Birmingham city councillors react to local elections 2022 results

West Midlanders have voted in the local elections, which are being used as a gauge of the potential national success of both main parties‘ leaders in the next general elections. Conservative losses have seen renewed calls for the Prime Minister Boris Johnson to resign.

Conservative councillor Ken Wood, who has kept his seat for Sutton Walmley & Minworth, said: “The decision as to whether Boris Johnson goes or not is down to the parliamentarians, not us. There’s no doubt that what’s been going on has had an effect. But as we found out today, the media have decided and the police have decided to investigate Keir Starmer as well.

“So had that happened two or three weeks ago, would the results have been different? We don’t know. What we’re doing know in Birmingham is that the Labour Party threw a lot of money at this election. It could have been a lot worse for us.

“We as local politicians, we’re very much aware of how things are affecting our residents and our constituents, in the same way as they’re effecting us. Again, it’s up to the parliamentarians to get on with the job and try and get back out of this.”

However, it is not all bad news for the conservatives. In the West Midlands, the party held Dudley, Tamworth and Redditch while Labour held and gained seats in Sandwell, Coventry and Wolverhampton.

Labour’s Alex Aitken, who has kept his seat for King’s Norton, said: “Yeah, I’m quietly confident. I think that, like I say, I think we are making those inroads. I think that there’s a lot of frustration with the Conservatives at the moment and not just from their sort of like, general lifelong conservative voters, but also from the conservative voters who were Labour before 2019.

“A lot of the people that I’ve spoken to in King’s Norton who voted conservative for the first time in 2019 have said things along the lines of - this is not the government we were promised, they haven’t done any of the things that they said they were going to do.

“And that we’ll be coming back to Labour now and then not voting Conservative again at the next general election. So I’m hopeful that people will be coming home to labour and that we will win the next general election.”

The next general election is expected to take place in just two years time and, with the conservatives losing ground despite Labour‘s lacklustre performance, it is possible that a new name could be leading the country.

A message from the editor:

Thank you for reading. BirminghamWorld is Birmingham’s latest news website, championing everything that is great about our city - reporting on news, lifestyle and sport. We want to start a community among our readers, so please follow us on Facebook,Twitter and Instagram, and keep the conversation going.