How did Birmingham get into this fine mess?

It’s not as if he had no idea what was happening. John Cotton, the Labour leader of the council, is a member of the GMB union which is at the forefront of the drive to drain the local authority of its money.

Yet he claimed he only learned of the financial crisis at the same time as other councillors during Tuesday morning’s cabinet meeting.

In the immortal words of John McEnroe: “You cannot be serious.”

It’s not as if the crisis emerged out of a clear blue sky. In June, the council stopped any extra spending because it had run out. More to the point, its auditors Grant Thornton have refused to sign off the council’s accounts for two years in a row because it didn’t have the funds to meet its £760m equal pay liability.

The accountant said the council “materially under-stated” its liabilities. What does that mean? Was it a simple mistake? Was it wishful-thinking? Were Birmingham’s leaders deliberately trying to mislead the voters? Or were they simply too dim to see what was happening?

If the council were a private company, it would have been trading while insolvent and its directors would be facing action.

This slow-motion car crash has been heading for a brick wall for more than a decade. In 2012, when Wolverhampton Council started paying out millions to dinner ladies and carers entitled to equal pay with dustmen and park-keepers, I wrote on these pages that this was “Labour’s ticking time-bomb”.

As long ago as 1997, Tony Blair’s Labour Government did a deal with the unions promising to increase the pay of women to match that of men doing ‘similar’ jobs.

The result is the GMB union taking one council after another to court demanding back-pay for all its under-paid female members.

The catastrophic price has still not been paid. In a bid to meet its liabilities, Birmingham sold off its crown jewels – the National Exhibition Centre company – for £307 million. As a testament to the local authority’s financial competence, it’s worth noting the buyers, Lloyds Bank, offloaded the company for £800m three years later, trousering almost half a billion in profit.

Birmingham’s problems have been made worse because it has introduced a new IT system which was supposed to cost £19m. The bill is now likely to hit £100m.

How is this possible? Surely this council is so utterly dysfunctional its leaders should be forced to resign and fresh elections called.

Birmingham, as we are constantly reminded, is the largest local authority in Europe. It has a history of enlightened government dating back to the Victorian era. That reputation is now trashed.

Every councillor associated with the management of the city should be required to quit and banned from seeking re-election. Meanwhile, the Government must step in and impose a leader. The obvious choice is Andy Street, Mayor of the West Midlands. He has business experience and it’s not as if he’s got anything else to do, given that Mayor of the West Midlands is a non-job.

However, for all its astonishing failures, Birmingham’s plight is not entirely of its own making nor is it unique to the city. Every local authority in the country is vulnerable to the GMB union’s campaign to win millions of pounds in back-pay for its members. You can’t blame the union or those people queuing up for a dollop of free money.

Our present Government must tackle the issue urgently and introduce legislation to limit the liabilities facing public and private-sector employers. It’s all very well doling out extra money to retired cleaners and teaching assistants but not if it means municipal meltdown.

In the case of bankrupt Birmingham, though, the ruling Labour group deceived the voters into believing it had this financial fiasco under control. If the guilty councillors won’t resign in disgrace en masse and can’t be kicked out, then at the very least they must acknowledge their part in Birmingham’s downfall and axe all their very generous allowances.

That alone will save over £2 million a year and, with a bit of luck, even Councillor Cotton will notice something’s not right.