Burnley’s reputation has been taken to heart. When I was looking over the files at the local newspaper office, a young man came in, amiable and feckless, and began talking to the woman at the counter in a kind of stream of consciousness way-”I’m just out for a walk, me and there’s nowt to do. There’s nowt to do in Burnley in t’mornin, is there? There’s nowt to do in Burnley any time. You don’t want to walk out at night here. It’s not a great place, is Burnley.” Had it not been so artless, it could have been a comic parody.
Burnley, enfolded in a valley in the moorland between Leeds and Manchester, is now at least on the political map-put there by its resentful whites and ethnic conflict over public funds; a case study in how not to manage industrial decline and racial integration. The borough of some 90,000 people gave 11 per cent of its vote to the British National Party in last year’s general election and now has three BNP councillors. The local paper noted with pride, just before the May council elections, that “about 100 reporters from all over the country will be at the count.”
If that seems like a high point, it is because Burnley is a town that few know or visit. The textile industry faded, the nearby coal mines closed and there was no one in the town with the clout to put something in their place. The brightest and the best left with nothing to attract them back. Quite a few of the post-1997 political elite have Burnley, or near Burnley, roots: Alistair Campbell, the voice of the government; Ian Hargreaves, the former Independent editor; Philip Collins, head of the Social Market Foundation think-tank; Krishnan Guru-Murthy, of Channel Four news. David Wild, a former union official and head of communications for Nirex, is from Todmorden, close to Burnley. He says: “I was brought up on a totally white council estate in the 1970s, my dad worked for the Gas Board, he was a shop steward. He had his routine: dinner on the table when he got home; a settled life. That life disappeared for a lot of people in places like Burnley in the 1980s. The official unemployment is low [3 per cent] but the black economy is big. Most of the money on these bad estates is drug money, and it’s mainly white controlled. The working-class sense of equity, of what’s right, on these estates went in the 1970s and 1980s.”
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