speech in 'Long Walk Home' feels different in this politically charged world: 'Your flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'). A furious version of 'Rainmaker' ('Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker') is dedicated to 'our dear leader'. As much as I admire Springsteen and seem to have followed him around and written about him for years, the Land of Hope and Dreams tour made me realise I hadn't fully known what he was for. When I saw him in Hyde Park in 2023, the first 200 yards of the crowd were given over to media wankers like me, with the paying fans at the back: every single person I had ever met in London was there, mildly pissed up and whirling about with looks of mutual congratulation. Springsteen had become, to the middle classes and above, a global symbol of right-thinking, summed up by his long stint on Broadway at $800 a ticket. His dull podcast with Barack Obama was the American version of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell: men saying stuff you want them to say, to confirm what you already think about stuff (Obama was in awe of Bruce). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Politics was easy for Springsteen when politics consisted of external events happening to innocent people, rather than something taking place on the level of psychology, in a movement of masses towards a demagogue. The job he adopted, back in the Seventies, was to set a particular kind of American life in its political and historical context: to tell people who they were, and why they mattered. His appeal as a rock star always lay less in his words than in how sincerely he embodied them: his extraordinary outward energy, his mirroring of his audience, his apparent concern with others over himself. After 9/11, someone apparently rolled down a window and told him, 'We need you now,' so he wrote his song 'The Rising' from the viewpoint of a doomed New York fireman ascending the tower. A recent BBC documentary revealed he'd donated £20,000 to the Northumberland and Durham Miners Support Group during the strikes of 1984 – rather as he donated ten grand to unemployed steelworkers in Pittsburgh the previous year. His self-made success and songs about freedom were the Republican dream, but when Reagan tapped him up for endorsements it was a right of passage for Springsteen as a Democrat rocker to rebuff them (I'm pretty sure they tried to play 'Born in the USA' at Trump rallies too). He is quoted as saying that the working-class American was facing a spiritual crisis, years ago: 'It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society any more. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family… to the point where nothing makes sense.' Now, Trump has taken Springsteen's people (the Republicans were doing so long before Trump), and the interior life of the working man that Springsteen made it his job to portray has been exploited by someone else. 'For 50 years, I've been an ambassador for this country and let me tell you that the America I was singing about is real,' he says, possessively, on stage. Springsteen, like Jon Bon Jovi, sees his fans as workers. The distances travelled, the money spent, the babysitters paid for: that's what the three-hour gigs are all about. It is part of the psyche of a certain generation of working-class American musician to consider themselves in a contract with the people who buy their records. It is not a particularly British thing – though time and again I am impressed by the commitment required to see these big shows, especially when so many punters are of an age where they would not longer, say, sleep in a tent: £250 a night for a hotel, no taxis to the stadium, a huge Ticketmaster crash that leaves hundreds of fans outside the venue fiddling with their QR codes while Bruce can be heard inside singing the opening lines of 'My Love Will Not Let You Down'. Yet the relationship between a rock star and his fan is not a co-dependency: the fan is having a night out, but the rock star needs the fan to survive. It is hard to underestimate the psychological shift Springsteen might be undergoing, in seeing the working men and women of America moving to a politics that is repellent to him. He has not played on American soil since Trump's re-election and it is likely that this kind of political commentary there will turn the 'Bruuuuuce' into the boo. A Springsteen tribute act in his native New Jersey was recently cancelled (the band offered to play other songs, and the venue said no). Last week, a young American band told me they won't speak out about the administration on stage because they're not all white and they're afraid of getting deported. It is the job of the powerful to do the protesting, and, like Pope Leo, Springsteen's previous good works will mean nothing if he doesn't call out the big nude emperor now. The Maga crowd will still come to see him, of course, and yell the 'woah' in 'Born to Run' just as loud as everyone else does – perhaps because music is bigger than politics, or perhaps because politics is now bigger than Bruce. Though his political speeches in Liverpool (it's UK 'heartland' only this tour: no London gigs) feel slightly out of step with a city that has its own problems, it seems fair enough for Springsteen to be telling the truth about America to a crowd who's enjoyed their romantic visions of the country via his music for 50 years. But their own personal communion is suspended tonight, and the song 'My City of Ruins' has nothing to do with 9/11 any more: 'Come on… rise up…' In the crowd, a very old man is sitting on someone's shoulders. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Anfield stadium, Liverpool, on 7 June 2025 [See also: Wes Anderson's sense of an ending] Related
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
What can Reform do to shift the idea it is the ‘Nigel Party'?
Labour breathed a huge sigh of relief after a surprise victory in the Scottish parliament by-election in Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse. Senior Scottish Labour figures had feared coming second or even third behind Reform UK; for once, it wasn't expectation management. Labour insiders admit privately the tight three-horse race confirms that Reform UK is on the map in Scotland, previously hostile territory for Nigel Farage. 'Something is up when you knock on doors in Scotland and get Reform talking points thrown at you,' one minister told me. Reform's advance will make Labour's task of ousting the SNP in next May's Scottish parliament elections much harder. After Keir Starmer's landslide last year, when Labour won 37 of Scotland's 57 seats, the party had high hopes of ending SNP rule north of the border after 19 years. But an unpopular government at Westminster has dragged Labour down; it has lost one in six of its 2024 Scottish voters to Farage's party. Reform is also on course to do well in next May's elections to the Welsh parliament, where Labour has called the shots since devolution in 1998. Although Reform had hoped to come at least second in Hamilton, it can still claim momentum in Scotland. A much bigger setback for Farage than its third place was the resignation of Zia Yusuf as party chair. After Reform's sweeping gains in last month's local elections in England and the Runcorn parliamentary by-election, Farage said: 'We would not have done […] what we did without him.' Now, Farage is dismissing Yusuf's claim to be responsible for Reform's meteoric rise. Tough game, politics. The energetic, telegenic Yusuf had made a good start in professionalising Reform – something Farage spectacularly failed to do as leader of Ukip and the Brexit Party. As a Muslim, Yusuf gave Reform cover against allegations of racism, but received nasty abuse on social media from some Reform supporters. Yusuf had plans to attract Muslim voters and that is why he was angered by Reform MP Sarah Pochin's call for a ban on the burqa. However, there were wider reasons for his departure. He felt sidelined after being put in charge of the Elon Musk-style Doge unit in councils run by Reform. The 38-year-old multi-millionaire entrepreneur didn't suffer fools gladly, and his abrasive style upset some at Reform's Millbank Tower headquarters (Labour's base when it won its 1997 landslide). He was blamed by critics for escalating the feud with former Reform MP Rupert Lowe. They complained that Yusuf was not a team player – a bit rich when that label applies to Farage in spades. The departure is a reminder of Farage's achilles heel: he falls out with senior figures in every party or campaign he is involved in. The loss of Yusuf will make it harder to make the Doge exercise work. This matters because the party needs to make its claim credible that vast savings can be made from cutting waste to be a contender for power. Crucially, Farage cannot be a one-man band – the 'Nigel Party', as it's dubbed at Westminster. He gives the impression of wanting to be the only tall poppy, but will need a cabinet-in-waiting to convince voters his party could run the country. However, other parties should not get carried away with Farage's woes. Voters are less bothered about Reform infighting than the Westminster village. Conservative claims that Reform is imploding are wishful thinking, and their humiliating fourth place in Hamilton illustrates their dire position. Reform remains a real threat to Keir Starmer's hopes of a second term. Labour is banking on turning the next election into a presidential contest between Starmer and Farage. Labour insiders call it a 'nosepeg' strategy: they hope left-of-centre voters who have given up on Labour after its poor first year will hold their nose and back Starmer to keep Farage out rather than defect to the Liberal Democrats, Greens or independents. Labour plans a parallel move in Scotland: 'Vote Farage, get SNP.' As my colleague John Rentoul noted, Labour should attack Farage for his 'fantasy economics' rather than being a 'privately-educated stockbroker'. Polling by More in Common shows that voters believe Starmer had a more privileged upbringing than Farage, and believe the Reform leader speaks more for the working class than the prime minister. Starmer allies insist the lesson has been learnt. Starmer's welcome moves to tackle child poverty and his U-turn on the winter fuel allowance suggest he realises he must also make a positive appeal to left-of-centre voters and not merely ape Reform with tough language on immigration, which such voters don't like. But he will need to go further, with an economic reset including tax rises, to pay for his new social justice commitments and avoid the impression that Wednesday's spending review will mean 'austerity 2.0'. Labour's approach has dangers: in attacking Farage head-on, some Labour MPs worry, the party risks amplifying his message and building him up further. There are no easy roads to a second Labour term.
