Michael Clifford: Is Boris Johnson the man for the moment?
Mike Sutcliffe thinks Boris is the man for the moment.
“He has his faults. But he knows the way the country voted and he is not going to renege on that. We are leaving," says Sutcliffe.
Sutcliffe is manning a stand for veteran armed forces personnel at the entrance to Pendle Rise Shopping Centre in the town of Nelson, Lancashire. Nelson has a storied history, a depressed present and a highly uncertain future. It was a place looking desperately for something to latch onto when the Brexit vote came along in 2016.
If you want to take the temperature of British politics today, Nelson is a good place to start.
“I want my country’s independence back,” Sutcliffe says.
Does he think it will improve Nelson, a post industrial town of 30,000 with unemployment soaring above the national average?
Yes I do. I have to believe in something. If the dream comes through, if we can now have free trade with whomever we want then it can only benefit us. You don’t have to be a scientist to work that out.
Inside the Pendle Rise centre, around a third of the shopping units are closed. The largest shuttered unit belongs to Home Bargains, a discount chain store with branches throughout England.
Further in, an exhibition of photographs takes up another darkened shopfront. This was erected a few years ago to celebrate the centre’s 40th birthday. It opened in 1967 to much fanfare. Ken Dodd put in a celebrity appearance in the 1970s. Home Bargains came in the 80s.
The place was still rocking in the 90s. Today, it dozes through a trickle of late morning pedestrian traffic. The brands have fled.
Nearly all the shops are independent retailers. Nelson is busy waiting for something to happen.
The town, about an hour north of Manchester, is in the heart of Lancashire’s old cotton mill country, four miles from the bigger town of Burnley. It sits at the foot of Pendle Hill overlooking an old canal that was dug to transport the cotton south. The canal is no longer in use for commercial use and the train service poor. The motorway ends at Nelson, effectively rendering it a cul-de-sac.
An alien dropped into the town centre might have difficulty identifying where in the world they had landed. The 2011 Census reported that 41% of residents are of Asian origin — mostly Pakistanis who were originally brought in to work the cotton mills in the 1950s.
The majority of the Asian community come from a traditional area of Punjab and they brought their traditions with them.
You are as likely to encounter men and women wearing the traditional Shalwar Kameez Asian dress as you are those attired in western clothes. At least half of all the shops in the town centre are Asian, including two small centres or bazaars displaying colourful saris and hijabs. Only the youngest Asians, teens hanging out on the street, have embraced the western teenage uniform of tight jeans and sneakers. But those are, for the most part, the fourth generation of Asians in Nelson.
The Conservatives have held the seat for parliament here since 2010 and anything other than a Tory victory in the general election would be a major surprise. The Pendle borough, of which Nelson is one of the main towns, voted 63% in favour of Brexit. Nobody is pretending that immigration didn’t play a huge part of that vote. There is little sign of tension between the white and Asian communities, but neither is there integration.
With the old manufacturing base gone east through globalisation, and with it some economic buoyancy, it’s easy to see why communities might point the finger of blame at each other.
Nelson has had a long history of some extreme attitudes to its newer arrivals. The old, intolerant British National Party had a presence here and its last councillor to hold office in Britain, Brian Parker, represented Nelson. Then along came Brexit and suddenly levels of tolerance took a turn for the worse.
Paul Harley noticed a change in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit vote. He runs In Situ, an organisation dedicated to embedding art and culture into people’s everyday lives. He says:
“The strongest response was early on after the vote. There was definitely a change in the atmosphere. I talked to a group of (Asian) mums we do a lot of work with and they told how they were treated differently. They had stories of being in the supermarket and the attitude towards them was as if people were saying ‘now you have to leave’. And these women were born and bred here.”
Harley set up In Situ in 2012 with two other artists. It was originally located in the disused old stone mill next to the canal in the town’s suburb of Briarfield. One focus of In Situ is to better relations between communities. In this regard, the mill held some significance.
“There is a need to find a space where people can come and ask difficult questions about each other and find out about each other. When the mill was in operation it was a place where people mingled on a day to day basis. Now that it is gone you’re back to small gatherings. The opportunities to mingle on a casual basis are gone.”
Brexit did provide an outlet for those who want to apportion blame at “the other”, but Hartley sees Brexit as a distraction.
“There is a sense of apathy about it now. There are a lot of more day to day things that people are more worried about. Among young people there is a complete lack of aspiration or the other extreme of a strong aspiration to get out as quickly as possible. We’re trying to make quality opportunities for people to come back.”
He says that it’s easy to wallow in the nostalgia of what the town was like when there was plenty of work. He is far more interested in the future:
It definitely feels like there’s a bigger division in the north-south divide in this country with a lot of public funds going to areas like London but sometimes I think we have an attitude here. We need to be positive.
"At a local level there is always an expectation that somebody else is going to solve thing. We do need to think more collectively how to solve some of the problems.”
Arresting decline and building community cohesion is no easy task.
As is often the case, people who are not at the frontline in tackling the complexity of these issues often reach for the simple answers.
Patrick and Marie Driscoll live locally and are convinced that Brexit could provide a large helping of salvation.
“I think British people have got something in them that they could create but are being held back from being that creative nation. With Brexit we have a chance to do something again,” she says.
Marie believes that immigration is a good thing if immigrants come to fill specific jobs: “Too many now don’t have jobs to come to and then they send for their families. People who come here and pay taxes and contribute are alright. But when they bring the rest of the family often they don’t even speak English. Some of them integrate, they wear our clothes and speak well but other don’t really. We’re all immigrants. I’m from an Irish background."
The notion that immigrants are milking the system is one to which Mohammad Iqbal takes exception. Iqbal is the Labour party leader on the Pendle Borough Council. An affable chap with a broad Lancashire accent, he is the son of immigrants from Pakistan and wears the traditional dress in his workplace.
“I think the immigration thing isn’t that much of an issue,” he says.
“People realise the value of having workers here but the media have played their part in saying that immgrants milk the system. The immigrants I know are damn hard workers.”
In this town, where the Asian community is so prominent, he sees another group of immigrants of being the focus of misinformed anger: “We have had a large influx of Eastern Europeans into this country. When Brexit happened I had people of Asian heritage in this town who said they were voting out because the Poles were taking their jobs. It’s the same as it was with the way Asians were regarded before. It’s a constant vicious circle.”
He considers Brexit as a convenient distraction for the Tories to keep the focus away from the divide between what he considers the neglected north and the prosperous south: “If the Tories win this election I’d be very pessimistic for this area."
He says: "The austerity and cuts of the last 10 years demonstrated that we’re being hit hardest compared to when Labour were in power before that. If the Tories get back in you might as well just turn the lights off.”
In tomorrow's Irish Examiner: Michael Clifford visits London and hears about race, identity and immigration issues.