Leafy Streets, Marginal Seats

There are nine parliamentary seats in Birmingham - ten if you include Sutton Coldfield (which we like to do, just to annoy them). Of these, eight are currently held by Labour, one by the Lib Dems and one by the Tories (that'll be Sutton Coldfield again). Up until recently, I lived on the outer reaches of Birmingham Ladywood; Clare Short's seat and a place where in 2005, 44.53% of voters plumped for Labour. But thanks to boundary changes in the city, I now find myself resident in Birmingham Edgbaston - about as vulnerable a Labour seat as you can get, encompassing comfortable, middle-class areas like Harborne and where all twelve local councillors are Tories. The Labour MP, Gisela Stuart, will go into the coming general election defending a very slim majority and has been more-or-less written off by just about everyone.

Certainly on paper, it doesn't look good. Gisela was returned to Parliament with a majority of 2,349 in 2005, a figure that looks even shakier when notional data from the boundary change is taken into account. The evidence out on the streets isn't much better either. For a Labourite more used to leafleting in places like Aston and Soho, seeing the size of some of the houses and cars is enough to make you think: 'we're f***ed'. The fact that the Tory literature being sent out is funky and glossy whilst ours is churned out of a temperamental black-and-white printer that no one can ever find enough toner for could also make you weep.

Not all, however, is necessarily blackness and despair. Far from it, in fact. For a start, I've never been part of such an active and motivated CLP. Whereas some local parties seem to spend their time in fruitless meetings, passing pie-in-the-sky resolutions that few will ever read, still less take any notice of, the good people of Edgbaston (and there are many) campaign hard and have been doing so long before I rocked up on the scene. We might be cash-poor, but we are activist-rich.

Furthermore, we have in Gisela Stuart one of the best MPs you could wish for, someone who is Labour to the core but thinks independently - but as a moderate, rather than one of the gang on the lunatic fringe. Deirdre Alden, the Tory candidate, might talk a good fight but she's not even in the same league. Gisela's local popularity is obvious in people's responses to canvassing and the election will largely turn on how much that encourages people to go out and vote Labour.

Finally, although the Tories held the seat from 1898 (1886 if you count Liberal Unionists as Tories) until 1997, the Birmingham of 2010 is a very different place even from the City in the 1990s. Despite the ethnic and cultural ghettoisation that is still Brum's particular curse, the City's well-documented renaissaince has made her character more akin to that of her Liberal, industrial heyday than the polarised, depressed city of the popular imagination. Whether you live in a working-class district or a rich one, you only have to walk half a mile from your front door to have the realities of inequality shoved hard in your face. The advantage of living in a city rather than some rural arcadia is that you can't pretend that such things don't affect you and actually have to make some considerable effort to talk yourself out of feeling a degree of empathy with your fellow citizens. If Edgbaston votes for itself in isolation, it'll turn blue. But if it votes as part of the wonderful city that it is a district of, it'll stay red.

Forward, and all that jazz.