Dear Editor, For the second consecutive week now The Independent has published articles questioning the second city status of Birmingham, the latter prompted by comments from Lord Digby Jones of Birmingham, who really should know better than to slate the city he may one day wish to stand for.
As someone who has been born and raised here I’m proud of Birmingham.
It’s a multicultural hub of talent and diversity that has done more to shape 21st century Britain than any other city in the UK.
However, I am not at all impressed by how we promote it; from our senior civic leaders, who to put it politely have failed this great city, to us as citizens.
For too long now, we all as Brummies have undersold this region. We seem to lack self belief that as an area we provide many great, unique and innovative things, instead accepting the rest of the nation’s outdated view that we are the “armpit of the universe”. In fact too many revel in it. We lack a narrative, a story line of our hardworking industrial past with a vision of how we will continue to prosper in the globalised era, embracing the two to our advantage.
What we need now is a radical rethink in how we position Birmingham.
There are in my eyes a few simple ways in which to address this.
Firstly, we need an elected Mayor of Birmingham who has both the charisma and a vision of Birmingham to sell to the rest of the country, not to punch Birmingham above its weight but to reintroduce us to the heavy weight division that we belong in, going head to head with London and Manchester.
We can’t do this alone; we need the support of whole the West Midlands region, similar to how Manchester used the tag Greater Manchester, with better long term strategic thinking between all local authorities.
With this in process we need to establish a Birmingham local history week in both schools and public events to celebrate and better understand our rich history. And finally, we all as Brummies need to wake up from this apathy that so many of us seem to be stuck in. We are the second city, it’s about time we as citizens started shouting about it.
Lee Marsham
UpRiser and Editor of TheB44 Blog
