Burnley in the early 2000s

Posted on 05/05/2022

Mike Makin-Waite is the author of On Burnley Road: Class, race and politics in a northern English town. The book explains why, twenty years ago, the town became the first place to have a clutch of far-right BNP councillors elected – and shows how this controversial moment in local politics fed into right-wing populism on a national level. In these excerpts from Mike’s diary, he charts the key events that informed the book.

2000

21 June. A colleague comes back to the office upset after visiting a lunch club the council runs for older people. There’s a big news story about fifty-eight Chinese ‘illegal immigrants’ suffocating to death in a container lorry coming into Dover, and some of the older people were talking about this story as they ate. My colleague says ‘Do you know what they said? They said they deserved it. And they were happy because it will put others off coming’.

11 August. A council-led partnership gets a £20 million grant for housing and community projects around Accrington Road and Burnley Wood – mainly ‘white’ parts of town. There’s also a £1.3 million Sure Start project for Stoneyholme, a ‘predominantly Asian’ area. The Burnley Express is full of letters complaining about ‘more money being spent in Stoneyholme’.

2001

27 May. There’s rioting in Oldham, and people say the BNP stirred it up. We’ve a BNP candidate standing in next month’s general election here.

11 June. In the wake of the Oldham riots, the BNP leader polls 16 per cent in Oldham. Michael Meacher holds the seat for Labour, but Nick Griffin’s vote is big news. The far-right’s Oldham organiser won 11 per cent in the neighbouring constituency, too. Less notice is given to Burnley, where the BNP candidate also won over 11 per cent, in this case without any time, money or troublemaking from BNP national office. On BBC Radio Four, Peter Kilfoyle, the Labour MP for Walton, rightly comments that ‘if you turn people off mainstream politics sufficiently, they don’t disengage entirely, but can be attracted to simplistic nostrums’.

21 June. In a meeting with a dozen senior managers, there’s reference to the recent Oldham riots, and to the high BNP vote in that town – and in this one. Someone wonders whether we will be reviewing our pattern of regeneration spending in the light of all this, as they understand Oldham are already doing. I’m taken aback by the way this comment appears to assume that there is some legitimacy in the complaints the far-right have been stirring up about ‘too much being spent on the Asians’.

28 June. I ask to be part of the team set up to respond to last weekend’s rioting in our town around Duke Bar and Burnley Wood, but my request is declined. I’m told thanks, but no thanks – I need to finish the ‘best value’ reviews I am doing of our leisure services and community centres.

2002

24 April. A car with a trailer plastered with posters pulls up in a parking bay outside a video shop owned by some Asian people: ‘VOTE BNP – Save Your Country’. The man from the shop comes out and starts arguing with the BNP activists – not because of their politics, but because his customers park in the places they’ve taken.

3 May. The BNP have won three seats. We’re the only council in the country with any BNP councillors. Not much gets done in the office today: we’re all talking politics. I think that our results are about Burnley, of course, but they are also a particular expression of a wider trend, a growing rejection of mainstream politics. Other examples: a monkey football mascot has been elected mayor in Hartlepool, and an independent elected in Middlesbrough who is said to be a corrupt, arrogant and populist right-winger.

10 September. At lunchtime, I see a young Asian woman in the town centre wearing a hijab in the design and colours of the Union Jack.

27 September. At this month’s planning meeting, the councillor who objected to a proposed design for a mosque was not BNP, but Labour. He’s not opposed to the mosque as such, he claims, but the minarets would be ‘obtrusive’ and would ‘not be in keeping with Burnley’s identity as a mill town’. The fact that all the mills have been closed down through long-term industrial decline and then Thatcher’s destructive policies is not in keeping with Burnley’s identity as a mill town, either!

2003

16 April. The BNP have campaigned for the Union Jack to be flown from the town hall whenever a British soldier is killed in Iraq. At first, council officers advised against doing this because of some list they’ve got from a government ministry about when the national flag should be flown from municipal buildings (on the Queen’s various birthdays, for example). But petitions came in, and now the flag is up there, and not just when there are casualties. A Labour councillor tells me that they’ve decided it is ‘staying up there forever … that way, the BNP won’t be able to make an issue of it’. I nearly say, ‘if you went further and implemented all of their policies, they won’t be able to argue with you about anything’ – but think better of it.

1 May. Just appointed to the newly-created post of ‘community cohesion manager’, I’m sent on a residential training course at Birmingham University’s Institute of Local Government Studies. We stay up watching election results come through, and Burnley’s on the national news: the BNP have won the most votes and gained the most seats, but because only a third of seats were being contested they had no hope of taking control of the council – this time. ‘What’s that job you’ve just got?’ the other people laugh. One of them says, ‘you’ve gone pale!’ and pours me another whiskey.

15 May. The first council meeting with the BNP as the second largest group on the council. Anti-Nazi League demonstrators throw flour and eggs as the BNPers arrive at the front door. In the meeting itself, the Labour council leader says that people shouldn’t be worried about asylum seekers in Burnley, because ‘there’s only fifty-four of them here’. He’s pointing out that the BNP are stirring up anxieties and promoting myths, but it’s an equivocal argument, effectively conceding ground to the racists.

5 June. A government-appointed Neighbourhood Renewal Advisor comes to give us tips about ‘communications’. They talk for a bit, and then ask for our comments. When we start talking, they open a notebook and start jotting things down – or rather, they try to: their pen doesn’t work!

2004

2 February 2004. It’s clearer to me than ever that the BNP is a kind of symptom. People talk about ‘defeating the BNP’, but the real need is for an effective response to the conditions which generated the far-right. This can’t be simply about rebuilding confidence in ‘mainstream politics’: it’s this which generated the symptom. Instead, a different politics must become mainstream. Rejection of what is currently mainstream politics should not be a rejection of democracy (as BNP leaders would like). The aim must be a more democratic politics.

17 May. There are St Georges’ flags everywhere: in windows, on flagpoles and little plastic things attached to car windows. Preparations for next month’s elections are co-incident with the build up to the big Euro football tournament in Portugal. Someone writes to the Burnley Express, angry that the BNP have hi-jacked the flag and that they can’t express support for the national football team without their neighbours thinking they’re fascists. People respond, saying ‘don’t be ashamed of flying the flag’. I notice that nearly every Asian taxi driver has got the little plastic things and A4 St Georges’ flags fluttering from their cars.

1 June. After work, I meet up for a drink with an old acquaintance who was involved in the Communist Party back in the 1980s. He left Burnley in the 1990s, but came back visiting just before the 2002 council elections. He was horrified to find that one of his old trade union contacts had nominated a BNP candidate, and rang him up to ask why. The answer was that ‘they’re a bit misguided, yes, but they’re just working-class lads, trying to do something right for the town’.

14 June. The BNP haven’t made the big breakthrough they expected. They’ve won a few seats on other councils, including Bradford and Epping Forest, but it’s nothing like what they hoped for. In Burnley itself, they’ve effectively stood still, losing one seat by a big margin, but winning another with a small majority. Even worse for the BNP, it’s Robert Kilroy-Silk’s UKIP which has drawn the anti-European vote in the EU elections, taking twelve seats across different English regions.

 

Read more about how a northern post-industrial town became fertile territory for the extreme right in On Burnley Road: Class, race and politics in a northern English town.