Cllr Robert Alden is the Leader of the Conservative Group on Birmingham City Council.
At about 12.30 am on Friday the 31st of May 2024 the cheers rang out from the winning candidate’s team at the Methodist Church on Kings Road, Kingstanding.
Rewind to the 11th of April and the resignation of one of the councillors for Kingstanding (elected as a Conservative but sitting as an independent, the other member in the ward was a Labour Councillor) meant that a by-election would be called in the ward at a time when the national polls such as the YouGov poll covering the 10/11th of April showed Labour leads of up to 26 points.
Kingstanding Ward has only elected Conservatives seven times in over 70 years. For most of that time, it has been considered a quintessential safe Labour seat – by the Labour Party.
Kingstanding was once known as the largest council estate in Europe and is one of the ten per cent most deprived Council Wards in the country, yet for decades it has been ignored and let down by the Labour Party.
So with history and the polls against us, we set about quickly selecting our candidate, the excellent Clifton Welch, and putting into action the plan we had drawn up within hours of the by-election being called.
Over the next month and a half, we focused our campaign on local issues that residents were concerned about. From leading the campaigns to keep open the local libraries, protecting a small much loved local playing fields, to opposing the Labour Council’s double whammy of higher taxes for fewer services, Clifton ensured he was at the front of everything happening locally.
It’s not revolutionary, but old-fashioned pavement politics was the order of the day. Getting out leaflets, with local action and a narrative consistent across them all, often combined with speaking to voters at the door was the path the campaign trod.
At the start of the campaign, we were highly focused on the West Midlands Mayoral campaign and complementing the get-out-the-vote campaign for Andy Street. But as soon as the Mayoral election ended, many in the Conservative family across the Birmingham City Council area came together to fight the campaign, morale boosted by multiple visits from local MPs Gary Sambrook, Wendy Morton and Mike Wood to help the campaign.
A vital part of our campaign was around the quick start we made to get out leaflets across the ward, already on our third leaflet by the time the Labour Party got moving. But leaflets by themselves do not win elections, the content needs to be relevant and needs to show the hands-on action being taken. Clifton’s ‘Pride in Kingstanding’ campaign was a key theme of the campaign focusing on his fighting for cleaner streets locally, importantly it also included Clifton getting his hands dirty himself to clean up road signs, remove graffiti and carry out community clean ups. This demonstrated to residents that Clifton was ‘actions not words’ focused.
This wasn’t the only issue that Clifton campaigned on, as explained earlier, he also focused on a range of local issues all weaved together with a thread of Birmingham Labour’s financial mismanagement of the City Council.
By polling week we were quietly confident that our campaign plan was working, residents in the street, on doorsteps and even in the pub where stopping Clifton to say they would be voting for him in the election.
Come the election, victory was secured for only the eighth time ever in Kingstanding Ward and with a 5.4 per cent swing to the Conservatives from Labour an almost nine per cent majority was delivered. At a time when poll after poll is showing the party behind by 20+ percentage points, we had just secured our second largest majority in the ward ever!
As the General Election approaches on July 4th, it is clear that where Conservatives listen to residents, put residents first and are willing to do the hard work, residents are still willing to listen to the case we put and give us a chance
A well thought out campaign plan, focused around the issues that mattered to local residents and a huge amount of hard work from Clifton and the Conservative family in Birmingham and Sutton Coldfield, meant the cheers that rang out at around 12.30am on May 31st , despite the national polls, were Conservative not Labour.