I could have sworn that I saw on Twitter a graphic from the Conservatives with the snappy slogan “Vote Labour, Get Rats”. A quick search suggests other people may have seen it too. But if ever it were real, it’s gone now.

Perhaps it wasn’t quite up to the impossible standard set by ‘L is for Labour – L is for LICE’ – but it was punchy. (The apparent replacement wins points for elephants, because who doesn’t like elephants, but loses points for ‘trash’.) And one can hardly blame the Opposition for going in studs-up over Birmingham, a Labour council kindly furnishing it with photographs redolent of the Winter of Discontent.

But if this is supposed to be a period of introspection and confronting hard truths, then at least in private Tories need to admit that the charge is mostly – and this is a word the CCHQ media team might add to their lexicon – rubbish. Or at least, like a Birmingham street scene, mostly rubbish.

We’ll get to the specific reason in a moment, but first it’s worth noting that central government criticising local government on anything to do with spending is little more than deception at this point. Local authority budgets are being crushed beneath the weight of statutory responsibilities – most importantly social care and SEND – which are mandated by Westminster but not funded by it.

The hollowing out of everything that laypeople probably think of as the council’s actual job, such as bin collections and fireworks displays, is a direct consequence of that. Who you vote into the town hall doesn’t make a blind bit of difference to the majority of the budget.

Anyway. In this case, the more particular reason that it’s difficult to put all the blame on Birmingham’s Labour council – or indeed the Conservative administration which preceded it – is that the current bin strike is a product of an absurd ‘equal pay’ decision which already bankrupted the city, Westminster legislation is to blame, and the Conservatives passed 14 years in office without correcting it.

Readers interested in the granular detail of how the settlement was worked out should read Bruce Grieg’s excellent piece for us on the very similar dispute between checkout and warehouse workers at Next, but the bare fact is that the courts first ruled that the council had engaged in sex discrimination by paying (mostly male) refuse workers more than (mostly female) clerical staff, and then greatly extended the window for compensation.

It ought to have been obvious to any Conservative government – at least one governing in line with its nominal principles – that this was nonsense. There are plenty of reasons why, absent any effort to discriminate against women, we should not be surprised if refuse collection and clerical work pay differently; I yesterday sketched these out elsewhere.

Nonetheless, the British state is back in the game of fixing by decree the price of a commodity (labour) at an arbitrary point – and it is going about as well as it usually does.

It would be bad enough if Birmingham had merely to pay out hundreds of millions to people free-riding on the organisation and bargaining effort of other workers and helping themselves to a pay premium that reflected unpleasant conditions they don’t themselves work in. That was enough to bankrupt the city, after all.

But it also creates a permanent problem. The refuse workers are still working antisocial hours in an environment few would prefer to an office. They are still well-organised and have the power to inflict great misery upon Birmingham. Now, however, they cannot have a separate pay deal – and a bankrupt council certainly cannot afford to let their specific conditions inflate the pay of a huge section of its workforce. So it is bearing down on their Ts & Cs instead. Thus, strike.

Does the council share some of the blame? Sure. Robert Alden, the leader of the Conservative Group, set out the case against Labour on this site yesterday. If nothing else, councillors seem to have been extraordinarily blasé about the legal risk involved.

But it is worth noting that the first suit against the city council was filed in 2012, at which point it had been under Tory control for the previous eight years. And whilst a councillor might be forgiven for focusing on remedies that are potentially within their actual power, it is a little sobering to read Alden’s reference to Birmingham’s “inequitable pay structure” without any mention that, maybe, having the state arbitrarily fixing prices and bankrupting his city is wrong.

Regardless, if Kemi Badenoch is going to weigh in on this than it is fair to ask what she would do about it. It is always difficult to criticise any [Nice Noun] Act, so the current preferred formulation is that these laws are being used in ways that were not intended.

That might be true in some cases, but it would be a specious argument in this one. This country outlawed actual, demonstrable pay discrimination on the basis of sex with the Equal Pay Act 1970; the Equality Act 2010 is doing exactly what Labour intended it would do when, having done without it for their entire period in office, they scrambled it onto the statute book a few months before losing power.

No doubt Cllr Alden and his colleagues would do a better job of running Birmingham. But Badenoch is right that the current state of the city is emblematic of Labour Britain. The problem is that it’s actually New Labour Britain, and she and her colleagues had almost a decade and a half to prevent this disaster or correct it.

During the leadership contest we heard a lot about this party’s ‘values’. Do these values include allowing the market – at least beyond the minimum wage and the perfectly reasonable anti-discrimination law laid down by Barbara Castle – to set wages? If so, Badenoch should say so. Or voting Conservative will probably just result, sooner or later, in more rats.

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This article (Conservative ministers allowed New Labour legislation to bankrupt Birmingham. Would they let it happen again?) was created and published by Conservative Home and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Henry Hill

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