Birmingham For folks in Birmingham and ACORN members arriving for their conference, there will finally be something to talk about besides what was once called “unseasonable heat,” but is now clearly climate change and the wave of the future. England is playing someone, it hardly matters whom, but I believe it’s Norway, in the World Cup, and that will fully change the conversation at least for several hours this evening.
For my part, there’s been lots to hear and to learn about what we are doing, issues in Birmingham, and of course ACORN developments.
On the ACORN side, I was delighted to hear about a development over the last year in Leeds in northern England, that organizers are calling “ACORN Tuesdays.” Almost every Tuesday since May 2025, between a half dozen and 20 ACORN members have come into the office like a small tornado to take on a range of tasks that might have normally either been done by organizers or, more likely, not done at all. This has ranged from making phone calls to other members in updates or for turnout to hitting the doors, working stalls, or making posters and signs for actions and rallies. I was reminded of the Moral Mondays in North Carolina and Georgia assembled to prod and protest deeply conservative and undemocratic proposals in those states that were organized several years ago. These ACORN Tuesday type efforts are exciting, and I’m betting as the word gets out, they spread throughout England and Wales, but also to affiliates around the world. That would be wonderful!
I also heard quite a lot about various Birmingham housing schemes from ACORN’s office director, some of which concerned initiatives of the council to try to put together affordable, new council housing and some of which almost seemed like Peaky Blinders scams. The “shared equity” projects, modeled on a Scottish program, are something on the order of a private-public partnership though joining aspiring council flat owners and the council, both investing and then splitting in various proportions the cost of construction and, if there’s a sale at some point, shares in the equity in order to keep the chain of affordable housing unbroken. Maybe that will work and maybe it won’t, but too much of it as Paul Barnes pointed out to me, are based on what Americans would call “eminent domain” which is a public takeover of the properties for development. From a favored pub, Paul pointed out a long street of former warehouses near the center of town that were scheduled for housing in this way, but also were part of a more controversial program in some buildings.
In these buildings, the council meets its requirements to house the homeless, many with mental issues or disabilities, but all lower income. They do so by contracting with private companies through a rent subsidy, something like a US Section 8, but worse. The private company, now acting in effect as a landlord for the council, can top off some of the costs of providing other services and deduct it from the recipients benefit checks, leaving them in bad shape. The tenants don’t have a lease, but are they as a public placement, giving them no rights to protest conditions, oppose evictions, or much of anything else. The same company is contracted or allowed to subcontract to provide services to support the residents, but from what I was hearing, there is little to no accountability, allowing this to just be more bills being paid by the council, scamming the residents. Some of these companies have been dodgy as well, opening the doors to even more Peaky Blinders like activity. When one of the organizers mentioned organizing in Small Heath, my head almost snapped around.
Before I lose you in the weeds, the biggest hoots and hollers I heard when sitting with the organizers were triggered by Neil Farage, the Brexit architect and leader of the dangerously ascendant Reform Party in the UK. He got himself embroiled in a financial scandal, resigned his seat in Parliament, and then announced he was running for re-election in the same seat. What’s not textbook political chicanery is that he has an intriguing opponent with almost as much name recognition as he has, and that’s Bin Man. This is a guy, rumored to have a government job, who wears a something looking like a metal garbage can on his head. He’s on the ballot. His platform not only seeks more bins, or garbage cans everywhere, and, incidentally, we saw none in the Birmingham train station, but other zingers like his commitment to build one affordable house, which he says with tragic truth, would be more than the existing government has produced. Other planks in his platform run along the same directions. It would be wild if he beat Farage and ended up in Parliament!