To say that Birmingham city council leader John Clancy is bullish about Brexit would be an understatement. Looking back on June’s referendum, Clancy – who voted Remain and whose city voted Leave by a whisker of less than 1% – claims to feel no regrets at all.
When I suggest grief as one natural-enough response to this severing of ties, he laughs. “Ha ha, it’s happened – you’ve just got to deal with it. Look, it was one of the great political moments of all our lives but I don’t think grief is the word. I think opportunity is, especially for big cities like Birmingham. We have to position ourselves as a world city, not just a European city.”
Clancy, 54, who took over the crisis-hit council last December when he won a leadership election by one vote, was in China last month to negotiate £2bn worth of investment in housing from Hong Kong-listed property giant Country Garden. On the long list of problems facing the city, including its failed children’s services, deeply ingrained poverty, large numbers of unskilled workers and further massive cuts, he puts housing at the top. As the council owns 60% of development sites, he sees himself not as a broker but as a maker of deals: “One of the reasons I went to China was to see if there was shovel-ready capital ready to come to this city. Country Garden is a company with social objectives and I think it’s one of the things socialists should do – subvert capital and make sure it works.”
This year he was in Chicago as the guest of mayor Rahm Emanuel, and could not be more on board with fashionable ideas about cities as hubs of innovation, diversity and progress. Someone there asked why Birmingham didn’t have its own foreign office. He thinks it should, and plans to work on this with the West Midlands metro mayor , likely to be Labour’s Sion Simon, after next May’s mayoral election.
I can’t hide my incredulity at this, not least because the UK is the most centralised country in Europe, and the idea of the Birmingham, Manchester or London mayors appointing foreign secretaries hadn’t crossed my mind. But Clancy seems not only to be serious but also to think that Brexit may even help.
“I think we’ve [Birmingham] got 19 people in Brussels now,” he says. “Obviously post-Brexit one has to reface the world, but I think if you’re engaging in a proactive economic policy in relation to building inclusive growth in your city, that involves engaging with world capital. That’s how diplomacy started in the very earliest days. We believe that city regions, city states indeed, are going to be far more powerful post-Brexit in terms of developing international trade.”
Clancy grew up in Stockport, the son of a nursery school headteacher and an electrician, and went from a Catholic grammar school to Keele University, where he studied English and law. He worked as a teacher and a solicitor, joined the Labour party when his daughter was born in 1989, and moved to Birmingham a year later to be near his wife’s family.
In 1997 he chaired Gisela Stuart’s campaign when she won Edgbaston from the Conservatives, and he challenged Sir Albert Bore four times as Labour group leader before finally being elected last year. Bore stood down following a highly critical report by Sir Bob Kerslake, commissioned in the aftermath of children’s services failures and the “Trojan horse” scandal, when an investigation criticised Muslim-majority schools for promoting “segregationist attitudes” and a politicised version of Islam. The report called for a complete overhaul of the council, or “programme of culture change”, and, among other reforms, its children’s services department is in the process of being spun off into a voluntary trust.
A supporter of electoral reform on the left of his party, Clancy wrote a book arguing that local authority pension funds should be pooled and forced to buy local investment bonds. Whether he voted for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader, he won’t say: “I think at the moment it’s probably best to …” He stops and restarts. “That’s something that happened over the summer… It needn’t have happened, it shouldn’t have happened and I think most people who were involved in the challenge now accept it was a grave error of judgment.” Now he wants Corbyn and shadow chancellor John McDonnell to start paying attention to Labour’s strength in local government, calling London plus the 10 Labour councils of the Core Cities group the party’s “first 11”. While the “northern powerhouse” has had a near monopoly on devolution-related news, and Manchester mayoral hopeful Andy Burnham has by far the highest profile of Labour’s mayoral candidates, Clancy thinks the change of Conservative leader and the sacking of George Osborne were good news for the “Midlands engine”. Theresa May’s admiration for Joseph Chamberlain, mayor of Birmingham in the 1870s, shared by her adviser Nick Timothy, was noted in the first days of her premiership. Communities secretary Sajid Javid’s constituency is a mile and a half from Clancy’s ward, business secretary Greg Clark is another supporter, and Clancy knows he will need such allies if he is to protect the region’s automotive industry from potentially ruinous tariffs. About the trio of Fox, Johnson and Davis leading the Brexit negotiations, he has less to say, except (dropping his voice) that they make “an interesting band”.
He claims he didn’t consider running for mayor of the West Midlands, “genuinely not for a moment”. Since Labour’s metro mayor candidates are all either current or former MPs, one wonders if he calculated that, as a local politician, he wouldn’t win. But Clancy insists he wants to run Birmingham, the biggest local authority in Europe. The metro mayor will have a strategic role overseeing regeneration across the region. In budget terms, Clancy points out that his is the bigger job: Birmingham council’s budget (including schools and social care across an area covering 10 parliamentary constituencies and 1.1 million people) is £3.5bn, whereas the metro mayor’s is £36.5m. As Birmingham’s leader, he will, in any case, be a big player on the mayor’s team.
Aside from an acute shortage of homes, the pain inflicted by cuts, and the disconnection from politics among working-class voters that Clancy believes was one of lessons of the EU vote, he says the council’s biggest problem is that it “thought it was the city”. He suggests Chamberlain was a metro mayor before his time in understanding the city as a public-private partnership. He calls the West Midlands authority’s plan to invest in mental health “Chamberlainesque”, and says the new combined authorities are filling gaps left by the regional development agencies abolished by the Coalition in 2010.
Clancy is relishing headlines about people relocating to his city, along with the buzz of HS2, and says Birmingham is ahead of anywhere else in the way it runs its schools. He even has a positive spin on the “Trojan horse” debacle, and says the end-result was a sharpening of “Birmingham values”, but the council itself remains on shaky ground. Further recommendations from the panel appointed in 2015 by the then communities secretary, Eric Pickles, to keep an eye on it, and ensure that Kerslake’s recommendations are followed through, are expected shortly.
Would he try to resurrect the idea of a mayor of the city of Birmingham?
“Joe Chamberlain wasn’t a directly elected mayor: he was elected by city councillors. I don’t think it particularly held him back, not that I’m suggesting I’m necessarily anywhere near that kind of level,” he laughs.As for Clancy’s global vision, he says: “Global growth, capital and enterprise were offered to ordinary folk as a way to achieve their dreams, and turned out to be quite the opposite. You ended up with hollowed-out economies in big cities around the world. So the response has to be from big cities, in terms of industrial strategy, and in the UK that has to start from places like Birmingham.”
Curriculum vitae
Age 54
Lives Birmingham
Family Married, one daughter
Education St Bede’s Roman Catholic College, Manchester; Keele University, English and law joint honours degree; Manchester Law School.
Career December 2015-present: leader, Birmingham city council; 1985-2015 teacher, various comprehensive schools
Public life February 2002-present: elected Birmingham council member; served on several key committees, including education scrutiny, regeneration scrutiny, public protection and planning.
Books Co-author (with with industry professor David Bailey), Blogs from the Blackstuff (2010); The Secret Wealth Garden: Re-wiring Local Government Pension Funds back into Regional Economies (2014); regular business columnist for the Birmingham Post.
Interests Stockport County FC and Aston Villa FC supporter, playing darts and campaigned to keep the pastime alive in Birmingham pubs
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