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."
Helen Clarkson, who teaches in a Burnley primary school, lives some way out and only goes in to work: she won't shop there, even in full daylight on a Saturday, "there's so much drunkenness, and violence." The part of Burnley which always comes up in discussions of violence is Burnley Wood, a district of late 19th-century artisans' dwellings: as grim a place as you can see in Britain, with streets in which-in the middle of the day-the men wander in vests and the women in slippers, surrounded by burned out cars, with as many as half of the houses boarded up. The faces are all white: this is poor white country.
Poor Asian country is another region of similar houses, a ward called Daneshouse with Stoneyholme, hard by the M65, which slices through the north of the town. Daneshouse has had some money spent on improvements to the pavements and the lighting, and it is much livelier: many more children are on the streets, as well as elderly men and women who appear to have roles rather than merely existences. Burnley Wood's complaint about Daneshouse is that it gets the money which they do not: that larger Asian families make claims on the social security and other budgets which their taxes cover; that Asian children, who often have poor English, take up the time and funds in schools denied to their own, often struggling kids. At Clarkson's junior school, where there are only three Asian children out of 220, there is still some sympathy for the BNP. She says: "One person said good luck to the BNP if they can get something done. A couple of BNP voters admitted to being racist, others are just fed up with the situation."
Do immigrant communities take money and resources away from the indigenous population? Liberals tend to see this claim and the rest of the anti-immigrant litany as a kind of false consciousness or as simple racial prejudice. But rather like free trade, immigration can be a benefit for the country as a whole, yet a cost for some groups of people in it. Or at least a "perceived" cost. Perception is a weasel word you hear a lot in this debate. But if you talk to alienated whites in areas of high immigration what often emerges is an idea of justice which is at odds with the modern liberal state. They cling to a notion of justice based on the reciprocal obligations of a particular local (usually white) community which is acutely hostile to "free riding," especially by outsiders. This local idea of justice has been in retreat over the past 30 years, eclipsed by a more universal notion of rights and needs which assumes an equal affinity towards, and between, all citizens. It is this notion of justice which dominates the national discourse of the political and media class, the welfare bureaucracy and the legal system. It also informs the distribution of public goods such as council flats and grants for urban renewal. And it is thanks to this idea of justice that immigrants do sometimes do better out of the welfare system: their needs-judged by incomes, number of children and so on-are greater even than those of many poor whites.
The conflict between these notions of justice has been at its most acute in public housing. Housing was a factor behind the BNP's only previous local council success-the election of Derek Beackon in the London borough of Tower Hamlets in 1993. Anne Sofer, who was director of education in the borough at the time, says that some of the local whites, especially on the Isle of Dogs, were outraged when Asian families started jumping ahead of them in housing queues on the grounds of greater need. Waiting in turn for a few years for a council flat or house was, at least until the 1970s, part of the inherited package of rights for the respectable working class in big cities like London. Getting on the waiting list often required connections which, by definition, discriminated against outsiders, especially immigrants. Municipal socialism worked for "our people"; until the rules were changed.
Paul Barker, the former editor of New Society, says: "Council housing after the war was for the aspiring working class, people who kept their doorsteps clean. There was a tradition in the East End of 'having a word' with a councillor or an official about getting a flat for the son. In the 1970s, all that went. There was a view that this wasn't serving the needs of the poor. At the same time, the aspiring working class were moving out to Essex. So as large-scale immigration happened, the docks were declining and you were left with a group of whites who hadn't got out and who resented the even poorer Asians who seemed to be getting things which they felt were due to them." This view remained strong in the East End-so strong that the Liberal Democratic leaderships of Tower Hamlets in the 1980s and early 1990s brought back a modified version of a white-friendly "sons and daughters" policy for housing allocation.
Burnley, like Tower Hamlets, was a strongly proletarian place in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The mills were its backbone and wealth. They produced a large and cohesive working class, which in turn produced a Labour majority when the franchise was extended. Henry Hyndman, founder of the Marx-inspired Social Democratic Federation, stood four times in Burnley-unlike the BNP, his party never won a council seat. But the agitation and distress of the workers forced the council to move workers' families out of slums into suburban estates: while the mill owners put up "model housing"-what are now the Burnley Wood and Stoneyholme districts.
The Asians who came to Burnley and other mill towns from the late 1950s were an expedient by the textile manufacturers to stave off low cost competition from Asia itself (and Italy). The early immigrants were men, who went back to the Punjab or Gujarat to marry when they had enough cash: their need was for low-cost housing, and they found it in the old Victorian quarters of these towns. In Burnley, as elsewhere, the whites tended to move out. When the rest of their families came in the 1960s and 1970s, the Asians were often allocated council houses on grounds of need: today Daneshouse, ranked as the eighth poorest ward in Britain, benefits from a range of programmes which include housing grants for large families, paying to convert two houses into one.
The senior Asian councillor in Burnley is Mohammad Rafique Malik. He was elected to the council in 1976, when the Asian community was only 2,000 (it is now about 5,000). He was chairman of housing for four years in the 1990s (Burnley's 5,400 council houses are now administered by a separate corporation)-and many whites blame him for pushing housing money to his constituents in Daneshouse. He in turn blames the independent councillor Harry Brooks, who led a group of largely ex-Labour members, for always pointing the finger at Daneshouse and saying, that's where the money goes. "Of course, some money went there. But we are putting ?20m in another renewal area which covers Burnley Wood. No Asians there. I campaigned for and got ?7m in improvements across the town, mostly in non-Asian areas. But people don't talk about that."
Immigrants have often been accused of putting whites out of jobs: that complaint is not loud in Burnley. It may be that the experience of mill work, taken by Asians when the wages were forced below what most whites would accept, has negated this kind of resentment. Unemployment is low, though everyone says that is just because it is harder to sign on. Asians and whites say that the drugs industry is "employing" a lot of young men. It is said to be strongest in the Stoops estate, which is almost wholly white.
Masood Ahmed Mirza, who stood as a Liberal Democrat in Daneshouse-"to keep out the BNP" [he did]-says he worked as a night overseer in a factory in the early 1960s. "It was terrible work: no English wanted to do it, though there were a few Scots and Irish. The wages were bad and there was so much dust and noise. Most of the workers didn't speak English. They made me night manager because I could speak English well, and several other languages of the areas the workers came from."
Mirza, like others of the Asian community (he was one of the few who would be quoted) attributes the youth violence to unemployment and drugs. A member of the local task force which produced a report on last year's riots in Burnley, he says that some young people in the Asian areas "were doing bad things, as in the white areas. You see, I don't think the riots were at root racist. When we dug into it, we found that an Asian lad had been selling drugs, and claimed he hadn't been paid by a white lad, and then the thing escalated from there, and of course it became racial because there was a white gang and an Asian gang."
The most contested area after housing is education. The schools in Burnley are increasingly either white or Asian: in part reflecting the concentration of whites and Asians in separate wards, in part by white and Asian preference. Helen Clarkson, the junior school teacher, says that white parents make it clear that they do not want their children to go to Asian schools and they often appeal if their child is allocated to such a school. "Parents say, the Asians get extra help in class for their English and that's taking away from my child. It's true there is language help, but it's an extra resource, and the white kids don't suffer."
Burnley's Asian schools have better results than many of the white comprehensives. It has been a similar pattern in Tower Hamlets, according to Anne Sofer: "Asian children generally tended to do better than white kids, even with language problems." Sofer also saw white flight from certain state schools: with the Anglican and Roman Catholic schools, which refused Muslims, being used by the white parents.
Yet this pattern is neither inevitable nor universal. The evidence of one teacher (who did not wish to be named) who had taught in Halifax was that the girls' school in which he taught, with 60 per cent Asian children and 40 per cent whites, worked well socially and educationally. The problems, he said, were largely cultural and familial: Asian girls were forbidden to take religious education; were sometimes absent for weeks when the family returned to Pakistan; and were often the subject of arranged marriages, which could distress them. Academically, however, they tended to be hard working and striving. Mirza, himself a graduate, has five children all of whom went to British universities. Both Sofer and the Halifax teacher believe that Asian families care more than the demoralised and sometimes fractured white families, whose sense of abandonment spreads to indifference about children's attainments.
Did 11th September exacerbate things? The Halifax teacher said, in a hesitant and regretful voice, that "yes, some Muslims did celebrate after 11th September. There was a lot of anti-American feeling. It caused tension in the school, a lot of fierce arguments, though no violence. I would encourage talk about it, have it out as a debate. It's better now." In Tower Hamlets, however, it does not seem to be much better. The Islamic Society at the Tower Hamlets College has been banned from using the college facilities, because of extreme and anti-semitic utterances.
Running through many accounts of Burnley-type problems is the claim that the Asian and white communities lead "parallel lives"-even when most of the Asians are second or third generation. The phrase is found in a report, "Community Cohesion," written for the government by Ted Cantle after last summer's riots in Burnley, Oldham and Bradford. Cantle's report is the first time in an official document that the white working class is identified as an oppressed minority. The BNP also use this idea, aping the language of multiculturalism.
But when do parallel lives-the tendency to stick to one's own kind-flip over into active hostility towards other kinds? Burnley seems to provide the perfect preconditions for such a flip: a demoralised and leaderless indigenous population; separate education and housing; a zero-sum game between racial groups over area-based public funding; growing aggression between the young, often over drug territories; and, finally, the tendency of many Muslim families to look inwards which contributes to the lack of language skills of the women-who do not, or cannot make friends with white women.
It is not hard for a party, even one as extreme as the BNP, to exploit this. They have done so. Steve Smith, its leader in Burnley, sits in his one-room shop. It is full of photographs of Old Burnley and ornaments and decorations with an accent on skulls and knights in armour. Posters of Lord of the Rings on one wall face a portrait of Richard Wagner. Smith is courteous and intelligent, with the physique of a body builder. He believes that much of what is happening in his town is "natural-everyone prefers their own. Lions and tigers don't go together. There's a reaction all over Europe. People are reacting against lies told in the name of multiculturalism. There's an agenda which is part of globalisation-breaking down people's resistance to capital moving from country to country. The end is world government, it's the destruction of the individual and cultural differences." The rhetoric is anti-capitalist, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-globalisation-a link with the far left who are, however, their most militant opponents.
Smith confirms the view expressed by many that the BNP stood not so much on a racist programme as an anti-council one. "The local council is Labour. The county council is Labour. People turn to us because they feel no connection with them, they no longer represent them. We, the BNP, put up councillors who everyone knew, local people, ordinary people, ex-servicemen." One councillor, Terence Grogan, is a former paratrooper who served in the Falklands; another David Edwards, is a professional engineer; the third, Carol Ann Hughes, is an office worker. The BNP is for negotiated repatriation: Smith says that the rate of Asian increase means that it is not possible to merely put a stop to immigration.
The BNP does not deny that it is racist, in the sense that it believes in the separation of the races. It sees events like 11th September as demonstrations of the truth of its views. In Burnley, it gains from what appears to be a rather supine council. Even Malik, a Labour loyalist, says, "I am not running away from responsibility for bad communication. We should have done better. One problem is that I am always the one to say-we're not putting money just into the Asian area. People say-he would say that, wouldn't he? I wish my white colleagues would do more."
Many whites don't seem to like, or want to try to like, their Asian neighbours. Malik thinks the divisions in the town have worsened since the 1970s. "People have withdrawn into their own areas. Daneshouse was 10 per cent Asian, now it's over 60 per cent. [Many whites say it is 100 per cent]. On the other hand, the younger Asians are not as enclosed as their fathers and grandfathers were. They used to work in the mills, on the night shift. They spoke to no one but Asians. They slept in the day."
Attempts to patch things up make Burnley sound like a war zone. "It is very bad," says Mizra. "But I and some others in the community have made an agreement with people from Burnley Wood. Ten of us go there and are welcomed and have tea and cakes; and then ten of them come to Stoneyholme and have hospitality here. It works well." John Hargreaves, who comes from Burnley and now teaches history in a school in Kirklees, mentions a wedding of an Asian pupil that he went to-"there were eight whites, another teacher and his family, and about 1,000 Asians. It was a tremendous event, they were hugely welcoming." He also mentions a football match which is regularly played in Halifax between Asian youths and the local police. These initiatives speak to an almost formal, even diplomatic exchange far from the multi-ethnic ideal of neighbourly intimacy, mixing in schools and pubs or even intermarriage-which is strongly discouraged, mostly on the Asian side.
Like some of the loyalist communities in Northern Ireland, the white working class in places like Burnley lack leaders produced from within, except those who lead criminal gangs. There are Asian councillors and public figures like Malik and Mirza, who form a political elite in the town. But they tend to see representation less in party political terms than in communal terms: Mirza, when listing councillors, talks of one representing the Punjabis, another the Pashtuns.
Net migration into Britain is rising (it fell in the 1960s and 1970s) and the children of recent immigrants will account for most of the population increase in the coming years. This will change the nature of some corners of the country and some whites will resent it. Politicians cannot simply dismiss such grievances as illegitimate, even though they will often be expressed in unacceptable language. They need to acknowledge the truth as people experience it, including the fact that some immigrants do qualify for more funds than whites. They need to explain why this is so without expecting poor whites to be happy about it. They must, above all, try to avoid race-based competition over public funds.
Some whites feel very strongly that they have been the losers from immigration-and point out, not unreasonably, that they were never consulted about it. This has bred a cynicism about politicians who seem indifferent or even hostile to their feelings. Although the BNP vote goes into the middle class, it has its root among poorly educated, low-income whites. So far, thanks in part to its extremism and the fact that few places are as bad as Burnley, the BNP has not made national the sense of desolation and betrayal on which it thrives. Someone more respectable might try. Then we will discover how widespread the "Burnley effect" is. Meanwhile, the Labour party has felt a blast of uncertainty and resentment from the moors.
