26 July 2025, 14:25 | Updated: 28 July 2025, 14:57

By Luke Shannahan

There’s a big difference between demanding a pay rise and fighting to protect your pay.

Outside of Spaghetti Junction, time doesn’t move any slower in Birmingham than anywhere else in the UK, but it’s felt like a very long year in the second city.

More than four months of all-out strike action by bin workers (who had been walking out intermittently for nearly four months before that), weeks without a bin collection for countless Brummies, months of nose-wrinkling at the mountainous cairns of black bags and fly tipping which marked every back street junction It was interminable for many and unacceptable for the rest.

I’m one of the reporters who’s been doing a fair bit of nose-wrinkling while covering the strike and, frankly, wishing at times I was anywhere else.........

© LBC