Good morning. Whatever else is going on the world, there is very little that makes people as angry as the bins not being collected. This isn’t to say that it’s a trivial concern. As well as the natural disgust that comes with facing piles of stinking rubbish every time you go out, bin collection is a natural proxy for our sense of living in a functioning society; a basic feature of a developed economy. When it goes wrong, it feels as if something more profound is broken, too.
To an infamous list that includes Paris in 2023 and Madrid in 2013, you can now add Birmingham in 2025 – the second such crisis in the city in eight years. Talks yesterday were said to be “productive”, but again failed to resolve the situation; as the strike drags on, residents are asking why they face such inadequate local services when the rates they pay keep going up.
For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Kate Knowles, editor of the excellent Birmingham Dispatch, about how it got so bad – and what the crisis reveals about the deeper problems facing the city. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Economy | Rates on imports to the United States from dozens of economies rose further on Wednesday, with tariffs imposed on Chinese products since Donald Trump returned to the White House reaching a staggering 104%. The new tariffs include rates of 20% on the European Union, 26% on India and 49% on Cambodia.
British Steel | Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are actively considering nationalising British Steel in an escalation of plans first revealed in the Guardian last year. The prime minister said all options were on the table to secure the future of the Scunthorpe plant after talks about a financial support package to move to less polluting technology faltered.
Ukraine | A high-profile former Ukrainian commander has called for the head of the country’s military to step aside, accusing him of putting Ukrainian soldiers’ lives at risk. In an interview, Bohdan Krotevych, who recently resigned as chief of staff of the Azov brigade, said that Gen Oleksandr Syrskyi “must go” and Ukraine’s military leadership must be shaken up.
Crime | The UK government is developing a “murder prediction” programme to identify those most likely to become killers. Researchers are alleged to be using algorithms to analyse the information of thousands of people, including victims of crime, to identify those at greatest risk of committing serious violent offences.
Theme parks | A former brickworks in Bedford will be the site of a new multibillion-pound theme park from the entertainment behemoth Universal, it has been announced. The government says the project will bring a £50bn boost to Britain’s economy and create 20,000 jobs in construction, with a further 8,000 operational roles once it is up and running in 2031.
In depth: ‘People here are incredibly frustrated. It’s definitely a crisis’
In its simplest terms, the bin strike in Birmingham is the result of the council’s plans to eliminate the role of waste recycling and collection officer (WRCO), leaving 170 workers facing a potential pay cut of £8,000 a year. After intermittent industrial action from January, an all-out, indefinite strike began last month after the council started using temporary labour to replace the striking crew members.
As the strike has worn on, and the rubbish has piled up, the story has become a national issue – partly because of the dramatic images of streets overflowing with waste, and partly because it feels like a parable of what happens as local services get worse even as council tax increases. “There is always the feeling with this kind of thing that the national press is descending on the city, and suddenly everyone wants a story about Birmingham,” Kate Knowles said. “But at the same time, people here are incredibly frustrated. It’s definitely a crisis.”
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How bad is the situation?
The strike has been going on for more than a month now, and in that time increasing quantities of rubbish have been piling up in parts of the city. Residents report unsanitary waste overflowing from bin bags that have been gnawed at by rats; the backlog of waste is growing by about 1,000 tonnes a week; and last week the council declared a major incident, with more than 17,000 tonnes of uncollected rubbish on the streets.
While some of the more apocalyptic reporting feels a bit like it’s been sensationalised to get clicks – “cannibal rats as big as cats could attack your kids,” apparently, and “a new influx of rat babies” is about to hit the city – there is no doubt that the problem is real. “As well as it just being disgusting, there are definitely health concerns,” Knowles said. “When you have rubbish piling up like this, it’s not going to be long until pests come.”
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How did it get to this point?
While the council’s determination to get rid of the WRCO role is the proximate cause of the strikes, as James Tapper wrote for the Observer, “that’s as simplistic as saying the first world war was caused by the killing of an archduke”.
The causes go back to 2017, when the council resolved a previous bin strike by creating a new role with additional responsibilities that paid up to £8,000 more than loaders on the back of the carts got. But, in fact, those responsibilities – such as logging data on a tablet on each round – quickly disappeared, and were determined at an employment tribunal to be a way to pay some of the workers more without any real change to their duties.
That is a big issue in Birmingham because ever since it lost a landmark equal pay claim in 2012, the council has been paying out huge sums in compensation – £1.1bn by 2023, enough to effectively bankrupt the council. WRCO workers, unlike administrators, are largely male. “That opened up the possibility of those other workers, who are much more likely to be women, to say: hang on a second, they’re on the same pay grade, but they’re getting more than me,” Knowles said. “So there is clearly an equal pay issue.”
Eliminating the WRCO role is an attempt to head off those kinds of claims: the council’s finances are so bad that it isn’t seen as feasible to raise the pay of women in equivalent desk jobs instead.
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Who is being affected?
Pictures on pieces about the bin strike (er, including this one) naturally focus on the most seriously affected areas, but in fact the problem is unevenly distributed, Knowles said.
“I’m spending most of my time in the city centre and my own neighbourhood, which aren’t that badly affected, so I’m not coming into contact with huge mounds of rubbish every day. On the other hand, a colleague of mine looked out of his window to see someone throwing bin bags over his fence. In the specific areas that are dealing with it, it’s really bad.”
Some of that difference appears to be linked to socioeconomic status, with more deprived areas like Sparkhill and Handsworth much more garbage-strewn than leafy Edgbaston, for example.
“Some of the worst affected areas are places where there’s already a problem with fly-tipping, and those parts of the city tend to be a bit poorer,” Knowles said. Then there’s the fact that people with cars are much more able to take their rubbish to the dump than those without – and that poorer areas tend to be more densely populated, increasing the volume of rubbish.
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Who is responsible?
Health secretary Wes Streeting yesterday accused Unite, the affected workers’ union, of “totally unacceptable” behaviour in blocking bin lorries from leaving the depot. Those who are sympathetic to the council’s position argue that the terms on offer to the affected workers are reasonable. “They’ve been offered alternative roles, or the chance to train to be a driver, which is a higher grade, or a voluntary redundancy package,” Knowles said. “So there are people who say, what are you complaining about?”
But, she pointed out, most of these workers are on £24,000 to £26,000, well below the median wage. And there aren’t enough vacancies for everyone to retrain: the alternative is a more junior role and a cut of £6,000 to £8,000 a year.
There is also a robust argument that central government bears a large share of the responsibility, with the legacy of austerity-era cuts to council budgets a central factor.
On the other hand, the financial crisis that the council faces is also the product of mismanagement – and council tax has gone up significantly to try to shore up the balance sheet, which makes the anger even more severe. “If you were to ask someone in the street, most of the time the blame would be directed at the council,” Knowles said. “It’s seen as just another thing that’s gone wrong on their watch.”
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Is enough being done to resolve it?
The latest round of talks broke up yesterday without resolution. But as well as wanting the two sides to reach a deal, there is a view that national politicians bear a share of responsibility.
“There’s a sense that the government haven’t prioritised Birmingham,” Knowles said. “There were hopes when Labour was elected that there would be a financial rescue package, but that hasn’t materialised. A lot of people ask whether, if it was happening in London, it would have been allowed to go on this long.”
Ministers like Streeting have focused their criticisms on the union rather than the Labour council, while the Tories have accused the government of not going after the union aggressively enough. While local government secretary Angela Rayner met council leader John Cotton at the weekend, the government has warned that no deal can be struck that “potentially compromises the equal pay settlement”. And, Knowles said: “Local MPs have definitely faced criticism for not doing enough to get the government to take decisive action.”
“There are so many memes about how crap Birmingham is,” she added. “We’re used to being ridiculed. You’ve had Andy Street [the former mayor of the West Midlands] saying that there is now going to be a job to build the city’s reputation again. I don’t think most people are that bothered about all that, to be honest. We just want our city to function. We don’t want to pay sky-high rates for services that don’t work.”
What else we’ve been reading
Frances Ryan is frank, funny and pointed about growing up with a disability in a world “that was not made for people like me, and worse, actively kept us out” in this excerpt from her new book, Who Wants Normal? – Craille Maguire Gillies, newsletters team
“As the world burns, we’ve got to take our cheap thrills where we can,” Marina Hyde quite reasonably says, turning her attention to “embarrassingly disillusioned billionaire Trump backers” like hedge-fund supremo Bill Ackman. How could he have known, other than by listening to Trump during the election campaign, that the president would unleash the “nuclear winter” of a tariff war? Archie
What ever happened to love thy neighbour? Julia Carrie Wong is fascinating on the growing number of white evangelical Christians in the US who are trying to square their support of Donald Trump’s agenda on immigration and foreign aid with traditional ideas of compassion. Could empathy ever truly be an existential threat? Craille
The violence in Titus Andronicus – which ends with a mother unknowingly eating a pie of her dead children’s flesh – “teeters on the edge of acceptability,” Simon Russell Beale tells Arifa Akbar. So why has he taken the lead role? Partly, he says, to explore the reason we watch it at all: “It’s a very particular component in our makeup as human beings … That’s what I’m trying to work out.” Archie
“They were tired, they were scared, but they continued” – aid worker Amy Neilson has written a brutally personal tribute to the paramedics killed in Gaza by Israel Defense Forces. Not to bear witness to their suffering, but to their lives. Craille
Sport
Football | Two stunning free-kicks from Declan Rice helped Arsenal to an exhilarating 3-0 win over Real Madrid in the first leg of the Champions League quarter-final. In the night’s other game, Bayern Munich were beaten 2-1 at home by Inter after a glaring miss from Harry Kane.
Football | England missed the chance to retake top spot in League A Group 3 after being caught cold by Belgium and Tessa Wullaert’s double in 3-2 defeat. Goals from Beth Mead and Michelle Agyemang gave England hope of a comeback but Sarine Wiegman’s side were left to rue a disastrous first half hour in which they conceded all three goals.
Horse racing | Celebre d’Allen, who collapsed after running in the Grand National at Aintree on Saturday, died on Tuesday after his condition deteriorated. The 13-year-old pulled up after the final fence and then collapsed on the racecourse. Animal rights organisations were critical of the race on Saturday, which also saw Broadway Boy fall while leading.
The front pages
“US and China on collision course for all-out trade war as tariffs hit” is the splash on the Guardian today, and the same story leads most of the newspapers. “Trump poised to ignite global trade war with steepest tariffs in a century,” says the FT. The i has: “Trump hits China with 104% tariffs in major trade war escalation,” while the Telegraph focuses on Elon Musk’s comments about Trump tariff tsar, running with the headline: “He’s dumb as a sack of bricks.”
“Moan Alone,” says the Sun about Prince Harry’s court case over his security arrangements in the UK, while the Mail has: “Streeting backs prostate tests.” “London drops down wealth list as super rich move out,” says the Times. Finally, over at the Daily Express the focus is on “‘Bonkers’ council bans VE day parade for being ‘too elitist.’”
Today in Focus
Will Trump’s tariffs tip the world into recession?
As countries reel from the Trump tariffs, can a global recession still be avoided? Richard Partington reports
Cartoon of the day | Rebecca Hendin
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
From Captain Hook to the Big Bad Wolf and Snow White’s wicked Queen, it’s a scene more akin to Disneyland than a sun-soaked stretch of Melbourne, Australia’s shoreline. This, however, is the Australian Sand Sculpting Championships, returning to Frankston foreshore for its 25th edition, following a six-year hiatus.
With a theme of The Villains of Storytime, Tasmanian artist Meg Murray took home top prize for her work, Screech of the Sea, following two days of competition that saw contestants build for up to 10 hours a day.
Participant Jim McCauley summed up the unique charm of the event, saying: “It’s a meditative practice … You’re just present with the sand.”
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
