9th September 2023
Over at Prospect magazine I have written an article headlined Whatever happened to ‘the best-governed city in the world’?.
Please do click and read it.
The rest of this post below provides some footnotes to the article and further thoughts about the subject.
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The title of the article, of course, derives in part from the Alan Moore comic.
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The other part of the title, however, is derived from one of the various quotations and sayings that you come across if you happen to come from or live in Birmingham. Others are “city of a thousand trades” and “more canals than Venice”.
But “the best-governed city in the world” seemed a good starting-point for this piece.
I knew it was from an American journalist about late Victorian Birmingham, but off-the-top-of-my-head I did not know more than that.
So I thought it may be interesting to track down the original quotation: any further information and context may at least add colour to a piece about local government finance and public procurement, which are not easy things to write about in an accessible way.
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Pretty soon I got a year for the article which had the quotation – 1890 – the name of the journalist – Julian Ralph – and the name of the magazine – Harper’s.
Finding it was Harper’s magazine was amusing for this is the glossy magazine still published today:
And indeed the 1890 article about Birmingham municipal glory is still available on Harper’s website, but only to subscribers:
I am not, however, a subscriber to Harper’s – and it seemed disproportionate to take out a subscription just to obtain the piece, as I suspected there would not be many other articles about Birmingham.
So I wondered if the article was available elsewhere.
(The issue of copyright then crossed my mind, but it seemed to me that an 1890 article by a writer who died in 1903 was likely to be in the public domain.)
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And eventually – Bingo! – I found an online copy of the publication:
And there on the contents page was the article and it actually had the quote as its title:
(Isn’t the Birmingham – see “Best-Governed City,” etc a lovely detail.)
For some reason I expected it to be a short piece, but the actual article was some twelve pages long with double columns.
So I started reading:
And on the last page of the article, and in the last paragraph, was this discussion of debt and the treatment of workers (which you should read so as to make sense of the rest of this post):
Any researcher will tell you of those moments when they are visited by the goddess Serendipity.
Not only had I found some colour for my Prospect piece, I had actually found a detailed point of comparison and contrast for a piece about Birmingham’s current predicament.
And, significantly, the 1890 article about “the best-governed city in the world” averred that the city council prowess was not because it avoided debt – indeed, the city council embraced immense debt, at levels almost unimaginable at current prices.
It was about how those Victorian councillors managed and resourced that debt, as serious people of business engaged in grand projects.
More of the Prospect piece then clicked in to place.
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Switching to the here-and-now, a close reading of the “section 114 notice”, the legislation, the relevant legal cases (for example this Supreme Court decision) and the detailed reportage at the Register and elsewhere, meant that various knee-jerk things to blame dissolved.
Labour! Conservative! – well, the key employment claim was commenced when the council was under a Conservative-led coalition, and then a Labour majority. And IT project disasters care little for party affiliation.
Resources! tax! – the IT project disaster looks as if it would have also swallowed double the budget. More public money would have just gone straight through to the contractors and consultants.
(Money In, Money Out is as much a feature of bad IT procurement as Garbage in, Garbage Out.)
The problem with both the matters that have brought down Birmingham is governance.
The employment case was litigated and litigated, but the ongoing exposure appears not to have been properly managed. And sometimes litigants lose.
The IT procurement ended up as an exercise in constant changes to the software to match working practices, rather than the reverse. And any public sector procurement of bespoke developed software, as opposed to commercial-off-the-shelf software, will always tend to go badly.
The problem was glaring: neither exercise in managing risk and exposure was sensibly managed.
Compare and contrast this with the various endeavours mentioned in the 1890 article: the acquisition of gas and water undertakings, and the improvement scheme that changed the face of a Victorian city. These were also enterprises which could have gone wrong, very wrong.
But read again that last paragraph from Julian Ralph:
You will see the seriousness in how the risks and exposures are managed.
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Of course, the Victorian councillors were deft self-publicists – and the leading Birmingham politician of the age, Joseph Chamberlain, can only be matched by Benjamin Disraeli in how his public image was manufactured and exploited.
Joseph Chamberlain even oversaw a memorial put up to himself, while he was still a relatively young politician and businessman.
And the 1890 article was the glossy magazine puff-piece of its time.
But.
Even realising the talent for rampant self-publicity of the Victorian politicians, the acquisition of the gas and water undertakings, and the slum clearances redevelopment, were considerable achievements for what was a growing and unfashionable urban sprawl.
(Indeed, until the year before the 1890 article, Birmingham was not even technically a city – the charter dates only from 1889.)
Whatever the (sometimes understated) faults of the municipal corporations of the time, local government was taken seriously – by voters, by the councillors, by the polity generally. Corporations had great powers, and they often used those powers sensibly, if ambitiously.
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A close look at current day problems of Birmingham city council also points to it not really being just about Birmingham at all.
Unequal pay will have been a problem for many councils, and poor IT procurement does not only have a Brummie accent.
The predicament of Birmingham is that two major exposures came together at once.
(Though, as the city has long been a centre for transport routes, from the canals to Spaghetti Junction, being the venue for such a confluence does seem apt.)
Many councils are probably a few steps away from a section 114 notice – under all political parties and none. Birmingham, which we are often told is the largest local authority in Europe, is just a striking illustration of a wider problem.
In part, the problems is about resources and ideology – and under-resourced councils and ideological commitments will often make things worse.
But section 114 notices – the emergency brake of local government finance – are also perhaps a function of poor management over time.
The overall problem is perhaps a lack of seriousness: in how we as a polity now treat local government, in how central government and parliament treats local government, and in how councils themselves manage risk and exposure.
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Finally, a shout-out to Prospect to being able to use this glorious 1886 depiction of Birmingham as the picture for the piece – complete with the Chamberlain monument in the foreground:
This print was up on the wall of an office in which I once worked as a temp and staring it probably was the start of my fascination with the (actual) history of my own city.
And if you look carefully at this 1886 print, you will see the dirty industrial smoke is blowing away from the nice civic architecture. As said above: the Victorians were deft self-publicists.
But if they took themselves too seriously, they also took local government seriously. And the latter is the lesson they give to us today.
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Seriousness vs lack of seriousness. Long term thinking vs struggling to get through a year.
Commitment to public ownership vs knee jerk outsourcing.
Fascinating article that gets to the heart of what has gone wrong in local government and governance.
For Victorian Representations of Virtue on Local Government: https://www.alamy.com/vauxhall-and-vauxhall-bridge-showing-the-statue-of-local-government-on-the-downstream-side-image329424516.html
A wonderful pick me up every morning on my commute to the coal face of Public Procurement!
Oh that is splendid!
More here: http://www.speel.me.uk/sculptlondon/vauxhallbridge.htm
Vauxhall Bridge has eight statues, four on the upstream (west) side of the bridge by Frederick Pomeroy – Pottery, Engineering, Architecture, Agriculture – and four on the downstream (east) side by Alfred Drury – Education, Fine Art, Science, Local Government.
Modern personifications of Local Government seem to be pretty unusual. In Roman times, Tyche or Fortuna was the protector of cities, with her mural crown, and cornucopia, like this: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/468202
Thank you for this very insightful article into the causes of what has gone wrong.
Reflecting on my own experience of local councils, I find much to support your interpretation.
Another dimension is the split between (temporary) elected officials and the (permanent) public sector officials who run services day to day. Are local council public sector jobs seen as a good opportunity for ‘the brightest and best’? Compared to Westminster and Whitehall, I suspect not.
If a municipal job requires the best and brightest, it should likely be outsourced. Public sector work requires solidity, stability, and seriousness. You don’t need Isembard Brunel to run a waterworks or Francis Crick to teach O-level mathematics.
Do you think most voters know where we have ended up on “equal pay for equal work” and how councils et al end up facing are facing such bills? And agree they should pay – back pay and all?
A totally unrepresentative sample (i.e. some of my friends and family) shows total support for the first category in the ACAS summary of “eqaul work:
“‘like work’ – work where the job and skills are the same or similar”
Several reservations about the second (e.g. “So slicing cheese may be equivalent to quarrying chalk?”):
“‘work rated as equivalent’ – work rated as equivalent, usually using a fair job evaluation. This could be because the level of skill, responsibility and effort needed to do the work are equivalent”
And a majority boggled by the third (NB and I didn’t tell them it’s origin in the 2000 Directives):
“‘work of equal value’ – work that is not similar but is of equal value. This could be because the level of skill, training, responsibility or demands of the working conditions are of equal value”
I once commented to a conference – for County Council Corporate Support Officers in England and Wales held in South East Wales in the early 1990s, before the UK Government abolished the 8 County Councils in Wales – that the relationship between the then Welsh Office and local authorities was a reciprocal one of “power-dependency”; we needed them, but they needed us just as much.
What a pity that UK Governments since 2010 have either not appreciated this, or simply ignored it.
Consultancy101:- Say to the customer, open your wallet, repeat after me – ‘help yourself’. Been that way since punched cards – and waterworks followed the pattern.
The curious thing is the balance between central government taxes and grants and control in 1890 and modern times. No point having capable people when the budgets and funding are set elsewhere and politically motivated and with little connection to economic reality.
Gradually a weakened and subservient council will descend into ‘they pretend to manage and we pretend to care’.
My Dad was elected a Labour Councillor on Birmingham City Council in 1996, and the Equal Pay issue was already a matter of concern, then.
And, I have a feeling it may have been starting to worry those in the know when my Mom was working as a school dinner lady, not to be confused with a lunchtime supervisor, at Great Barr School in the early 1980s.
In one corner, we had manly men on the bins and in the other, women who cooked meals.
“Mining and manufacturing are ‘real jobs’; cooking and caring are not … textiles – was of course the industrial analogue of the traditional female activity of making clothes for the family, and barely acknowledged as a source of ‘real jobs’.”
https://www.johnkay.com/2016/08/29/the-economics-and-politics-of-manufacturing-fetishism/
These days, women work on the wheelie bins in Birmingham …
I am afraid to say Birmingham City Council has a bit of a reputation for proving why the latest wheeze popular amongst some management consultants is one best avoided.
To misquote John Maynard Keynes, even the most practical men and women of affairs are often in the thrall of the ideas of some quick talking, fast moving, plausible snake oil salesman (they do mostly seem to be male).
When Birmingham City Council set up Service Birmingham, essentially an outsourced call centre (and IT support arrangement) to be their customer interface, customer satisfaction fell, but Capita, the delivery partner could point to targets being hit.
The Council pointed to a poor interface between Service Birmingham and individual Council departments as a cause of the poor service delivery to end users.
Of course, there had been no third party getting between service users and service providers complicating matters for both parties until the Council set up Service Birmingham …
Do we have here a curious incident of the dog in the night time?
Despite the Equal Pay issue having been a major financial concern for Birmingham City Council for some time now, I cannot remember it being mentioned much in local authority election campaigns over the decades.
Certainly, nothing with the intensity, oh, the irony, as the political battle over bringing in the wheelie bins.
A passionate electoral issue that baffles political activists from out of town.
Has there been, cough, a gentlemen’s agreement between the main parties not to bring up Equal Pay on the hustings?
Incidentally, another dog that did not bark recently was the third runway proposed for Heathrow Airport.
Given Boris Johnson’s committed opposition to the airport expannsion, you would have thought the topic would have come up during the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by election to fill his vacated seat, especially given the focus on Net Zero.
But, no.
Both Labour and the Tories are now committed to the carbon generating project so they focused on squabbling over Urban Low Emission Zones, instead.
We have a ULEZ here in Birmingham that was implemented with relatively little fuss.
The three main political parties on Birmingham City Council have played a fairly quiet game of pass the parcel on Equal Pay over the years.
It has fallen to Sir Keir’s handpicked Labour leadership team on Birmingham City Council to unwrap the last layer.
Earlier this year, Sir Keir was prevailed upon to step in and nationalise (or Take Back Control of) the Birmingham Labour Party and put in place a leadership acceptable to the Labour Party in London.
A move which does not bode well for how Labour might treat local government if it wins power next year.
Ostensibly, the aim of the intervention was to minimise the risk to the national Labour Party of reputational damage caused by how the Birmingham Labour Party was running Birmingham.
Not long after the story broke that Birmingham City Council was going bust, the Daily Mail was headlining who had picked the latest leader and deputy leader of the Labour group on the council.
On 14th January 2022 before that year’s council elections, Councillor Ian Ward, then Labour leader of Birmingham City Council, said that 2022 represented the start of a Golden Decade of Opportunity for Birmingham …
https://www.birmingham.gov.uk/blog/birmingham-blog/post/1025/a-golden-decade-of-opportunity-for-birmingham-begins
Nicely pointed analysis, and the Harper’s article you chased down is a treasure.
Sorry I only caught your piece today, but I wondered if you knew of an even earlier ‘encomium’ of Birmingham’s government.
In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville travelled through England, making notes on his findings. He paid particular attention to city performance and government, devoting considerable space to a comparison between Manchester and Birmingham. On the off chance you may not have read this text, what follows gives some of its flavour.
In Birmingham, Tocqueville went into great detail about the powers of public improvement granted to city officials under the
“Act of 23rd May 1828 which created the Commissioners of Streets at Birmingham; good example of a local act. ” He described how the different levies that formed City revenues were designed to fall on the rich rather than the poor. “That is a tax that is progressive.” he noted.
Although Tocqueville’s journey predated Engel’s “Condition of the Working Class in England”, his explanation of the differences between Manchester and Birmingham was based on an analysis of their different class structure: ” Separation of classes, much greater at Manchester than at Birmingham. Why? Large accumulations of capital, immense factories”
Here is Tocqueville summarizing his findings:
” The police are less efficient at Manchester than at Birmingham.
More complete absence of government; 60,000 Irish at Manchester
(at most 5,000 at Birmingham); a crowd of small
tenants huddled in the same house. At Birmingham almost all
the houses are inhabited by one family only; at Manchester a
part of the population lives in damp cellars, hot, stinking and
unhealthy; thirteen to fifteen individuals in one. At Birmingham
that is rare. At Manchester, stagnant puddles, roads paved
badly or not at all. Insufficient public lavatories. All that almost
unknown at Birmingham. At Manchester a few great capitalists,
thousands of poor workmen and little middle class. At Birmingham,
few large industries, many small industrialists. At Manchester
workmen are counted by the thousand, two or three
thousand in the factories. At Birmingham the workers work in
their own houses or in little workshops in company with the / master himself.
At Manchester there is above all need for
women and children. At Birmingham, particularly men, few
women. From the look of the inhabitants of Manchester, the
working people of Birmingham seem more healthy, better off,
more orderly and more moral than those of Manchester.”
Pp104/105
Quotations from:
Alexis De Tocqueville, “Journeys to England and Ireland”
Translated by George Lawrence and K. P. Mayer
Edited by J. P. Mayer
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958
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