Burnley people say BNP vote is not racism, it’s about not being heard

If someone had told me 20-odd years ago that this place, with its tatty shops, hulking factories, lively hen nights and tacky but strangely alluring Cat’s Whiskers nightclub, would one day be called “Britain’s capital of racism”, I would have thought them overexcitable. The only “bashing” I witnessed was between white lads tanked up on lager.

Yes, there were people who used the word Paki, but weren’t there everywhere? From memory, it was used more in a pitying way than a hateful one, a nod to the underdog. “I’m doing the Paki shift,” someone might say if working nights, the Asian community so often doing the dirty, grim jobs that nobody else wanted. The gobbier kids at my comprehensive school would call cheap, unfashionable clothes Paki gear — a term that I assumed, perhaps naively, came not from malice but an acknowledgment that the Asian community were not only poorer than us but also culturally adrift.

In Burnley now it is obvious that something has changed; many members of the white working class consider themselves to be the underdogs, themselves to have been cut adrift.

In recent decades Burnley has watched the country bask in a prosperity that eluded it. The textile industry — the dark, brick mills and loom-workers upon which its economy was built — has been decimated and with it the structure that provided generations of families with employment. When I grew up in a town a few miles from Burnley — my father an engineer and my mother a school dinner-lady — I remember the three-day weeks and people’s dads suffering periods of unemployment, but not kids having parents and grandparents who had never worked a day in their lives.

As white working-class people’s living standards have fallen, they have watched some of the Asian communities’ improve. There is a perception (not borne out by statistics) that more has been spent on improving Asian areas than theirs, that they have been abandoned for “political correctness”. In the early 20th century Burnley was producing more cotton cloth than anywhere in the world. Now, according to a local newspaper report, there are 22 people chasing every job vacancy.

In the town centre, which is cleaner and more pedestrianised than I remember, I ask Maureen, 61, how she thinks Burnley has changed. “For the worse,” she says. “Too many drugs and not enough jobs. When I left school, if you’d no exams and didn’t have two heads, you’d always find work. Now there’s bugger all. The work’s gone abroad. There’s no industry here.

Her daughter, who has two children, is married but Maureen sometimes thinks she would be better off if she were not. Her daughter and son-in-law have low-paid jobs and struggle to pay a mortgage on a house that has probably declined in value. “The worst thing you can do is just keep your head above water in this country — no one will help you then. But if you’re a single mum who keeps knocking out kids, they’ll set up everything for you.”

When I agree not to use her real name she reveals that she has voted BNP in the past. “I’m not proud of it. My family’s always been Labour but I’ve got kids and grandkids to think of; the BNP at least understand how folk are struggling. Some of the Asian families claim for dozens of kids but then send most of their money back home to their own countries.”

Like almost everyone I meet she denies that Burnley people are racist. “It’s not racism, it’s about not being listened to. It’s not racist to say that you can’t sell your house because it’s . . . in an Asian area or that you’ve worked all these years for nothing — it’s fact. I’d have voted BNP even if there was no Asian community here.”

Racism is defined as believing that one’s own race is superior. This is not the feeling you get from some white people here: on the contrary, they seem to feel that it is they who have become “inferior”, who have become “nobodies”. To call this social shift racism is too simplistic. We do not have an adequate language for what is a relatively new phenomenon.The culprit in many eyes is Margaret Thatcher, who is seen as sticking the boot into manufacturing and making the country too London-centric.

Prestige, which used to be one of the main two employers in Burnley, making pots and pans, closed in the 1990s. The building is now the frontispiece for a retail park of Currys,bed shops and PC World. In Padiham, the ward that elected Ms Wilkinson, a mammoth pile of rubble is what’s left of the Perseverance factory that made textiles for outdoor wear. Burnley’s biggest employer is the public sector.

Linda, of the St John’s Area Residents’ Group in Padiham, believes that Britain is “broken” because it fails to help those who have worked all their lives and are now in need. Her husband was made redundant last year at 57 and cannot find work: “It’s so depressing; he shouldn’t have to start begging at his age. He gets £64 a week: what’s he supposed to do with that? My husband will be lucky if he ever gets a job again. But there’s nothing. No help at all. He doesn’t get his pension until he’s 65. Labour was supposed to support your working man but they’ve let everything go out of the country.”

Her neighbour, David Simm, interjects:“It’s not just a Labour problem; it dates back to Thatcher. Everything seems to focus on London, nothing ever comes up here.” David, a former car repair worker, thinks that if Britain is broken, then it is because of law and order above all else. “I don’t think race is a big issue at all, I really don’t.”

He was struck by something in the local paper: a man prosecuted for a relatively minor crime who had been in court 35 times before. “They hit motorists with parking fines — fair enough — yet someone nicks an old lady’s handbag and just gets their wrists slapped. There’s no deterrent. A few weeks ago someone pinched the collection boxes for Poppy Day in the town hall. That’s broken Britain.”

Another neighbour says that her son, a university graduate, tried to get a packing job. Some 430 people applied. He got a second interview but the job went to someone younger. Last year, he was told, the post could not be filled. “Employers have the pick now; it lets them pay lower wages.”

I walk to the Cat’s Whiskers, the sticky-carpeted emporium where we went to show off our Chelsea Girl outfits, but I find that it has closed and become a Gala Bingo club. The Angels, a more upmarket club where it was harder to get served under-age, has become a TJ Hughes bargain store. Next door is a Wilkinson budget shop.

Where does everyone go clubbing now? A teenage boy tells me that it’s Bojangles, a newish place open until 5am at weekends. Does he drink much? Yes — cider, mainly. What about Muslim teenagers? “Oh, they smoke pot.”

In Duke Bar, the district where Burnley’s race riots erupted in 2001, work is in progress to bulldoze some run-down terraced houses and spruce up others. This is on the border of one of Burnley’s two main Asian areas. The manager thinks that that the town is still a good place in which to live. “There’s good and bad, like anywhere, but Burnley folk are decent people.”

You might expect in the so-called polestar of bigotry to find much racist graffiti. I saw only one example, “Paki bastards” scrawled on a wall near a mosque. In response, someone has scrawled “Bangladesh B-block” above in fancier writing. I ask four 17-year-olds — Rubal, Jubai, Saleh and Imran — whether they suffer from much racism. They shrug. “Sometimes — some people give us stick but we give it back,” smiles Jubai. On the Stoops housing estate, they say, they are likely to be chased away. But mostly it’s all right. Do they like living here? “Sometimes.”

I ask Ms Wilkinson what people say to her on the doorstep. She says that the main worries are employment, schools and immigration. “I heard a lot of people say: ‘I put into the system all my life, I lost my job through no fault of my own and what do I get — £40 a week’.”

Why does she think that the BNP has support here? “The Race Relations Act has silenced people. It’s wrong. People should be able to voice an opinion. They want the Government to understand how they feel, because some people are quite desperate.” She says that employers are tending to give short-term contracts, which means people cannot secure mortgages. Then there is “overcrowding”. “Britain as a whole is full, it’s not just individual towns.”

Is it all so bleak? I don’t think so. Some people that I met were despairing but all were thoughtful and willing to do whatever is necessary to improve things. Few were apathetic — apathy being one of the main contributors to a broken society.

We tend to look at the past and airbrush it, as if there were no binge drinking then, no layabouts, no teenage pregnancy, when there was plenty of all three. I knew a girl who had had three abortions by 16; she had lost her virginity at 12 in a lock-up garage.

There are too many good things happening here for all to be lost, such as Burnley Youth Theatre, where youngsters aged 5 to 19, from all cultures and backgrounds, make drama together. Investment was made in youth arts after the 2001 riots and they form a healthy part of Burnley’s cultural scene. “In my experience, race or background makes no difference to kids,” says Mandy Precious, who runs the drama group. “It’s just another person; colour is irrelevant. They learn their attitudes from adults. We can offer another set of adults who can act as role models.”

Burnley’s schools are in the process of being restructured to make them more integrated. Mash Hussain, a youth leader in local secondary schools, who attended Nelson and Colne sixth-form college in the early 1980s at the same time as me, says this is important because everything begins with school.

“Kids are a blank piece of paper,” he says. “What they hear at home can rub off on them. The BNP want to segregate people . . . But young people do not want segregated communities.” He suggests that racism was less apparent when we were students because the Asian community was less noticeable.

He believes that although racism exists it is not particularly deep-rooted. “There’s a lot of awareness in young people that what the BNP stands for is wrong. My daughter’s a nursery nurse and wears a headscarf and she never had any trouble.”

I do not believe that Britain is broken: it may be ailing and some of its citizens in need, but there is enough good to outweigh the bad.

No need to measure up for the coffin just yet.