00:09Welcome to Oli's Live. Well, the people of Birmingham have spoken.
00:14Labour has lost control of the City Council after 14 years in power.
00:19What went wrong for Labour?
00:21I think what went wrong isn't just what's happened now.
00:25There's two issues. One is national issue. I think there has been a lot of dissatisfaction with the national government.
00:34I think some of the U-turns that have been made had had a devastating effect.
00:38Well, Birmingham locally has played its own fair share as well.
00:42I think the bin dispute, I think a number of other issues.
00:46I think also the introduction of the CAS and then on top of that, the 30-mile speed limit brought
00:53on to zero carriageways.
00:55It just stifled people and other people were feeling really hemmed in and just wanted to move away from that.
01:01And I think also there needed to be a recognition by the Labour Party locally that there were issues they
01:07needed to deal with and that wasn't brought forward.
01:11Ewan, what needs to happen now to get the trust back into the public arena so that they have confidence
01:19in their political leadership?
01:21I think ultimately what the council's got to do is just got to get its governance sorted out.
01:26It just needs a balanced budget.
01:28And then from there, it just needs to spend within its remit.
01:33I think the reason why the council went wrong was that we had the credit country all the way back
01:38in 2008.
01:39Other councils actually worked to their budget.
01:43Birmingham City Council never did.
01:44It was always overspending.
01:46It was always using reserves.
01:47And at the end of the day, as anyone knows, if you spend more money than you've got coming in,
01:53eventually you go bankrupt.
01:54And that's what happened to Birmingham.
01:55This time round, I must admit, the way that people voted, it was more like a shopping list.
02:00It was what can each political party do for me?
02:04So it was a very change in the way that generally people tended to vote.
02:10And also, we have to take into account that 52% of Birmingham's population is now from a black or
02:20Asian background.
02:22Has this changed the cultural dynamics of how people vote?
02:26Yeah, I think when you've got a lack of trust, you can see that certain areas voted very heavily for
02:35certain parties.
02:36The lack of trust in both Conservative and Labour, I think, came across that you can see the two biggest
02:43parties, Green and Reform.
02:46Not many people saw that coming, say, four or five years ago.
02:50You might saw it coming into the election.
02:52And whilst there is no trust, you've got some new people with very little experience heading up the two biggest
02:59parties in Birmingham.
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