Bradford's uniqueness comes from its Asian community - perhaps that's where economic development should begin?

“I have always been struck by how while every company tries to convince you of how different it is than every other brand, every city tries to convince you that it is exactly the same as every other city that is conventionally cool,”

You'll be familiar with this - "Shoreditch of the North" or similar is a common cry from city leaders as they scrat about for a positioning statement (Bradford and Halifax have both laid claim to this particular tag making it all the less individual). Places need to be more like Barcelona or Amsterdam or Montpelier. The result, as Aaron Renn whose quotation opens this piece, observed is that city marketing videos all seem the same:

“...pictures of the hip creative class, some startups, something about the local fashion and food scene, some people on bicycles going through the center of the city"

I recall, for work on my masters degree, reading the 'innovation strategy' of every English Regional Development Agency (RDA). They were, references to specific places or businesses aside, pretty much identical - except that is for the London and South East RDAs: they didn't have innovation strategies, just lots of innovation. Economic development has become - perhaps it was always so - something of a search for a safe sameness. Today every local or regional economic strategy stresses something called "inclusive growth" and proclaims that this is somehow new or different (without, it seems to me, ever really defining what "inclusive growth" means). Nowhere - least of all the places that struggle - is taking Aaron Renn's advice and seeking out individuality, difference, a unique selling point as us old fashioned marketers put it back in the days of big hair and nice suits.

Is any struggling city taking Michael Porters advice about branding?

“Competitive strategy is about being different. It means deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of value."

The answer - at least from looking at the North of England, is a clear 'no'. Bradford wants to talk about 'technology', about 'levering land values', about tourism and about retaining graduates. Don't get me wrong, these are all excellent things but Doncaster and Wakefield and Hull and Salford and Gateshead and Barnsley and Sheffield say exactly the same. And, after decades of investing time and money in this ideas, what have we got to show for it all?

Much of what we do, quite understandably, is to point at what we have got that's working (in Bradford's case City Park, The Media Museum, Saltaire and high tech manufacturing in Airedale) and say things like "we're on the up". Again there's nothing wrong with this, it's just not enough. At the same time we are making strategic decisions based on the assumption that the economic fundamentals (things like land values, for example) are the same in Bradford as they are in Shoreditch.

Currently Bradford city centre has a few short of 2000 planning permissions for residential units yet to be built. We know (because the Council keeps bragging about it) that there are more applications in the pipeline. The problem is that in 2016/17 just 95 of these units were built out. And there's a reason - it probably costs something around £50,000 to built an apartment unit (more if we're talking about high rise buildings or heritage conversions) but you can buy a 2-bed flat in a (relatively) new build complex for £48,000. This tells me that land values in the city centre are pretty close to zero.

The classic regeneration approach is to use actions ('levers' is a favourite word) to raise those land values so it becomes viable to build speculative apartments or even offices. Those levers involve things like anchor institutions - one reason why so many places have chased Channel 4 so hard is because those 300 jobs will act to make wherever they end up "sexier" thereby raising values. If there aren't the anchor institutions, local authorities nationalise risk by using public borrowing to secure investment, either as a package of public and private funding (as with the former Bradford Odeon) or as, in effect, a straightforward commercial loan (Bradford did this successfully to secure the HQ of Provident Financial and less successfully with rugby league club, Bradford Bulls).

The thing is that this mix of funding does not seem to have made much of a difference - a listed former bank building in the best part of the city centre sold recently for a value indicating again that the land on which it stands is worth nothing. The Council has set aside (or more precisely indicated its willingness to borrow) something of the order of £87m in the transformation of the city and as part of a wider asset strategy. It should worry us that the Council is planning on buying up essentially valueless property in the hope that its involvement and investment will transform land values. I hope I am wrong in saying I really don't expect the city to get any real return from this spending nor to I anticipate that it will trigger some sort of investment boom in the city centre.

I've said, in remembering architect Will Alsop, that we should look again at his masterplan for Bradford. I described Alsop as a prophet for recognising that the city centre is too large and too dispersed. Moreover, Alsop set out an alternative - anti-development I dubbed it - approach of knocking down all the rubbish and replacing it with open space. We, almost reluctantly, did a little bit of this with City Park (where there wasn't so much to knock down) but everywhere else the plan is still to 'lever' those non-existent land values. With the emptying out of the 1960s/1970s part of the city centre we have the opportunity to do that clearance, to create new open space but instead the intention is to knock down the top of town, relocate the (admittedly struggling) John Street Market and create a site for, you've guessed it, more housing that nobody wants to build because there's no value.

The proposals are only made possible, just as is the crazed idea of building a new office block on part of that successful City Park, by the readiness of the Council and Combined Authority to bung loads of (borrowed) public money at these developments. In a city ringed with empty office blocks, surrounded by cheap rents and filled with empty flats it seems entirely the wrong strategy to build more. Yet that is what orthodox economic development tells us, all in the essentially vain hope that the result will be like Shoreditch rather than just more empty offices and poor quality flats. The problem is (and I hate to break it to Bradford's leaders) that our city centre isn't fifteen minutes walk from the City of London.

Having a city centre with zero land value is an advantage but only if we use it. Putting in parks and open space is a start but we also have the opportunity to look at creative approaches like homesteading or similar based on giving people free rent or free land in exchange for living and working there. We can learn from successful retail models in Bradford like the bazaars run by Asian entrepreneurs at Great Horton and Thornbury. The irony is that, while the traditional municipal markets are declining, these market-style bazaars (including one in what was a temporary building created during the botched relocation of Bradford's last specialist fresh food markets) are thriving. Alongside the Bradford Curry, these developments play to the city's uniqueness - the UK's biggest Kashmiri community at over 100,000 may not be without its problems but it does set the city apart from those other Northern cities. The first time I heard the term 'Bradistan' was from a Pakistani colleague in Manchester - her and her friends were frequent visitors to Bradford partly for reasons of family but also because of the offer to smart Pakistani women. Just not the city centre.

Looking at what we might call the 'old' city (Bradford pre-1974), the only thriving culture is, in the main, that Pakistani culture of bazaars, takeaways, sweet and pudding shops, grills, restaurants, cloth shops, and wedding halls. Us white residents get only occasional glimpses of this world but it's there and it's thriving. Perhaps, instead of pretty much saying "shh don't mention the Asian stuff", we should listen to what Aaron Renn said about Brooklyn's imported mid-west culture and Nashville's celebration of once-naff country music and become British Asian's capital?

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Shisha, the next target for the anti-fun brigade

At its next Council meeting, Bradford Councillors will discuss the scourge of shisha smoking. In a time of austerity, when the Council is cutting services and too many people don't have jobs we're discussing how to shut down a few more businesses and spoil a few more folk's pleasure. But then the motion is from Respect - who seem to have appointed themselves moral guardians of the Asian communities in Bradford! 

I was therefore struck by the Pub Curmudgeon's spot of a similar campaign under way in Manchester:

Traders and  councillors say curry houses are now struggling to compete with the shisha bars and fear it could be the end for the Curry Mile.

They say some of the shisha bars are allowing customers to flout the smoking ban and illegally smoke shisha indoors.

Under the law, the shisha bars are meant to restrict customers to smoking outside, often on a terrace.

Manchester council is  now launching a campaign to crack down on people who flout the smoking ban at shisha bars, and to highlight the health risks of smoking shisha.

And doubtless the main element of the campaign will be this particular lie:

Yes folks this claim - from Bradford NHS - is simply not true. Nor is the claim in our Respect motion that:

...according to the WHO, an hour of smoking shisha for one hour is equivalent to smoking 200 times the volume of smoke in one cigarette.

 There are variations on this story depending on how many times it has been tweaked and adjusted from the original WHO report. And it's still not true:

...studies led by independent researchers at the Royal University of Saudi Arabia have shown that shisha smoke is 30 times less concentrated in chemicals than cigarette smoke, contradicting the WHO's warnings. "It is ludicrous and anti-scientific to claim that hookah or shisha smoke is 200 times more toxic than cigarette smoke," he says. "While about 5,000 chemicals have been identified so far in cigarette smoke, chemists and pharmacologists from Saudi Arabia only found 142 chemicals in shisha smoke. Also, a medical team in Pakistan found that shisha smoke can be much less carcinogenic and radioactive than cigarette smoke."

So shisha is a lot less of a problem than smoking cigarettes. This isn't to say that shisha is harmless just that it is a whole lot less harmful than smoking cigarettes. But that doesn't stop the prohibitionists (as the poster above shows) - despite little or no evidence at all for their claim this is the conclusion:

"The research on shisha is admittedly limited," concedes Anis. "But I have to concur with the WHO. If you watch the way people smoke shisha, they take deliberate, deep breaths before exhaling so there is a lot of smoke being inhaled."

Which rather begs a big question. Surely it's what the smoke contains that the issue rather than how much? The truth is that Dr Anis and the other prohibitionists just don't approve. These people are getting pleasure without purpose, they don't care about their health, they must be stopped!

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A Bradford Valentine's Day....

... Valentinus was a Roman priest martyred during the reign of Claudius the Goth [Claudius II]. Since he was caught marrying Christian couples and aiding any Christians who were being persecuted under Emperor Claudius in Rome [when helping them was considered a crime], Valentinus was arrested and imprisoned. Claudius took a liking to this prisoner -- until Valentinus made a strategic error: he tried to convert the Emperor -- whereupon this priest was condemned to death. He was beaten with clubs and stoned; when that didn't do it, he was beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate [circa 269].

So died the patron of bee-keepers and, as we know so well, the inspiration for so many naff (and anonymous) greeting cards – St Valentine, patron of young lovers.

So today, in the spirit of such Christian virtue I am queueing at the little flower kiosk outside the Kirkgate Centre in Bradford. In my hand I am clutching three small bunches of tulips – conscious of the dilemma of Valentine’s Day. If you fail to buy flowers your name is mud, you are lower than the slimiest of slithering creatures but when you splash out on a grand bunch you’re told how this is an extravagance since florists inflate their prices to cash in on England’s lovelorn male populace.

Before me in the queue loiter an assortment of slightly nervous looking young Asian men – carefully ordering fine bunches of expensive flowers. Bunches enhanced with glitter, sprays of coloured sticks and curious golden shapes made from bent wire. St Valentine may have been a Christian martyr but it’s pretty clear that Bradford’s Muslim youth have embraced his festival with gusto!

And like so much about our culture that was Christian but is now secular, St Valentine’s Day – now most often said without the ‘saint’ part – has celebrated its divorce from the church by growing in importance.  It’s a time when we celebrate love in all its forms – from the simple, honest sexual attraction that might be encouraging those Asian lads I saw queueing today, to remembering how love changes from that passionate immediacy to the point where imagining being without that lover is impossible.

Again I find myself reminded – by the simple acts of Bradford’s young Asians – that they’re part of our culture now. We say they don’t integrate and we are wrong – watching those young men today told me that our indulgent, once Christian, festival of love means just the same to them as it does to young white men in our City. And for that matter to this greying blogger.

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Is there really a curry crisis?

All right, it's in Keighley!

This is Bradford, Britain’s undisputed curry capital and home to a bewildering range of restaurants serving Asian food. From Prasad’s exceptional vegetarian food through a range of decent quality mid-market curry houses to the classic providers of the mucky curry – the Sweet Centre on Lumb Lane, the Kashmir, the Karachi and the International all within a spit of each other and close to the University for that critical student market.

Yet some people suggest that the business is struggling:

Analyst Peter Backman, of Horizons FS, says that while the restaurant industry has just stopped growing, the Indian restaurant sector is doing even worse, with profits falling. Pat Chapman, founder of the Curry Club, and author of the Good Curry Guide, notes, "You just instinctively know they are struggling", while Backman adds that he is "increasingly gloomy" about the sector's outlook for the next few years, believing Indian restaurants will "continue to lose share to the rest of the eating out market" if the recession continues.

I’m going to take these guys at their word – after all they’re the experts in these matters. The problems, we’re told, are three-fold:

• The Indian restaurant business hasn’t innovated – everywhere we go there’s the same menu, a seemingly endless list of variations on rogan josh, CTM and balti this and that.
• The children of the industry don’t want to work there preferring other jobs with shorter hours and earlier nights
• The government’s immigration policies mean that the tradition of importing chefs from the sub-continent has broken down and there simply aren’t the chefs to fill the hole

It seems to me that there’s another part of the restaurant business that might provide a lesson for the curry house – the Italian. Just as you’re hard pushed to find a High street without an Indian, every place has its share of Italian restaurants. And these restaurants, on the whole, target exactly the same mid-market customers as do the curry houses. Moreover, the Italian developed a consistent offer (usually presented on a menu slightly bigger than a broadsheet newspaper) with a set of familiar dishes that crop up time and time again.

The secret wasn’t exceptional food but consistency, reliability, friendliness and value. And the good ones thrived and survived. Even in a place like Bradford where the curry house is king there are plenty of Italian restaurants. I don’t doubt that, in these tough times, these restaurants are struggling and that some may go to the wall.

For Bradford – curry central (although unlike most other places Bradford’s curry restaurants are mostly Kashmiri-run rather than Bengali-run) means even more of a challenge for restaurants. And the cannier restaurateurs have stopped trying to cram another sleekly-designed place onto Leeds Road. Instead they look to nearby towns – Omar Khan has opened a new restaurant in Skipton and Shipley’s Aagrah has places at Pudsey, on the A64 near York and at Thornbury.

As to innovation there is some – Jaldi Jaldi, Mumtaz’s fast food chain is interesting and creative, for example – but not in the menu. We are stuck with a false search for authenticity:

Ranjit Mathrani, the chief executive of Masala World, which employs 5,000 people and, among others, owns London's Veerasawamy, the country's oldest surviving Indian restaurant, claims the chef shortage has brought the group's expansion up short as surely as the recession.

The company, he points out, could not use "curry college" chefs, because they only allow chefs to cook dishes from their home regions, he says, so they can offer their customers authentic Indian food.

The proper answer to Ranjit’s problem is to remind him that the curry we eat in Britain is the result of an evolution in the dishes brought here from South Asia. What we need is for some more adventurous chefs and a willingness to cut the classic Asian menu down from its choice of fifty or sixty different main courses.

Perhaps a new generation of home grown chefs – needed because we can’t import them from Mirpur or Sylhet any more – will begin to change the menus again. Or maybe the best Asian family restaurants will take the Italian route and eschew innovation in favour of getting the basics right. And, in the end, success will come to the places that set out an offer people like at a price they can afford with service that makes you feel at home.

There isn't a crisis but a little home grown creativity might not go amiss!

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Wives or whores? Thoughts on 'grooming'....

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It is a sensitive issue, one that contains more elephant traps for politicians than almost any other issue but which I know will stick in the minds of those I represent. And, in the end, the voters decide what is, or isn’t, important. I refer to the matter of ‘grooming’ (as the papers like to put it) of mostly white girls by ‘gangs’ of young Asian men.

Following from a case in Derby – and referring to an earlier case in Keighley – we are expected to extrapolate to a conclusion that, in every Northern town, there is at least one gang of young Asians organising sex parties for each other’s entertainment at which these groomed young girls feature. In the Derby case:

Three trials held under reporting restrictions last year heard how the nine-strong gang cruised around Derby in a BMW or a Range Rover – which Saddique referred to as the ‘Rape Rover’ – looking for vulnerable young girls.

They were then offered rides in the car to ‘link and chill’ with the men, plied with vodka stored under the seats and taken to parks, hotel rooms or houses, where they were sometimes offered cocaine before being pressured into sex.

Now this mirrors quite closely the nature of the earlier Keighley case – which resulted in convictions as well – where the coincidence of the debate with elections led to Channel 4 pulling a documentary (on the police’s request) on the issue after the BNP described it as a ‘party political broadcast’.

...the documentary examined the area of child abuse known as "grooming". It reported that white girls as young as 11 were being sexually abused by Asian men who encouraged their dependency on drugs over a period of time.

Yet again the issue has become political and, as usual, mainstream politicians are struggling to frame the debate in our comfort zone. Some, like Jack Straw, have stepped as close to the edge of that zone as they dare:

Mr Straw said: "Pakistanis, let's be clear, are not the only people who commit sexual offences, and overwhelmingly the sex offenders' wings of prisons are full of white sex offenders. But there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men ... who target vulnerable young white girls.

"We need to get the Pakistani community to think much more clearly about why this is going on and to be more open about the problems that are leading to a number of Pakistani heritage men thinking it is OK to target white girls in this way."

Now I have two problems with this statement – why are we shifting the responsibility for addressing the problem from the mainstream authorities to the “Pakistani community”? And why do we carry on believing the lies of bearded (and the occasionally unbearded) community leaders that they can speak with authority on behalf of two million and more people? But at least Jack Straw is trying to frame the debate in asking why a few young, mostly Pakistani men have done this ‘grooming’. 

At the heart of all this isn’t race or religion but attitudes to women and especially the view that women fall into two categories – wives or whores. This is an attitude common among young Asian men but we are kidding ourselves if we think the cultural problem is wholly imported or even restricted to Pakistanis. What doesn’t help is that when someone says to the Asian community in Derby or Keighley that they have a problem, the first response of that community's representatives is denial – usually followed by allegations of racism or of “fuelling the BNP”.

The problem is that these cases do seem to involve a disproportionate number of young Asians – so either the police are letting white, afro-caribbean or mixed race gangs off the hook or else it really is a type of crime associated with young Asian men.  And an exploitative, cruel and oppressive attitude to women – seeing girls as sex toys – sits at the heart of the problem.

For many of us - including plenty of Pakistani men - adopting such an attitude would result in short shrift but in all communities there are men passing on the evil doctrine that women are mere chattels fit only for making babies, feeding men and cleaning house – unless they’re whores when they just provide sex. 

So long as some communities – and this includes parts of the Pakistani community – define women by role rather than as individuals, these problems will persist. In the meantime we should support the efforts of police and social workers to deal with men like those found guilty of these offences in Derby and Keighley.

But we have to cut out the political correctness. If in Bradford the problem is with Asian men – we should say so. I do not become a rapist because another white man is a rapist. And my Asian friends and neighbours don’t become ‘groomers of young girls’ because some other Asian men have committed that crime. And I’m pretty sure that most of the Asian men I know would like to see these rapists and paedophiles behind bars – whatever colour or creed they might be.

 
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