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Local elections on May 7 will be a “day of reckoning” for Labour in Britain’s largest local authority, party insiders fear. Labour has run Birmingham since 2012 but its reign could come to an end after next month’s vote.

At stake is control of a £4.4 billion budget and services for more than a million people. But losing Birmingham would also be a massive blow to Sir Keir Starmer, and further alarm his MPs at Westminster.

A local Labour politician said: “Our chickens are coming home to roost. The result in places like this is what’s going to cause real panic, not Scotland or Wales.”

The party’s traditional coalition of voters is splitting in three different directions. Liberal-minded members of the city’s middle class are defecting to the Green Party, while working class voters are considering Reform.

Meanwhile, inner-city Muslim voters could desert the party for so-called “Gaza independents”, who have formed an alliance with firebrand ex-Labour MP George Galloway.

It’s a perfect storm. Sir Keir’s government is unpopular on a national level, while the council has been hit by a series of disasters locally.

The authority issued what’s known as a Section 114 notice in 2023 – declaring itself effectively bankrupt – and former Local Government Secretary Michael Gove appointed commissioners to oversee improvements. Lord Gove has moved on to other things, but the Commissioners remain.

Residents have suffered a two-year bin strike, which saw black bags piling up in city streets. Refuse workers from neighbouring councils were brought in to clear up the mess.

And the local Labour group is in disarray. Former council leader Ian Ward was sacked by the national party, giving the authority a new leader effectively imposed by party bosses in London.

A study by analysts Bombe concluded May’s election could leave Labour with just 11 of the city’s 101 council seats, down from 50 (out of 99 seats) today.

Polling by JL Partners for the Daily Telegraph suggested Labour could win 28% of the vote – the same proportion as Reform, also forecast to win 28%. While the findings differ, they both suggest that the city could end up under no overall control.

Labour is warning of a “coalition of chaos” taking over. John Cotton, the current council leader and head of the city’s Labour group, said in a message to local voters: “There is a very simple choice at this election. Unity with a labour led council or division created by Independents and Reform who want to tear this city apart.”

Conservatives think this may be their big moment. They are currently the second-largest group in the authority and the council was Tory-led from 2004 to 2012. Unlike some of the UK’s other big cities, Birmingham has a strong Conservative tradition.

Robert Alden, leader of the Conservative group on the city council, said: “The only way this city is going to be ungovernable is if Labour stays in charge, because they have made a complete mess of it. We are gunning to try and take control.”

But Reform UK leader Nigel Farage is also hoping for a breakthrough and earlier this year he declared: “I will stick my neck out slightly and say that I think on May 7 we have a really good chance of winning”.

Local candidates aren’t quit as gung ho but Jex Parkin, standing in the city’s Kingstanding ward, said: “We are the only party that can kick Labour out of the disastrous Birmingham City Council.”

The great unknown is whether independent candidates will cause upsets similar to those in the 2024 general election, when lawyer Ayoub Khan, a former Lib Dem turned independent, defeated the sitting Labour MP in Birmingham Perry Barr. Independent candidate Akhmed Yakoob, also a lawyer, came a close second in Birmingham Ladywood, reducing Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s majority from 28,582 to just 3,421.

Mr Yakoob is not standing in May but has joined forces with property developer turned activist Shakeel Afsar to co-ordinate a campaign to get independents elected to the authority. Mr Afsar is known locally after leading protests in 2019 outside a city school over lessons some parents saw as promoting an LGBT lifestyle.

Their candidates, also backed by Mr Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain, could take seats from Labour in areas large Muslim populations. A key campaign issue is the war in Gaza, but other concerns include conflict in Kashmir – many Birmingham Muslims have Kashmiri links – and a general sense that Labour has taken ethnic minority voters for granted.

Speaking to the Birmingham Mail, Mr Afsar said: “We have indigenously put our weight behind Labour, and have been betrayed.”

In other parts of the city, Labour is more worried about the Green Party. The party in Birmingham remains dominated by old-fashioned environmentalists rather than the radical left-wingers associated with party leader Zack Polanski. However, they still stand to benefit from Mr Polanski’s charisma and media profile.

Liberal Democrats have been somewhat overlooked in this election, but party leader Sir Ed Davey visited the city and while he ruled out forming a coalition with Reform in the council house, he would not be drawn on other deals. And perhaps that was wise, as a potential outcome is a joint Conservative-Lib Dem administration.

But another possibility after next month’s vote is that there is no clear winner – and it simply proves impossible to form a stable coalition supported by a majority of councillors. Who would run Birmingham then?

The answer might be Tony McArdle, a man nobody elected. He’s the former Chief Executive of Lincolnshire County Council and the “Lead Commissioner” appointed by Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government to try to impose order on Birmingham’s crisis-hit local authority. Some local politicians say the commissioners are running the show already.