Wokeness Has Brought Britain’s Second City Bankruptcy and Crime
If you want to understand what has gone wrong with Britain, there is probably no better place to start than Birmingham.
As of this month, Birmingham’s refuse collectors have been on strike for a whole year, with no obvious end in sight. At the worst point, 23,000 metric tons of rubbish were left uncollected, with queues of residents reaching up to a mile long at mobile collection points. Rats the size of kittens roamed on the streets. Birmingham, England’s second city, had quite literally become a dump.
The crisis began in 2012, when 174 female employees of Birmingham City Council successfully sued the city for what they claimed was “pay discrimination.” Now, given this is no longer the 1970s, no one was accusing Birmingham of paying women less than men for performing the same roles. Indeed, this was not “discrimination” as anyone might traditionally understand it. Instead, under the terms of the Equality Act 2010, equal-pay claims can succeed if a court determines that two entirely different jobs in the same company or public body are of the “same value.”
The UK Supreme Court agreed that Birmingham had been underpaying staff in “female-dominated” positions, such as cleaners and teaching assistants, relative to “male-dominated” roles like bin men and street cleaners, despite these jobs having nothing obvious in common with each other (and despite many of these male roles being more physically demanding, dirtier, and requiring unsocial hours).
Since 2012, the council has paid out more than £1 billion ($1.3 billion) in equal-pay claims to thousands of mostly female employees. As a result, in 2023, Birmingham City Council, the largest municipal authority in Europe, was forced to effectively declare bankruptcy. By then, it still had around £760 million ($1 billion) worth of claims to settle.
To get itself out of the red, Birmingham was forced to hike local taxes and cut all non-essential spending. Among the areas targeted for budget cuts was refuse management. Garbage men would be given new job titles, with reduced salaries and bonuses, in order to put them on an equal footing with the council’s female employees. The trade union, Unite, argued that this would leave hundreds of its members out of pocket, and so it launched an indefinite strike last year that is still underway. Last month, the agency workers brought in to collect rubbish during the crisis also decided to go on strike.
As you might expect, there are other factors behind Birmingham’s bankruptcy. Local mismanagement has undoubtedly played its own role. An upgrade to the council’s IT payments-processing system, was expected to cost £19 million ($25 million) when commissioned in 2019, has cost £170 million ($228 million) and is still not functioning properly.
The city may have imposed brutal cuts to its most essential services, but local officials have fought hard to keep cash flowing to pet projects and, naturally, to themselves. Councilors voted to increase their own pay by 6 percent in January 2025, more than double the rate of inflation. Their rationale? The pay bump would encourage more “diversity” in local government. Similarly, the council’s department for “Community Services, and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” still seems to be flush with cash, recently offering a six-figure salary to a new assistant director.
Birmingham’s obsession with diversity—and its legal commitment to so-called equality—has had darker consequences, too. West Midlands Police, responsible for law enforcement in Birmingham, has become notorious for dispensing “two-tier justice.” In 2024, during the summer riots, gangs of local Muslims were given a free pass by police to roam around parts of Birmingham, wearing masks, holding weapons, menacing journalists and assaulting non-Muslim members of the public. In 2025, West Midlands Police fabricated intelligence to justify banning Israeli football fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from visiting Birmingham for a friendly match. Early police notes indicated they feared local Muslims would turn up with weapons to attack Jewish and Israeli fans. In public, the police accused the Israeli fans of harboring violent designs on local Muslims. The scandal all but confirmed that a British police force has fallen under the thumb of Islamic sectarians. They were willing to spread antisemitic lies, and essentially to declare Birmingham a Jew-free city for the day, in order to preserve “community cohesion.”
Of course, it’s not just Birmingham that has been steamrolled by the “equality, diversity and inclusion” juggernaut. Following the success of the lawsuit against Birmingham, similar pay disputes have forced Glasgow City Council in Scotland and Coventry City Council in England’s West Midlands to sell off property and slash vital services. Dozens of city and county councils fear they could go the way of Birmingham, thanks to dubious sex-discrimination claims. The private sector is in trouble, too. Major retailers, such as the Walmart-owned Asda and the clothing store Next, have been forced to pay out millions under the bizarre delusion that working in a store’s checkout should earn exactly the same remuneration as working in the warehouse.
Birmingham, then, is a cautionary tale of what can happen when well-meaning DEI initiatives are allowed to run amok. Woke overreach is not simply a minor irritation; it has pushed England’s second-largest city into bankruptcy, worsened the pay and conditions of its working-class employees, and condemned millions of its residents to live in filth and squalor. But don’t expect any lessons to be learned.
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