Rats! Why Angela Rayner must sort out Birmingham’s striking binmen

The deputy prime minister boasts of her background as a trade union negotiator – as rubbish piles up in the Labour-run city, she must put it to the test, writes John Rentoul

The echoes from Labour’s history are unfortunate. Harold Wilson was elected in 1974 because his was the party of the trade unions. The voters thought he would be able to calm the wave of strikes, which Ted Heath had been unable to control.

Wilson settled the miners’ dispute, but he and Jim Callaghan were unable to persuade the unions to reform themselves – Callaghan’s phrase, “free collective vandalism”, rings through the decades – and the Labour government ended in the misery of the Winter of Discontent, with rubbish piling up on the streets of London.

If the current strike by refuse collectors in Birmingham had been in the capital, it would have attracted more media attention. But the crisis is serious and is starting to damage the Labour government.

Inevitably, reports of “rats the size of cats”, as when the bin bags piled high in Leicester Square in February 1979, prompt public alarm and demands that the government step in.

We can tell that the Birmingham dispute is damaging to the Labour government because Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has strayed beyond his brief again, posting a photo on social media comparing the rubbish on Labour-controlled Birmingham city council’s side of a road with the rubbish-free side in Conservative Bromsgrove.

But we didn’t need Jenrick’s intervention to see how the dispute has all the ingredients to make a toxic brew, especially for Angela Rayner, deputy prime minister, responsible for local government and trade unionism’s representative at the cabinet table.

She is proud of her background as a tough negotiator in the tradition of the party of organised labour. She came into politics as a union rep for care workers in Unison in local government. Yet when her department is asked about what is going on in Birmingham, it says only that it is “monitoring the situation closely”.

She needs to get on the phone to Sharon Graham, the general secretary of Unite, the union that is in dispute with Birmingham city council over its attempt to make the workforce more efficient.

The council seems to be powerless in the face of industrial action by a small group of workers. This week it declared a “major incident”, but all that seems to mean is that it can ask neighbouring councils for help – and they cannot resolve the dispute that is the cause of the problem.

The council’s finances have been weakened by huge payouts for historical equal-pay claims. The only “assistance” provided by central government has been to allow it to raise its council tax by more than the usual 5 per cent limit. So this week Birmingham residents face not only rat-infested streets but council tax bills 7.5 per cent higher than last year.

So far, Rayner has sent out Jim McMahon, her junior minister, to say that the government “cannot legally intervene” in the strike, because the council is being overseen by commissioners after it in effect declared bankruptcy. No wonder Conservative MPs are accusing the government of “washing its hands” of the dispute.

Rayner could be the fulcrum around which the fate of the Labour government turns. The bin strike in Birmingham is the most visible of her challenges, but local government around the country is under financial strain. If Labour does badly in the local elections next month – and I hear squeaks of panic behind closed Labour doors – she might be allocated some of the blame. One saving grace may be that there are no elections in Birmingham this year, but that may not save the city from dragging Labour down elsewhere.

She is also responsible for an employment rights bill that could cost jobs, and an ambitious house-building target that seems to be a long way off track to being met. But the urgent priority is to get the refuse collectors back to work in Birmingham. If she cannot do that, the echoes of the Seventies will only grow louder.

Julian Lewis, the Tory MP for New Forest East, which is some distance from Birmingham, warned McMahon – who wasn’t born at the time of the Winter of Discontent – in the Commons on Monday: “The Callaghan government and the Labour Party never shook off the pungent smell of the rubbish piling in the streets on their watch, and he really doesn’t want to have the same thing happen to him.”