Where candidates vie for race supremacy

By Ian Herbert | Wednesday, 13 April 2005 Source: The Independent

One day is much like any another at the Eclipse hairdressers' salon at Oakworth, an affluent, stone-built village in West Yorkshire's Brontë country, so the regulars were drawn from their blow-dryers when a new sports car door parked outside in the street.

The salon's young proprietor Sharon Wiseman was the first to clock that the driver and his passengers were young Asian men, and "up to no good", she assumed. "The first thing I thought was 'drug dealers'," she admitted later.

Her assistant added that she will not let her daughter into nearby Keighley because of stories about "Asians grooming teenage white girls". She also believes it is time to "do something" about Keighley's immigration problem. From beneath a mass of pink rollers, Joan, aged 67, nodded her head vigorously. "Up to no good," she said.

The women's view of their village's race issues are not borne out by facts. Oakworth does not have a drug problem; child "grooming" has been virtually wiped out after several local court convictions; and the sum total of Keighley's "immigration problem" at present are eight asylum-seekers (including a paediatrician, two mechanics, a teacher and an Iraqi nuclear scientist). Most of Keighley's British Asians are born and bred in Keighley and have broad West Yorkshire accents.

But perceptions can get in the way of the facts. And when the Conservative leader Michael Howard is making immigration more central to an election campaign than ever, and the Labour Party is producing plans of its own rather than attacking the Tories as illiberal, the source of these perceptions is clear.

The British National Party (BNP), will field its leader Nick Griffin in Keighley on 5 May, and is busy feeding off local suspicions and anxieties about Asians. The Labour MP Ann Cryer did not expect to hear stories about Asians grooming white teenagers quoted back at her from Oakworth, one of several affluent local sources of BNP support, when she was first alerted to 60 possible criminal cases, back in May 2002.

With typical Keighley directness, she went public and told the Asian community it must deal with the perpetrators. She has adopted the same forth-right tone on many issues, including Asian children speaking English in the home, not missing school to visit relatives on the subcontinent and the dangers of forced marriages.

As well as causing offence to some older members of the Asian community (the "greybeards" as they are known to some in these parts), her pronouncements have given the BNP a meaty issue to bite on. Despite the positive results of her work - which include a change in legislation to ensure parents' testimony can be used against groomers - Mr Griffin has placed it at the top of its election agenda for Keighley. The party first "cloned" the story two years ago, parading it on its website as evidence of endemic Asian paedophilia just one day after Ms Cryer gave it to Channel 4 News.

Mr Griffin, who used the grooming story in his local election campaign video last year to expound his belief that no Asian is welcome in Britain, claims to have filmed local Asian youths boasting in Keighley police station about their criminality for a local election video this time around.

The Conservatives' local candidate Karl Poulsen, a Halifax Bank executive, has leapt on the issue too. "Mrs Cryer is the greatest recruiting sergeant the BNP has ever had," he said.

The BNP's threat is actually minimal here. Though two of the party's candidates were returned to the local Bradford council last May, their collective vote tally was just 4,000. And Mr Griffin, whose questionable local credentials were not enhanced when the key constituency town of Howarth was misspelt on its website, now admits the Conservatives' trenchant espousal of the immigration issues will cause him problems.

"They are legitimising what we are saying," he said yesterday. "That means in some softer areas they are going to take our vote."

But whether it is BNP or Conservative, the anti-immigrant message means the same to Asif, a 20-year-old British Asian of Pakistani descent, who says the election campaign has brought back levels of intolerance he has not seen since the BNP flogged the grooming issue to death at the last local elections.

"It's not physical, just inference," he said, on Drewery Lane, in a rundown district on the fringes of Keighley. "We've been getting along quietly here." He would not give his name for fear that "they'll think I'm trouble". Another man, Mohammed, 60 gave a similar story. "It's the worst it's ever been for suspicion," he said.

The anti-Asian sentiments the men described were to be found at their most unsavoury in the Bakers' Oven café at Keighley's modern shopping centre, where busy retail chains show a former industrial and textiles town starting to make some progress after years of post industrial decline. "We get accused of racism so why can't we," said Michelle Vaughan, 26, one of the "send them back" brigade.

"The local school is 80 per cent Asian so I've had to take my young children out," added Gail Mullerack, 26, who estimated the town's British Asian population to be 80 per cent (it is actually 8 per cent).

In part, Ms Mullerack's insistence that "the Pakis never seem to be on the buses; they're always in their cars", is a reflection of the poverty which still pervades the Keighley side of a constituency which spans two valleys with strikingly different economic fortunes: the Airedale, which is relatively poor, and the Worth, including wealthy Howarth and Ilkley.

But the politicians' messages about immigration also appeared to have hit the spot three miles away "over the hill", as locals say, near the cobbled streets of Howarth, where the Brontës' Parsonage home is a tourist honeypot.

Each of the young mothers pushing their children up the hill from Howarth pre-school falsely believed immigration was on the rise. Not one of them could distinguish between asylum-seekers and immigrants in general, a distinction often fudged by Mr Howard.

"There are a lot more of them [Asians] coming in here," said Claire Brierley, 29, with Charlie, aged three. "Some of them are moving up here from Keighley and there are concerns about house prices."

The political capital being made out of the grooming story by the BNP is a source of anger to the Cryer camp, which has been maintaining a low national profile to keep a lid on the issues it has raised.

The Liberal Democrat candidate, Nader Fekri, a Calderdale councillor of Iranian descent, accuses Mrs Cryer of intemperately "racialising" issues such grooming in the Asian community. It creates the impression that "all Asians are pervs", he said. Mrs Cryer's agent, Mark Taylor, said: "If the by-product of drawing attention to an issue is a few [far-right] nutters, does that mean you should never talk about it? Of course you do."

Many of Howarth's young mothers seem to appreciate Mrs Cryer's stances, especially her intolerance of forced marriages. So do younger Asians such as Mujeeb Rahman, 36, a Keighley success story who got himself to university and has returned as pharmaceutical analyst.

"She has been trying to wake local people up to realities," he said. "There are ingrained aspects of [Asian culture] which have not been good and need sorting. But using racial tactics to further political ends is a dangerous tactic for any party. Once it swallows one target, racism moves on. These politicians are playing with fire."

Though Asians disenchanted by Mrs Cryer's views may defect to either the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats, the biggest threat to Mrs Cryer's 4,000 majority lies at the affluent Ilkley end of the constituency, where the Conservatives are fighting to get enough of the 70,000 electorate out to secure the 4.6 per cent swing they need.

Her position is helped by her long-running opposition to the Iraq war, which should please many British Asians. Mrs Cryer has placed adverts in the Keighley Times advertising herself as an "independent" MP and is proud that Tony Blair did not feature in her 2001 campaign material, let alone 2005.

There are positive sides to the arrival in Keighley of an anti-immigration agenda and the BNP. In response, a "Keighley Together" campaign has been formed, led by unions, the council and businesses, to edge locals into a vision of the town that transcends colour. Black and white "anti-racist" wristbands issued by the group are all the rage this week.

But when the election circus is over, the constituency can return to the real issues that need tackling if Keighley is to find more racial harmony: educational segregation and the under-achievement of Pakistani boys. Just 22 per cent of them get five GCSEs, a statistic which means the leafy lanes of Oakworth and Haworth will remain beyond their reach for years.