Reform UK says Britain is broken. Birmingham tells another story

This week, Reform UK gathered thousands of supporters at Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre to present itself as a government-in-waiting. This was not a sudden interest in Britain’s second-biggest city: Reform has repeatedly used Birmingham for national campaign launches and conferences, committing considerable resources to making it a showcase for its advance.Birmingham – young, working-class, multiracial and almost evenly divided between residents recorded as white and those from Black, Asian, mixed and other ethnic groups – is precisely the kind of city Reform leader Nigel Farage’s politics portrays as a warning: a place where an older Britain has supposedly been displaced by an alien new one.In May’s local elections, Reform became the largest single group on the Birmingham City Council, winning 23 of 101 seats.The party’s growing presence in Birmingham, however, is not proof that multiculturalism has failed. It is a warning about the feeling of abandonment spreading across Britain.Reform’s gains in the city demand serious attention. They should neither be minimised by those repelled by its politics nor inflated into a popular mandate the party did not win.Birmingham is not...