Yorkshire town faces a nasty election campaign- Blame it on the Asians.
Popular subjects "immigration, immigration, immigration"

A small Yorkshire town faces a nasty election campaign, with both left and right arriving at the same conclusion

Monday February 14, 2005
The Guardian

Every time Charles Clarke and Michael Howard compete for the toughest rhetoric on immigration and asylum, spare a thought for the reverberations it has on the streets of a town such as Keighley, where it helps edge the centre of political gravity that bit closer to the British National party.
The West Yorkshire town is bracing itself for what is likely to be its nastiest election campaign ever with the decision of Nick Griffin, the head of the BNP, to stand in the seat. Already, Keighley has won the soubriquet of "racial hotspot" but it could become much worse. Keighley could become emblematic of a brand of endemic British racism, of increasing segregation between the Asian and white communities and a generation of political inertia finally unravelling. A town just re-emerging after several decades of deindustrialisation and high unemployment could find itself lumbered with a new and unwelcome national reputation - as the centre of the BNP's electoral base.

All the evidence is that the election campaign in Keighley will be about one issue. Not "education, education, education" but "immigration, immigration, immigration" - as one weary Labour party worker put it. He was working through the responses to a Labour party questionnaire in the constituency. "I feel a stranger in my own town, I don't dare go there even in the day," wrote one. Even other popular subjects such as crime and litter are code for the same issue.

But, of course, this is not about immigration. Many in the Asian community are born and bred in Keighley and have broad West Yorkshire accents; others have been there for 30 or 40 years. But that makes no difference on the white estates and villages that ring the town, and where the BNP has two councillors. All Asians are immigrants, and the distinction from asylum seekers is equally muddled. It all gets boiled down to the same basic rubric: "they" shouldn't be here, "they" should go "back home".

The key issue is not Keighley's racism - which like much of West Yorkshire and the rest of the country is deeply rooted and nothing new - but why it is becoming so much more assertive. Why is a modus vivendi of the past 40 years in many of the mill towns along the M62 coming unstuck now, just as their economies are picking up and unemployment has fallen dramatically (in Keighley, it's down by over 50%)? Explanations about poor communities competing for scarce resources may have some truth, but it's not the whole story. Prosperous white areas are also sympathetic to the BNP: one of their councillors won in the pretty middle-class villages around Haworth last year. Griffin could do real damage to Ann Cryer's slender Labour majority of just 4,005.

There are two main narratives to explain what is happening in Keighley. One, with strongly racist overtones, links three disparate elements. It argues that the Asian population is growing fast - across the Bradford district it grew from 50,000 in 1991 to 75,000 in 2001, partly because it is a very young population. It then picks up on two recent scandals in Keighley that have hit the headlines: a case of young girls being groomed for sex and the murders of four Asian men in 2002 in a tit-for-tat drug-related gang feud. The conclusion is: something must be done about the Asian community.

The second narrative on the liberal left has the same conclusion - and therein lies a big problem - but arrives by another route. Its concern is social cohesion and it points to the increasing segregation of education in Keighley which, as in the rest of Bradford district, is exceeding residential segregation. It points to the terrible educational under-achievement, particularly of Pakistani boys (22% get five GCSEs). It argues that the only way to tackle the chronic poverty of the Asian community is through education and suggests that the high rate of transcontinental marriages - it is traditional among the Pakistanis to marry a first cousin, usually from Pakistan - is holding back the community.

This is the narrative Cryer has adopted. With her Keighley directness, she has caused great offence within the Asian community by her pronouncements on issues such as Asian children speaking English in the home and her criticisms of transcontinental marriages.

There are some in the Asian community who might agree with Cryer's conclusion, but they deeply resent the issues she picks and how she speaks about them. Azhar Hussain, for example, is a Keighley success story. He got himself to Skipton grammar school and the London School of Economics. Now an accountant in Leeds, he returned to live in Keighley to put something back into his community. He bristles at the idea that anyone can tell him whom he should marry. His wife came from Pakistan, and he finds it deeply insulting that anyone should suggest it will hold back his children. His choice of wife ensures that his children will grow up confident and familiar in both cultures.

Hussain is well aware that the Asian community must change, but believes that the solutions have to come from within, and that criticism only adds to the sense of a community under siege. He and a group of other Keighley professionals have a set up a centre that serves both as a homework club for kids - with internet access, Monopoly, and Roald Dahl books - and as a madrasa for learning the Qur'an. More than a hundred kids an evening are using the terraced house.

The danger of the two dominant narratives is that they are subtly reinforcing each other: in both, the Asian community is the problem. Meanwhile, neither narrative challenges the white community. What has been absent in small towns such as Keighley has been the political leadership to steer the town towards a multi-racial identity. In a town where you can still be called an "offcum-den" 50 years after moving in, that reshaping of civic identity was not going to be easy, but it wasn't helped by the fact that the stuffing was knocked out of the town, politically as well as economically. Keighley is still smarting from its amalgamation into Bradford council in 1974. Its civic life has never recovered: it was reduced to little more than a suburb.

The task of edging the stubborn, proud, independent-minded residents of Keighley into a vision of the town that transcends colour was shelved for a generation. Only now is it emerging in a campaign, Keighley Together. The next few months will determine whether that vision can begin to catch on and hold off the BNP or whether a nasty election sets it back for another generation.

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