Four years ago, I saw something on a computer screen that I have never forgotten. The UK was six weeks into lockdown, and I was working on a series of Guardian videos based on raw footage from around the country, most of which had been filmed on people’s phones.

We had made contact with a community activist from Alum Rock in central Birmingham – and he had captured an unbearably vivid signifier of what people there were faced with. First, he showed us a car park outside a mosque, where six or seven rectangular white tents had been put up. Then, he pulled back the flap that formed one of their front doors to reveal a sight that left him silent: stacks of coffins, each awaiting a janazah, the Muslim funeral.

In June 2020, Birmingham was identified as the UK’s “coronavirus capital”: the first local authority area in the UK to register more than 1,000 deaths from Covid-19. Just under a year later, I went there to report on the pandemic’s aftershocks – among them, a 15% rate of unemployment and the sudden closure of the palatial John Lewis store opened only five years before. Talking to people, I got a sense of both lingering trauma and an amazing drive to somehow keep going; in 2022, that same indefatigable spirit was displayed to the wider world when the city consummately hosted the Commonwealth Games. But then came yet another huge blow.

Most of us now know the basics. In 2023, Birmingham city council – which is controlled by Labour, and is reckoned to be Europe’s largest local authority – effectively went bankrupt. There were three key reasons: massive cuts in funding from Whitehall, the cost of the belated resolution of the council’s gender pay gap, and the mind-boggling mishandling of a new IT system. In the........

© The Guardian