Delivered this evening at the Library of Birmingham for the RSA, the following is my talk on the future of our city, our incredible diversity, and why we must proudly claim our title as the First City of the Future. Read the full text of ‘Branding Birmingham: The Audacity of the Demographic Dividend’ below
Good evening, and welcome to the Library of Birmingham.
We are gathered here tonight under the auspices of the RSA to discuss ‘Branding Birmingham: Future ambitions and an evolving identity’.
Let me quickly state for the record that I was born in Birmingham, and I was educated right here in this city.
I have been away for many years, and I have done a great many different things in my academic career.
I have travelled across the globe, researching ethnic relations, social equity, and radicalisation from the Middle East to mainland Europe.
I bring back with me lots of different perspectives from these international experiences.
I have found myself defending our unique cuisine in Beirut and explaining the intricacies of the Brummie accent in The Hague.
But my baseline was always the research I began here, in the schools and the independent restaurants of this very city.
Stepping away gave me the crucial perspective to see clearly what is often obscured when you live right in the thick of it.
Now, I have returned to take up a new role at Aston University, ready to bring those global insights home.
But tonight is not about my personal biography.
We have urgent matters to address, so let us get straight into the cut and thrust of this particular talk.
We meet at a deeply critical, highly volatile juncture for our city.
Crucial local elections are looming on the horizon for the 7th of May.
All 101 council seats across our fractured political landscape will be fiercely contested.
The instability in our local politics is palpable and entirely unavoidable.
Just yesterday, the Labour council leader, John Cotton, lost a vote of no confidence following a last-minute Conservative amendment.
The ruling administration may have dismissed this as a “cheap trick” with no implications for its leadership.
But the Conservative group leader, Robert Alden, declared it must be a “turning point for Birmingham”.
He argued that the leadership has lost the confidence of both the council and the people.
This political turbulence reflects a deep, lingering tension over the city’s recent financial collapse.
Conservative councillor Deirdre Alden rightly reminded the chamber that declaring effective bankruptcy was both humiliating and costly.
She pointed out that residents are facing a double whammy: a collapse in services on top of more taxes.
Liberal Democrat councillor Colin Green argued that the council is “broken but fixable”, acknowledging the huge financial pain inflicted on this authority.
We cannot ignore the catastrophic problems with the Oracle IT system and the devastating equal pay dispute that plunged us into crisis.
This financial ruin resulted in immense strain on our frontline services.
It is perhaps most visibly symbolised by the mountains of rubbish during the ongoing bins strike.
That dispute between the council and the Unite union was sparked by the loss of the Waste Recycling and Collection Officer role.
Striking workers claim they face a pay cut of £8,000, leaving our streets overwhelmed with uncollected refuse.
A city struggling to collect its rubbish fundamentally struggles to project a confident vision to the rest of the world.
At last month’s budget meeting, Councillor Cotton declared that an extra £130 million is being invested in council services for cleaner, safer streets.
Brutal choices were made, and we have finally balanced the books.
But the “bankrupt Birmingham” tag is a severe brand problem that we must now actively dismantle.
Branding Birmingham requires us to look beyond the balance sheet and examine the demographic currents that truly define us.
Birmingham is not just a recovering city; it is a replete city.
We possess an incredibly youthful population, with 36 per cent of our people under the age of 25.
We are a super-diverse, majority-minority city.
By standard economic definitions, a youthful working-age cohort that outnumbers dependents should make economic growth inevitable.
This is our demographic dividend, an incredible natural advantage over the aging cities of Europe.
Yet, what do we actually do with this incredible surplus of talent?
We attract 100,000 students to our five world-class universities.
But Centre for Cities data shows a staggering and depressing problem.
76 per cent of those who moved here specifically to study bounce straight out again after graduation.
London absorbs the lion’s share of our graduate wealth-creators.
They do not leave for a lack of jobs; they leave because we have failed to sell the Brummie proposition.
The Brummie proposition should be that you can build a successful career here without mortgaging your adulthood to exorbitant rent.
It should be that you can raise a family in a vibrantly diverse community that looks like the world, not a 1950s postcard.
Instead, they leave because we have built a city suffering from a profound housing crisis.
Right now, 116,000 households languish on housing waiting lists.
We are forcing our brilliant young graduates to compete with essential key-workers for the exact same scarce roofs.
We cannot conflate graduate retention entirely with social housing policy, but the physical link is undeniable.
A city which wastes its demographic dividend on queuing lists is a city preparing its own obsolescence.
This brings me to the cultural and economic core of our evolving identity.
Back in 2006, I authored a background report on Muslims in Birmingham for the University of Oxford Centre for Migration, Policy and Society – it is still on their website.
The city’s demographics have evolved remarkably since then, but many structural impediments and biases remain deeply entrenched.
Nearly 30 per cent of Birmingham is Muslim, making it the largest Muslim population of any UK local authority.
We must emphatically recognise that our diversity is not a sociological liability to be managed.
It has always been an economic engine to be fuelled.
Across the UK, British Muslims generate a staggering £70 billion annually for the economy.
This includes approximately £42 billion generated directly by the Muslim workforce.
These are the people providing absolutely vital, everyday support to our public sector.
In the National Health Service alone, British Muslims fill over 46,000 essential roles.
Remarkably, 31 per cent of Muslims in the NHS hold specialist or consultant positions.
Furthermore, over 18,220 British Muslim civil servants support the government.
The community donates nearly £1.79 billion a year to charitable causes.
That is a rate of charitable giving four times more generous than the national average.
Muslims also volunteer time worth £622 million a year to help their local communities.
Here in Birmingham, independent restaurateurs, creators, and professionals are building the city’s economic infrastructure.
Muslim-owned businesses contribute at least £24.7 billion a year to the British economy.
They are actively reviving local communities that have faced historic economic decline.
They are tapping into a global halal market worth billions of pounds, creating unique market opportunities for the UK.
Yet, the potential of this wealth-creating demographic is under severe threat.
Recent data paints a highly concerning picture for the future of our local and national economy.
Affluent British Muslims—those earning over £62,000 a year—are 65 per cent more likely to consider emigration than the average citizen.
Overall, British Muslims are 50 per cent more likely to want to leave the UK.
They are twice as likely as the average British citizen to have taken concrete steps to leave the country.
If followed through, this exodus could lead to losses worth over £1.1 billion a year in tax contributions alone.
Why are they leaving?
They cite systemic religious discrimination and a declining quality of life as primary reasons.
In fact, they are three times more likely to cite religious discrimination as a reason for leaving the UK.
When our brightest minds and most successful entrepreneurs feel pushed out, the entire city loses.
If we fail to sell them on a future in Birmingham, we risk a massive brain and wealth drain.
This failure to retain talent is exacerbated by our increasingly hostile cultural climate.
We often celebrate Birmingham as a multicultural utopia, pointing to our diverse high streets with pride.
But this superficial conviviality obscures the heavy emotional and social burden placed on our minority communities.
Sociologists note that true conviviality should mean that diversity is entirely unremarkable.
Instead, what we see in our city is the “burden of conviviality”.
This is a requirement placed upon those racialised as different to constantly educate, explain, and put the white majority at ease.
It is the exhausting, everyday labour of appearing unremarkable just to avoid suspicion.
Consider the mother in Tower Hamlets who suggested her daughter read a book by Tariq Ramadan for school.
Her daughter was terrified, replying, “Imagine what the teachers will say… they’ll be seen as extremist.”
It hit that mother that her children have to constantly hide certain aspects of their lives in public just to survive.
This climate of suspicion is not accidental; it is the product of national political narratives that treat diversity as a security threat.
Birmingham has been at the absolute epicentre of this securitisation.
The controversial Trojan Horse affair in 2014 cast a long and exceptionally damaging shadow over this city.
Allegations of an Islamist takeover in our local schools fuelled a massive moral panic.
It reinforced the damaging image of Muslims as a fifth column in British society.
The aftermath of such controversies, coupled with the Prevent strategy, has transformed the classroom into a space of surveillance.
We have watched as counter-terrorism policy spiralled out of control over the last decade.
It has become a Frankenstein policy, constantly deconstructed, revised, and entwined with cohesion agendas.
It has morphed into a self-serving industry.
The Counter-Extremism Strategy and programmes like Building a Stronger Britain Together have heavily blurred the lines of trust.
We have seen the Home Office use PR agencies like M&C Saatchi and Breakthrough Media to run covert campaigns.
These are practices of “astroturfing,” where state-directed activities are cynically disguised as grassroots community initiatives.
Many local practitioners view these strategies as a Machiavellian industry where threats are deliberately exaggerated just to secure funding.
We see literal “beauty pageants” where civil society organisations are forced to compete on stage for Home Office contracts.
We see “double dipping,” where organisations cynically take money from multiple different funders to deliver the exact same piece of work.
The practitioners who navigate this space find themselves trapped in a treacherous grey area.
They are often labelled by their own communities as sell-outs and informants.
Simultaneously, they are viewed with suspicion by the state as potential extremists themselves.
When our young people feel they must hide what books they read to avoid being labelled extremists, we are fundamentally failing them.
When our community workers are treated as suspect informants, our civic trust is completely broken.
Our brand cannot be built on a foundation of suspicion and surveillance.
And our brand certainly cannot be a hollow marketing campaign designed to gloss over recent municipal bankruptcy.
True branding requires us to boldly recognize and invest in our actual demographic reality.
It requires hard infrastructure, and here Birmingham retains a structural advantage that London cannot replicate.
The HS2 Curzon Street station is no longer just a blueprint; it is a physical reality emerging from the Digbeth clay.
Engineers completed the foundation phase last month, sinking 2,011 concrete piles for the station.
At a total investment of over £43.6 billion, HS2 represents a massive bet on Birmingham as the gravitational centre of the country.
It will link to the Midland Metro extension and a new Automated People Mover to the airport.
This creates a transport ecosystem that makes Birmingham the absolute natural gateway to the UK.
We must leverage this not as a quick commuter route for Londoners, but as a declaration of our own centrality.
But we must remember that connectivity is meaningless without vibrant cultural production.
Our diversity is our raw material for that culture.
Our creative industries comprise 2,605 businesses, making up 6 per cent of the city’s total economy.
They employ 27,000 talented individuals across the region.
Projects like Digbeth Loc Studios and the CreaTech Frontiers initiative link our universities with gaming and immersive-tech firms.
Our brand should be built on the authenticity of our incredible hybridity.
It is the collision of our celebrated industrial heritage with the vibrant innovation of the global diaspora.
It is heavy metal and grime existing on the same streets.
It is Punjabi street food and Michelin-starred dining elevating our culinary reputation.
Birmingham is at a critical turning point.
We may have finally balanced the council’s books, but now we must balance the scales of opportunity.
We must address the stubborn ethnic penalties in our labour market that hold back our brightest minds.
We must ensure our brilliant graduates stay right here to build their lives and their businesses.
We must ensure that future regeneration builds affordable homes for the families currently languishing on waiting lists.
Most importantly, we must firmly reject the national political scripts that rebrand diversity as disorder and youth as a threat.
We must not conflate community cohesion with covert surveillance.
We must not demand that our citizens shed their cultural identities to make others feel more comfortable.
Britain frequently oscillates between nostalgic nationalism and anxious multiculturalism.
Birmingham offers a necessary third way.
We are the city where the Demographic Revolution is maturing before our very eyes.
If we harness the talent of our youthful, diverse population, we will do more than just recover from insolvency.
We will stop apologising for who we are and what we look like.
We will proudly claim our identity as the First City of the Future.
Thank you.