Robert Jenrick claimed that he didn’t see a single white face in Handsworth. In February, the shadow justice secretary spent 90 minutes wandering the area, just north-west of Birmingham city centre, with a GB News camera crew in tow. “These are some of the filthiest streets in the country,” Jenrick delivered down the lens. “People should not have to live like this.”
In the report, he was keen to project himself as being on the side of the people of Handsworth, which, like the rest of Birmingham, was contending with a bin strike by the council’s refuse workers. In private, however, Jenrick’s ire was not focused on the area’s clutter, but its demographics. The following month, at a dinner for the Aldridge-Brownhills Conservative Association, he raised the subject of Handsworth’s diversity. The area “was one of the worst integrated places I’ve ever been to”, he said, in a leaked recording published by the Guardian this week. “In fact, in the hour and a half I was filming news there, I didn’t see another white face. That’s not the kind of country I want to live in.” Birmingham’s leaders have condemned the comments, and Jenrick has been accused of fuelling a “toxic nationalism”.
To test the veracity of the wannabe Tory leader’s headline claim, I went to Handsworth on 9 October. Two minutes after a colleague and I began filming on the bustling, mile-long Soho Road in the heart of Handsworth, we were introduced to Kath, 55. Her friend, Karvinder Dhillon, 36, a British-Sikh Brummie, spotted her and called her over for a chat. They first met at the community hub Dhillon volunteers at further up the road. Kath told me she had “heard something on the news last night” about a politician attacking the make-up of an area she has lived in for over 30 years. “I’m not having that,” she huffed. “This politician, whoever he is… He says [you’ll] never see a white person [here] on the street. You’re speaking to a white person here.” As we stood opposite a Ladbrokes on the overcast Wednesday morning, a few more locals shuffled past: “Look! White people here, see – now tell me there’s no white people in Handsworth. There’s white, black, Indian, Chinese… We’re all the same. We’re all a community. We all stick together, look after each other.”
In his initial remarks, Jenrick stressed that his grievance was “not about the colour of your skin or your faith”, but a supposed lack of integration. Handsworth, he said, is “as close as I’ve come to a slum in this country”. Speaking at the Tory Party conference this week, Jenrick doubled down, arguing that “a lack of integration leads us into a very dark place as a country”.
Birmingham is a melting pot of multiethnic and multicultural Britain, split almost evenly between its white population (48.6 per cent, according to the 2021 census) and its residents from black, Asian, mixed and other minority ethnic backgrounds (51.4 per cent). This mix is often evenly spread across most of the city, but some areas are less diverse: the Northfield ward, for example, has the highest white population (83 per cent of all residents) in the city; while Sparkhill is the area with the highest concentration of Asian and Asian-British inhabitants (78.3 per cent). Handsworth aligns with the latter example: of its 11,814 residents, 91.3 per cent are from all ethnic-minority backgrounds, and its white residents make up the remaining 8.7 per cent.
Anna Turley, the chair of the Labour Party, said Jenrick had simply reduced people “to the colour of their skin, and judges his own level of comfort by whether there are other white faces around”. Turley queried how the comments align with Kemi Badenoch’s leader’s speech at her party’s conference, where she said the Conservatives stood against a “politics that ‘reduces people to categories and then pits them against each other’”.
Handsworth’s multicultural population can be traced back to the arrival of many West Indians in the postwar period, who helped in rebuilding efforts and provided labour in the region’s once-strong industrial factories. People rioted in the 1980s because of unemployment, social alienation and black youths being disproportionately stopped, searched and arrested by the police.
On my visit, there was little evidence to suggest that there was a lack of cohesion among its residents – or, as Jenrick suggested, people living “parallel lives”. Unlike too many high streets across Britain, the Soho Road strip was bustling: its east and south Asian restaurants had respectable footfall, and many local women (and a number of day-trippers from other parts of the country) were stationed at the numerous bridal shops dotted along the road.
What was cohesive among all of the Brummies I spoke to was a feeling of anger. They were angry about their still-cluttered streets, and the ongoing bin strike: “There’s mounds of rubbish everywhere. What’s the council doing about that? Nothing!” They were angry about housing shortages and the perils of renting: “Houses are very expensive now. You see a shithole house and the price is [high]… the landlord refuses to fix it, and then raises rent.” And they were angry about the closure of “third spaces” for socialising, and the reduction of council-run community services: “The kids need to be supported… if they’re not, they’ll go to the streets.” The anger is also confrontational. As I was interviewing Khalid Mahmood, who was Labour MP for Perry Barr (which covers Handsworth) for 23 years until he lost the seat in the 2024 general election, two middle-aged white women approached us and interrupted our filming to confront him. “You need to sort our rubbish out!” they accosted, assuming Mahmood was still in post. “I’m not being funny, the rubbish round here is disgusting.” Even after that was clarified, they were still simmering: “It needs to be sorted…”
But instead of looking for answers to these issues, local politicians engage in a circular blame game. Labour curses the £1bn of local funding taken away by austerity; Tories blame the Labour-led council for bankrupting the local authority in 2023. Indeed, at the end of my visit, John Cotton, the Labour leader of Birmingham City Council, told me: “Handsworth is an incredibly diverse community. It’s not without its challenges, [but] the consequences of 14 years of austerity have meant that it still faces issues around unemployment and poverty.” Cotton likened Jenrick’s “racist” remarks to Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech, and accused him of participating in “political opportunism”.
In the middle of this partisan bickering, the people of Handsworth and Birmingham suffer. The fundamental issues that are key in fostering community and togetherness – housing, pride in place, initiatives and schemes – fall by the wayside while politicians waste their time point-scoring. Rather than the cultural and ethnic make-up of their community, that is the grave concern for the people of Handsworth and indeed the rest of Birmingham: a permanent feeling of stagnation, if not decline. That they are fated and beset with a lack of political leadership and ambition to turn England’s second city around.
As is the story across most of the country, the social safety net, pulled at by austerity and ineffective politicians, has been sown back together by good-faith actors across the third sector: charities, religious groups, emboldened locals creating all kinds of “hubs” and “banks”. One of many examples in Handsworth is the redbrick Nishkam Health Centre, located at the top of the slight gradient on Soho Road. It was set up in 2012 by a Sikh collective whose grand white and bronze temple looms across the road.
It provides a free-to-access adult counselling service, a pay-as-you-can dental service run by local dentists and a community pharmacy. “Over the last ten years, public services impacting communities here in Handsworth have been decimated,” Shuranjeet Singh, a local Labour council candidate and activist, told me inside a clinical treatment room at the centre. He believes that the current discourse around, and the substance of what constitutes “community” – particularly its ethnic and cultural make-up – in 21st century Britain is “fundamentally misunderstood” by people like Jenrick.
“In Handsworth, we’ve had migration from various communities over the last 50 or 60 years. We’ve had communities coming together to support each other, to stand up for each other. We faced racism, all kinds of challenges, and I think it’s really important that we have that legacy and that history of coming together and engaging as one,” Singh said. “We walk up and down the road, we connect with each other, and try different food. There’s communities from all over the world that come here. Growing up here, I was teaching people from different backgrounds swear words in Punjabi when I was in primary school, and I’d learned funny and amazing things about different people’s cultures as well; and that, for me, is a really beautiful part of integration. It’s a beautiful cultural exchange.
“We need to create the places for people to connect. And unfortunately, the government that Robert Jenrick was a part of took these places away from our communities; him coming here to point the finger and say our communities aren’t integrating, I think that’s a real slap in the face.”
Additional reporting by Rhi Storer.
[Further reading: The UK’s sense of decline is terminal]
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