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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Lifestyle
Jessica Murray Social affairs correspondent

What happened next: Maggots, rats and growing despair – a year of the Birmingham bin strike

Birmingham Unite
Shafaq Hussain, chair of the ‘End The Bin Strike’ campaign. He is by fly tipping in the Small Heath area of the city.
Shafaq Hussain: ‘People are just fed up – we’ve had maggots, we’ve had rats.’ Photograph: Andrew Fox/The Guardian

It’s an icy cold winter morning, and 80-year-old Mohammed Bashir is armed with a broom, tackling the large pile of rubbish that has accumulated outside his terraced house in Small Heath, Birmingham.

This has become an almost daily activity for Bashir since the city’s bin strike started 50 weeks ago and, like many in the city, he is starting to lose patience.

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