In this section, I look for clues as to why a specific image of Bradford has taken hold and been reproduced. I explore North-South cultural politics, which make it easy for the population to find confirming evidence of the negativity of Bradford. I then look at the politics of multiculturalism, which form part of the context in which a story about Bradford has been created. Finally, I consider the power of the media in defining newsworthiness and creating an agenda of what is a compelling story.
a – North-South cultural politics and prejudice against the North Here, I explore how a “matrix of attitudes” (Russell, 2003: 50) towards the North has formed over centuries and how this forms a context for the development of a story of Bradford. According to Helen Jewell’s work (as cited in Russell, 2003),
“representations of the North as bleak, damp, grimy, ungrateful and uncivilised are easy to find and [...] have been present from at least the fourteenth century and possibly earlier.” (Russell, 2003: 51) More positive images of the North, linked to its scenery and pre-industrial times especially, can be found (Russell, 2004). However, with the industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, the image of the North was overwhelmingly negative and crystallised as such. It has endured since then and notably has been reinforced by jokes about the North used both by insiders and outsiders (for a detailed study of representations and place of the North in national culture since 1840, see Russell, 2004), despite occasional emphases on more
positive elements of Northern British identity (for example, hard-working, funny, welcoming, and committed to politics (Russell, 2003; Bainbridge, 1984).).
Attitudes towards the North are also informed by a class identity and prejudice as the North has become associated with the working classes, whose harsh living conditions in the industrial North have been portrayed in such works as Gaskells’
North and South (1855) and Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier (1937). According to Shields, the North as the land of the working class became defined as an “Other”
from the South. He writes about the “North” that it is “an invention cast as the foreign ‘Other’ of the socially constructed orderliness of the British nation centred around London.” (1991: 218) Again, this sense of otherness has persisted from the industrial revolution to more recent times. For example, although the “riots” or disturbances in 2001 happened in only a few locations, they became dubbed the
“northern riots,” thus defining “racial tension as a northern problem” (Russell, 2003: 50) and in the process stigmatising and othering the North as the prime location of Britain’s contemporary social ills.
It is in this context of specific national attitudes towards the North that the national storying of Bradford must be understood, and the city’s othering can be located in the continuation of long-term cultural politics in the UK linked to phases of industrialisation and deindustrialisation. Within a story of the North defined from the South, Bradford was not always used as a symbol for the North, and cities like Wigan, Sheffield and Liverpool were more often the target of Southern prejudice (Russell, 2003). However, this changed with the wave of deindustrialisation of the late 1970s and 1980s, which quashed the working-classes and their way of life. It was then that Bradford was singled out amongst Northern cities and stigmatised as a bleaker place within the bleak North (Russell, 2003) and started attracting writers and journalists. The accounts they produced tended to repeat “the Southerner’s prejudices about the gloomy and unhealthy North of England.” (Schmid, 1997: 173) Through such constant reporting, Bradford became the convenient symbol of Northern and class struggle and stories about Bradford that confirmed stereotypes
of “grim Northern city,” mobilising long-established cultural ideas of the grim North spread. Easy to mobilise stories affirming the decline of the city provided confirming evidence of the condition of the North.
b – Politics of multiculturalism and prejudice against ethnic minorities
Bradford became singled out amongst other cities also due to its large “Asian”
population (Russell, 2003; Schmid, 1997). Here, I investigate the influence of politics and national discourse about multiculturalism on the national story about Bradford.
According to Gould and Qureshi (2009), there is a British historical narrative within which a national identity is defined by and closely linked to issues of national and international power of the UK. They write “an official collective sense of national identity [was] forged over the period of colonisation, and surviving into the post-colonial era” has set “the standard paradigms of identity and power” in Britain (2009: 12). However, this mainstream British historical narrative does not sit comfortably with local histories of “Asian” migration and settlement in the UK, which challenges the idea of shared values and national identity attached to the nation state. Thus, a tension emerges between the idea of multiculturalism “as a vision of peaceful coexistence, where members from different ethnic backgrounds accept each other’s value systems and ways of life” (Schmid, 1997: 164) and the reality of the integration demands that the idea of Britishness is linked to the official British narrative, as it relies on unity around a mythical white culture associating Britishness with whiteness, “understatement, civilized discourse and respect for reason.” (Kureishi, 1986: 166) Such attitudes have been particularly dominant in the “New Right” movement (Kureishi, 1986), which took hold in the 1980s of Margaret Thatcher and endured, and stories around the Honeyford affair and the Rushdie affair can be understood in relation with this discourse. They reveal the changing relationship between “host” and “immigrant” communities, as the latter become more settled and established, and more politically assertive. As such, they are remembered not necessarily for the specific facts of the case, but more as symbolic markers of a cultural change, specifically a cultural change that
threatens the “host” community. It is in this context that journalists and commentators travelled to Bradford and assessed the situation in the city against this myth of a national identity. As Schmid writes, “When English travellers through England describe their country they usually consciously or unconsciously present a specific construction of Englishness, some sort of belief in a national identity. The realities of the England that a travel writer finds are structured around the England for which he is looking. In this context, a foreign community necessarily serves as a contrast,” (1997: 176) which is why Bradford tends to be othered due to its large
“Asian population.” With the spread of the New Right discourse, “discourses of otherness coincide with discourses of Englishness.” (Schmid, 1997: 164)
If the focus was already on the nation-state before the 2001 riots, it became even more so after the summer of 2001, especially as this was closely followed by the attacks of 9/11. The riots surfaced fears that cities like Bradford had been “taken over” by an ethnic minority, which played into wider fears about changing demographics and identity in the UK. In terms of discourse, this translated into the idea of failure of multiculturalism and the agenda of community cohesion. In the political sphere, for example, the Cantle report (2001)24 speaks of the level of segregation as being higher than the authors had imagined, so much so that they claim people in the cities affected by the rioting in 2001 live “parallel lives.” (9) They observed poverty, unemployment, and resentment between communities. To a certain extent, they framed the riots (in Burnley more than Bradford) as a drug crime (Alexander, 2004). But they also framed them in terms of deprivation and disaffection. However, their suggested solutions focused more on “community cohesion” through interaction between communities, than on dealing with other underlying issues such as unemployment, thus locating the reasons for the riots in the failure of communities to live together. According to Alexander (2004), the
24The Cantle Report is the result of an investigation by the Community Cohesion Review Team, led by Ted Cantle and established by the Home Secretary at the time of the 2001 riots. The task of the review team was “to seek the views of local residents and community leaders in the affected towns and in other parts of England on the issues which need to be addressed to bring about social cohesion” (Cantle, 2001: 1) in the wake of the disturbances.
Cantle Report and the Denham Report (2001), another Home Office report following the “Northern” disturbances, put the emphasis on young men, and present them as criminals, which “reflects the ongoing process of the criminalization of Asian youth and their increased visibility in the criminal justice system.” (542) As such, the official reports into the riots also sanctioned the conservative story of young Muslim and Asian men as pathological and culturally dysfunctional (Alexander, 2004), which to a certain extent shows that the blame for discord between communities lies with them. From this analysis, the community cohesion agenda was created, which was heralded as the solution to finding a national identity that all citizens could identify with in the UK (Burnett, 2008).
Rather than advocating the inclusion of various cultures, the concept of community cohesion moves away from the idea of multiculturalism towards a more exclusive way (Bleich et al. 2010) of dealing with ethnic minorities. This is evident, for example, in Norman Tebbit’s comments following the London bombings in July 2005. In 1990, Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet minister claimed that “A large proportion of Britain’s Asian population fail to pass the cricket test. Which side do they cheer for? ... Are you still harking back to where you came from or where you are?” (Tebbit, as cited in Andrews, 2007: 202) Following the 7/7 attacks on London, he claimed that multiculturalism was undermining British society and that “a multicultural society is an impossibility.” (Tebbit, 2005 as cited in Andrews, 2007:
203) More recently, the British Prime Minister David Cameron criticised state multiculturalism for preventing the creation of a strong British national identity (BBC, 2011). In this context, Bradford became a prime site for rolling out community cohesion as it appeared its “Asian” population needed “fixing.” Thus, not only was the city othered, but it was also recruited symbolically in support of the political discursive position on the failure of multiculturalism, which reinforced the image of the city as contested.
c – Newsworthiness and power relations in popular media
Considering that violence (Spare, 1998), negativity (Galtung and Ruge, 1965), conflict and relevance (Harcup and O’Neill, 2001) are amongst the news values that can determine whether a story is going to make the headlines, it is perhaps
unsurprising that these elements characterise the coverage of events in Bradford over the years. The city has suffered from the general tendency towards reductionism and sensationalism in the popular media. Indeed, in its recent inquiry on press standards and practices, Lord Leveson has criticised the practice of
“sensational and unbalanced reporting in relation to ethnic minorities, immigrants and/or asylum seekers” (EIN, 2012) in parts of the press. Bradford, with its large
“Asian” and immigrant population, has certainly experienced such sensationalist reporting in which the representation of events such as the riots in the media become more significant than the events themselves (Russell, 2003).
In addition, the stories about Bradford are often constructed by outsiders occupying various social positions who come in for a short period of time, leave the city and report to other outsiders on what they have seen. The profile of the travel writers who came to Bradford and confirmed stereotypes of northernness and otherness is telling in this respect. Beryl Bainbridge was a prolific and award-winning author, Hanif Kureishi a “cosmopolitan Londoner” (McLoughlin, 2006a:
126), Dervla Murphy a “white, bourgeois, middle-aged, Irish woman” (McLoughlin, 2006a: 126) and Bill Bryson a best-selling American author. Nowadays, it is the
“essentially middle-class industry” (Manzoor, n.d.) of television, with decision-making powers located in the South of the country, which sends cameras and journalists to Bradford to document the life in the city and perpetuate a similar story to that of the travel writers. This necessarily impacts on the story of Bradford told at the national level.