The battle for the West Midlands

By Patrick Burns
Political Editor, West Midlands

People have the chance to vote for 18 councils in the region

Local election night will be an anxious one for Labour MPs nursing those marginal Parliamentary constituencies which have a habit of swinging general elections.

Birmingham is a marginal city in its own right - Edgbaston, Hall Green and Yardley have a track-record as serial "switchers".

Elsewhere Redditch, Tamworth, Worcester and Wyre Forest will be among the Conservative targets at the next general election.

These are all places where council elections will be taking place on Thursday 4 May.

If Labour MPs see support ebbing away in the council wards that make up their own constituencies, expect the mood in the parliamentary party to become ever more restless, accompanied of course by the inevitable orgy of Blair-baiting in the press.

'Relatively low ebb'

But there is a major issue, too, between the principal opposition parties, entering the fray under new management.

There is no shortage of territory here in the West Midlands where the Conservatives will be vying with the Liberal Democrats to demonstrate that precious political commodity, momentum.

Solihull and Cheltenham are two of the once rock-solid Conservative seats where Liberal Democrat MPs will need to be dislodged if David Cameron is to have any hope of forming a government after the next election.

It is two years since all the council seats in the great population centres were up for election.

How councils get their money to provide local services

Labour's electoral fortunes were at a relatively low ebb then, so this may soften any sense of declining Labour support this time round.

Whenever competition hots-up between the three main parties, conventional wisdom has it that turnout goes up; and that, in turn, makes it more difficult for the "other parties" to have an impact.

But they still have the potential to deliver some interesting local variations from the themes presented in airy generalisations by national pundits.

Watch, for example, the performance in Coventry of the Socialist Party led by the former Militant Labour MP Dave Nellist: Will they benefit from any slip in Labour support among instinctively left-leaning "core" voters?

Environmental concern

The British National Party intends to concentrate substantial candidates in the big population centres: Birmingham and the Black Country, Coventry and Stoke.

On average, the BNP has so far accounted for just one council seat in every thousand and they are significantly behind, say the Greens, in the general level of electoral support it has so far mustered across our region as a whole.

The Greens, for their part, are also promising to field candidates in strength, hoping to capitalise on any mood of increased environmental concern.

And the UK Independence Party will be hoping to emulate the success they achieved in the 2004 European Election, when the region elected its UKIP member of the European Parliament.