Inside ‘the most unBritish place in Britain’: A convicted terrorist standing for election. Riven with sectarian division and piled high with filth. Half not working and a massive migrant influx. And it gets worse in ROBERT HARDMAN’s shocking dispatch…

Causing shocks is something of a family tradition.

And while this one might not quite beat biting the head off a bat live on stage, it’s still the talk of the town: the news that Sharon Osbourne, widow of the self-styled ‘Prince of Darkness’ and wild man of heavy metal, Ozzy Osbourne, could be about to run in the upcoming elections for Birmingham City Council against a convicted terrorist – and in an area where eight out of ten voters are Muslims.

A final decision has yet to come from the formidable crimson-haired power behind the Ozzy Osbourne throne.

However, this week Mrs Osbourne wrote on social media that she was seriously considering relocating to Brum following the news that former jihadi Shahid Butt has announced he will stand in the Sparkhill ward of the city in the May 6 poll.

Mr Butt, who spent five years in a Yemeni jail for his links to an Islamist group which kidnapped 16 Westerners and plotted to blow up an Anglican church, is standing as an unabashedly pro-Palestinian independent candidate. His primary aim, he insists, is to unseat the city’s current Labour administration.

Clearly unconvinced, Sharon Osbourne feels that it is time to take a stand.

‘This has nothing to do with racism,’ she wrote on Instagram. ‘I think I’m gonna move to Birmingham and put my name down for the ballot to be on the council.’ She then followed up with a further post: ‘I’m serious.’

Though Sharon was born in London, the Osbourne name will for ever be associated with Birmingham, where her late husband, the former lead singer of Black Sabbath, was brought up as plain John Osbourne – the son of a toolmaker, as it happens.

It is all very bad news for the son of another toolmaker, one who is currently being laid low by another self-styled ‘Prince of Darkness’. For even if Sir Keir Starmer manages to haul himself out of the ordure of the Peter Mandelson/Epstein scandal, his next monumental challenge will be the gathering storm of local elections in May. They will include the battle for the largest unitary authority in Europe. 

Currently run by a Labour administration with a whopping majority, this is a city riven with sectarian division and piled high with filth thanks to a bin strike which is now Britain’s longest-running industrial dispute of the century.

Sparkhill is also an area which has perhaps come to define the profound social and cultural shifts which are reshaping Brum – and British politics. For, in just a few decades, this ward has gone from being overwhelmingly white working class to a bastion of multi-culturalism and then back to monoculturalism, but of a different sort.

The latest census puts the old white working class at just 7.9 per cent of the population while the number of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) residents, stands at 92 per cent, most of them of Pakistani heritage. Almost 84 per cent of the residents are Muslim, 42 per cent were born overseas and almost half of those of working age are ‘economically inactive’.

I struggle to spot a single national high street chain, while there seem to be a disproportionate number of currency exchanges and halal butchers. However, all these independent retailers seem to be doing a decent trade.

Meanwhile, the pubs have gone from 23 at the turn of the century down to one. As for the local (Labour) MP, he is best known for his campaign to build a new airport – in Kashmir.

Just last month, the local chief constable had to resign over his imposition of a ban on Israeli football fans at a game at nearby Aston Villa following pressure from Muslim ‘community leaders’.

It is this sort of sea change which two years ago prompted Tory MP, Paul Scully, to call Sparkhill a ‘no‑go’ zone, though he later apologised. Privately, I have heard former residents complain that ‘it’s the most unBritish place in Britain’.

To some, that is summed up by the fact that a former terrorist – who has described jihad (holy war) as an act of ‘compassion’ – is the front-runner to be a councillor for the area three months from now.

Former jihadi Shahid Butt has announced he will stand in the Sparkhill ward of Birmingham in the May 6 council elections

Others argue that this is a blinkered, racist denial of what ‘being British’ means in the second quarter of the 21st century; that the old white working class were mainly immigrants, too – from Ireland. As for electing a terrorist, they say, look at Northern Ireland electing a former IRA commander in Martin McGuinness.

It certainly does not feel any more of a ‘no-go’ zone than my own bit of London as I wander around Sparkhill. Yet, it is no paragon of social cohesion, either.

Take this bracing opinion from a 60-year-old local man who has lived here nearly all his life: ‘We’ve had this massive influx of migrants coming in for various reasons who are not what I would class as indigenous – as in people like myself, who have been brought up here, gone through the education system and been part of this society for decades. Now we’ve had all this uncontrolled immigration.

‘There should be controlled immigration. We can’t have undocumented people we don’t know walking around our streets. Our kids are not safe, our women are not safe.’

These are not the words of a despairing Brummie from the dwindling white working class. This is that erstwhile convicted terrorist himself, Shahid Butt – dressed in a padded Barbour coat and smart brown shoes – chatting over coffee in a nice cafe amid the bustle (and piles of uncollected rubbish) on Stratford Road.

He tells me he is happy with all the Palestinian flags flying hereabouts but says he is equally in favour of the Union and St George’s flags in neighbouring areas. ‘It’s the country’s flag – and you should see all the Pakistanis flying England flags when there’s a World Cup on.’

Mr Butt also feels that diversity has gone far enough and that he would very much like to see more white faces back in the area.

He readily accepts his own community, ‘including the elders’, are to blame for the two big anti-social bugbears around here: fly-tipping and double-parking.

Robert Hardman visited the Birmingham suburb of Sparkhill, where the streets are still filled with festering uncollected rubbish

‘Fair play to Nigel Farage. As crazy as it sounds, there’s a lot of policies of the Reform party that I actually agree with,’ he says, contrasting today’s immigration policies to his family’s own experience.

‘Now you’ve got every Tom, Dick and Harry coming over here and just jumping the queues and getting benefits.

‘My father came from Pakistan – for Queen and country – and worked for British Rail for 40 years. And he paid his taxes and he built this country and he never took a day off work. Now we’ve got a very lost younger generation, disillusioned with a lot of imports and asylum-seekers as well.’

All of which is what you might expect to hear in a golf club bar in a Tory suburb on the other side of town, but not from an ex-con widely tipped to be a front-runner in a Labour-run pocket of deprivation.

So how on earth did Mr Butt make this transition from Yemeni terror convict to Basil Fawlty?

He tells me that he came ‘from quite a physical violent background’. His first proper fight came in the 1970s with a gang of National Front skinheads: ‘They were grown men and I’m an 11-year-old boy in my school uniform, I’m on my way to school. So this was my wake-up.’

He says he wanted to be a soldier and made three failed attempts to join the Royal Marines before a magazine called Dogs Of War inspired him to volunteer to help Bosnian Muslims during the civil war in former Yugoslavia.

The story then gets rather sketchy as he talks of stints in Afghanistan with the Mujahideen fighting the Soviets (though the Russians had disappeared by this point), and an 18-month spell in prison back in Britain ‘for some money stuff’ – which he ‘quite enjoyed’.

The proportion of BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) residents in Sparkhill stands at 92 per cent

Then he decided to head out to war-torn Yemen to set up a company doing ‘military contracting’ – as you do. ‘I thought: why don’t I set up a security company? I have military experience. I have weapons experience. I have friends who are from that background as well.’

After just a fortnight, he was arrested in the dead of night. He says it was because he knew the son of the London-based Islamic firebrand Abu Hamza who had been stirring up trouble in Yemen.

Mr Butt says he was tortured into signing a confession and put on trial with others accused of various terror plots in ‘a kangaroo court’. ‘This was a cowboy country, labelled a terror sponsor.’ He got five years.

During his time in prison, the world was turned upside down by the 9/11 terror attacks of 2001. There was no jubilation, he insists. ‘We were horrified because everybody knew they were going to come hard for the Muslims.’ On his release and return to Sparkhill two years later, he says he was approached by various radical Islamist groups but he refused them. Instead, his aim, he claims, was to deradicalise young Muslim men and he assisted the government’s Prevent scheme. He had death threats for condemning the ISIS death cult and was accused of being an ‘Uncle Tom’.

A father of four – with a businessman brother and solicitor sister – he says he went respectable and set up a healthcare business.

Mr Butt claims that everyone round here knows him (many seem to) and that his past reputation as a bruiser means he is better equipped to stand up to the local gangs.

‘When I go into these areas, I’m going to be going with some heavy hitters; guys that have got a past like me, who used to be drug dealers, who used to be gangsters and the main guys. They’ve repented and they’ve paid their dues. When I’ve got five or six of them guys, nobody’s going to be messing around.’

I hear echoes of two brothers with a similar message in London’s East End back in the day, except that Ronnie and Reggie Kray liked to operate out of pubs. Round here there are next to none.

Mark McDwyer is still pulling pints at McDwyers, the pub his mother bought in 1997. It ticks over happily, thanks to its thriving pool league, regular functions and a loyal clientele of chaps like Alan, Peter and Mick, retired members of the once-booming Irish community who are enjoying a mid-afternoon half or two.

I find no great resentment towards the changing face of Sparkhill, just a sense of nostalgia. ‘We all change, and areas change too,’ says Peter.

‘My children don’t drink the way I do,’ adds Alan.

Behind the bar, Mr McDwyer tells me that his is a ‘dying trade’ – not because of Islam but brewery prices, rising taxes and a shift in drinking habits.

‘City centre pubs are booming but the community pub is becoming a thing of the past,’ the landlord acknowledges, adding that he gets on very well with the other community across the road – the Ibn Salah Al-Shahrazuri Mosque. The only tensions tend to involve parking (there is some astonishingly bad driving here).

Further down, I find another casualty of the changing face of Brum. Ironically, it is that much-loved emblem of the city’s Asian identity: the Balti.

In the 1970s, a Kashmiri chef started making a new sort of stir-fried curry in a red-hot, thin, steel pan. It was so popular that the Sparkhill/Sparkbrook area appeared on maps as the ‘Balti Triangle’, with up to 50 Balti houses. Now, there are just a couple, the most famous being Shababs, still run by the Hussain family. The signature dish is as delicious – and piping hot – as ever.

Hamza Hussain tells me two factors have done for the Balti. First, much of the trade was a white clientele making a night of it – with a pint or three and then a Balti. With no pubs, that crowd has gone. Second, young Asians have different tastes. ‘They get curry at home all the time. When they go out, they want a burger or pizza,’ he says.

The street is now full of fast food joints. In other words, those who lament that the area is becoming ‘less British’ might reflect that it’s becoming ‘less Asian’ too.

All of which makes for a fascinating contest – especially if Sharon Osbourne joins the fray (no response, as yet, to my request for a comment).

‘She’d be very welcome to help us clean up this great city,’ says Robert Alden, leader of the Conservative opposition on the city council, who has invited Mrs Osbourne to don a blue rosette.

Sitting Labour councillor, Rashad Mahmood, tells me that he does not recognise the picture of Sparkhill painted by Mr Butt or the Tories, insisting that his party has brought down crime and that the bin strike is now ‘a minor issue’.

The voters are split. Hafiz Amin, 44, Kashmir-born owner of Pakeeza Halal Meat shop, has had enough of Labour – ‘they say one thing and do another’. And Mr Butt’s terror conviction? ‘Allah wanted him to go down a different path. A person can learn from his mistakes.’

Others, who are reluctant to be named, say that a man with a past like Mr Butt’s should not be on the ballot paper.

Naveed Sadiq, 50, from Yardley, disagrees, saying that Mr Butt, who he knows, is the victim of a ‘witch hunt’. He adds: ‘People are entitled to make changes.’

But all are as one on the Brum bin strike. ‘When the Irish left, we became ambassadors for the area but what standards have we set?’ asks Mr Sadiq. ‘Islamabad is cleaner than Birmingham! And they’ve got half the resources.’

• Additional reporting by Iram Ramzan.