By Cain O’Mahony
In the West Midlands we are being bombarded by high quality leaflets coming through our letter boxes from the Conservative candidate and current Metro Mayor Andy Street, in the run up to the May elections.
And in all of it, he doesn’t mention he is a Conservative once. In fact, in the acres of newsprint, he doesn’t mention the Conservatives at all. And apparently the new election colour of the Conservatives is… green.
It has caused a furore because under UK electoral law, the campaign material of all political parties must contain an imprint of the party it represents, which must be “clear and visible”. I got out my magnifying glass and did discover that this material was published on “behalf of West Midlands Conservatives” – it was in the smallest size font available.
Street has been pulled up by the media on this, but even then, uses the TV interview to distance himself further from the Tories, saying he wants to “remind people I don’t have to take the Conservative Whip”. He likes to present himself as the ‘apolitical politician’. Yet it didn’t stop him voting for the ideologue Liz Truss in the Tory leadership elections, showing his true political colours.
Like all Tories, Street is running scared, facing electoral meltdown. The largest national polling yet of 15,000 voters, carried out by Survation, show the Tories could even be reduced to less than 100 seats in the coming General Election, which would be the worse election result in Conservative history, even worse than their previous meltdown way back in 1906 (Sunday Times, 28.03.24).
Stay At Home Tories, the nail in the coffin for Street
The big problem for the Tories is a new movement – the Stay Home Tories, or SHTs as we call them here. The former Conservative vote will not turn out – many won’t vote Labour, but instead not vote at all. I live in a Birmingham Tory stronghold, where the Conservative MP has a 19,000 majority, but even here, the SHTs are everywhere. In pubs, shops and restaurants, I have never heard such vehemence against a government.
Andy Street faces a double-whammy though – it’s not just the SHTs he has to worry about. A recent poll by the Centre for Cities (Birmingham Live, 25.03.24), found 65 per cent of Brummies could name their Metro Mayor (in Manchester it was 68 per cent for Andy Burnham), which is not surprising as Street is on TV virtually every night, jumping around some building site or other in a hard hat and Hi-Viz jacket. But in the same poll, a staggering 89 per cent could not name one policy that Street stood for!
Street probably prefers it that way, because the only policy people could name (a mere 9 per cent) was ‘transport’. For transport, read HS2 which everyone here is fuming about, and which Street has been championing since he took office as proof of ‘levelling up’, only for his own government to pull the rug from under his feat.
HS2 has meant much misery for Birmingham, Warwickshire and Staffordshire, with whole swathes of land butchered, transport disruption and much of the conurbation turned into one big building site. This pain would have been worth it, if as in the original plan it did link the North and South. But halting the project at Birmingham is a complete waste of time. Street still claims the project is worth it, as it will cut 30 minutes off travel time to London. So what? You can guarantee HS2 trains will be far more expensive, so everyone will still use the less expensive old trains rather than think about an extra 30 minutes in bed.
Tory meltdown
Last year Birmingham had a poll on what we should call our magnificent giant mechanical bull that opened the Commonwealth Games, which now stands resplendent in New Street Station. The joke at the time was that they should stick some large ears and a trunk on it, paint it white and call it HS2.
Thanks to the SHTs, the Tories face meltdown, and hopefully Street with them too. When he loses his job, I know what we can do with him. The maddest part of the HS2 failure is the 10 mile stretch of new railway being laid north of Birmingham. For some bizarre reason they are still going ahead with it, and one day we will have 10 miles of perfectly formed railway stretching into Staffordshire – going absolutely nowhere. We should stick Street at the end of it, as a monument to 14 years of Tory mis-rule and the myth of ‘levelling up’.
