Why would anyone leave London?

On the 27th July 1987 I set off, suitcase in hand, from Kent House Station to arrive some four hours or so later at Bradford Interchange. It feels odd to think that all those years ago I made the decision to leave the place where I'd been born and brought up, the South London suburb of Beckenham, to take a job in Bradford. Lots of people, especially Londoners, have asked me why I did it, why did I leave the 'Greatest City in the World' to live in one of those dreadful, dreary, northern places they'd seen on the telly. Even a few curious Bradford folk have asked!

My usual answer is either: "someone gave me a job" or a longer explanation that, even in 1987, London was expensive. There was little hope of me being able to afford to buy even a tiny place in my home town and I faced the prospect of either spending most of my life on a train in from Essex or North Kent or else buying a pokey flat in Hackney where you'd need three bolts on the door and daren't go out at night. Leaving London was an easy decision and choosing Bradford was simply because, besides the job offer, I actually knew somebody in Bradford.

I'm writing this sitting in the kitchen of our house in Cullingworth where, if I stand out on the terrace, I can look out at the wooded valley where we live, can hear the chatter of birds, the basso profundo moo of cows fattening in nearby fields and the bleat of sheep on the moor. Sometimes in a morning the clip-clop of horses passes by on the bridleway out back, accompanied by girly giggles or gentle conversation. In twenty minutes I can be in the centre of Bradford, it's a little more than half an hour into Leeds and even Manchester can be reached within an hour. If you put your foot down on the north bound A629 you'll be in the Yorkshire Dales National Park in a breath and an hour later, given favourable traffic, Windermere and the Lake District beckons. Why would anyone leave London?

Yet sometimes the idea of leaving a place, especially a place a grand as London, seems an impossibility:

One beneficiary of this idea, though, could be the former 5 Live presenter Victoria Derbyshire, who could be appointed the Today programme's fifth presenter. She comes from Bolton, so the argument goes. Trouble is, her family is unlikely to welcome such a move. Her husband is a fellow West Ham season ticket holder and she has two teenage children. Why would anyone want to uproot their family like this?

This was Iain Dale talking about the daft idea of sending a bit of the Today Programme "Up North" in the form of Nick Robinson. As a piece of tokenism this is classic BBC but Iain's tone troubled me, not because moving to a new job sometimes comes with tricky decisions for families, but because there was a sense of "only in London" about the post. Or maybe it was just Dale using the term "Professional Northerner" in his headline.

Crossing this attitudinal bridge, the view that everything of importance happens in London, is central to the idea of "levelling up" England's regions. And it is perhaps the most difficult part of the project to achieve for the simple reason that people don't see what I see out my window, they see what they'll lose even if the view from their window is just a brick wall. Not just the West Ham season ticket but the connections, the familiar places and bewildering choices. To go where? To Durham, Hull, Stoke or Wrexham, to places you've vaguely heard of but (if the average person's geography is a guide) would struggle to place on a map.

Part of the problem is fifty years of portraying England's north and midlands as dour places filled with slightly unhealthy blokes in work clothes talking funny. Pictured in drama as an endless struggle interspersed with strong tea and large women in flowery aprons: The North, whose leaders arrive in London, twisting their proverbial cap in their gnarled workers hands, to ask the rich folk for more money. And now, when those leaders no longer look like professional northerners, nothing has changed. Week after week little clumps of the North's great and good cram onto the train to head for meetings with ministers and civil servants in the glittering glories on London. "Please Sir, can we have some more?" is the plaintive cry of these folk.

This picturing of places far from London as primitive, barely out of the stone age, is not new. I recall a geography lesson where we discussed perceptions of distance and place. Mr Delaney produced what Dungeons & Dragons DMs would call a "crudely drawn map" showing England from the perspective of a Londoner. A map where The North was a place of rude huts and outside toilets beginning at the end of the Metropolitan Line, and where London contained everything of any importance or significance. This mindset, even from those who began their life somewhere other than London is what must be overcome if we are to level up.

I'm not sure how we do this, how we change attitudes, expectations and opportunities so people don't see ending up in Hull (with a decent job and a cottage in South Cave) as some sort of failure. Some of this is, as Chris Blackhurst suggests at Reaction, about government's choices:

The brain drain has to be reversed, the civil service has to move north, out of London, and not just the back room jobs but all the jobs, leaders included. The private sector, too, has to be incentivised to relocate. Again, it can’t be the rehoming of satellite operations – the North has long and bitter experience of those, of their arrival and their subsequent closing – but the headquarters.

But Iain Dale's article tells us that, if the reaction to one journalist leaving London is "oh my god, what a terrible idea, everyone's in London", what will be the reaction of civil service mandarins with a nice house in Amersham and children at a good day school? I mean, do they even have good day schools in Newcastle? Civil service reorganisation will be doubly difficult if the reorganisation doesn't just mean a new set of names for ministries and moving to a different office in Chiswick or Kensington but means moving to some place you've never heard of in a part of England that's more than an hour from London.

The other day I read a newspaper report about some men who'd gone for a pint somewhere in East London and been charged £6.40 for a pint of ordinary session bitter plus a late night supplement. Here in Cullingworth you won't pay more than £3.30 for a beer like that (and it will have been brewed in the village too). Yesterday I went to the Polish bakers on Manningham Lane in Bradford returning with five loaves of fresh bread plus a challah - all for just over six quid. Compare that to the price of a single sourdough loaf in Borough Market.

London is expensive, crowded, often lonely, crime-ridden and unhealthy. For all the great institutions (the ones you never go to because you're too busy), it's as much a place of homelessness, mental breakdown and filth as it is of those famous bright lights. Londoners spend hours hanging from straps on tube trains, cramming overground trains and holding a pole in a bus. Hours that could be spent sitting in the garden with a cup of tea or walking into the village for a pint. We're told that the business of London is a good thing, "drives the economy" say all the experts, but somehow I've a feeling I was right to leave.

But then, why would anyone leave London?


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Manchester's review makes the case for a national public enquiry into street grooming

It's some time in the early 2000s and, as the controlling group's executive on Bradford Council, we're briefed about 'grooming' in Keighley. It's a matter-of-fact presentation albeit one informed by the political issues associated with the BNP and the concerns raised publicly by Anne Cryer, then Labour MP for the town. And, since you are going to ask, that's it. We were told it was with the police, that social services were engaged and that it was a bad but isolated incident. I don't recall any other discussion or presentation on the subject in the remainder of my time as a member of the Council Executive (I left in 2006).

I present this observation - it's a recollection rather than a set of facts - because it seems to me that we failed some very vulnerable young people back then. And I say 'we' here to refer to us as councillors because every year, sometimes more than once, we make a big thing of us being 'corporate parents' to hundreds of young people in the Council's care. So when one of those young people is raped, exploited and abused we should be (and mostly aren't) taking some responsibility.

Today the review commissioned by Greater Manchester Mayor, Andy Burnham has reported on the scandal of how Greater Manchester Police allowed hundreds of abusers to carry on raping and exploiting young people in the city. The report describes how GMP made choices about resources and priorities, the downgrading of serious accusations and the ending of the investigation that, without question, resulted in subsequent abuse, exploitation and rape of children:

After her (Victoria Agoglia) death a police investigation, Operation Augusta, was set up to see if there was a wider problem of child sexual exploitation in south Manchester. Officers managed to quickly identify a network of nearly 100 Asian men potentially involved in the abuse of scores of girls via takeaways in and around Rusholme, but the operation was shut down shortly afterwards due to resources, ‘rather than a sound understanding’ of whether lines of inquiry had been exhausted.

Barely any charges were made against the men identified by the operation. Eight of them later went on to commit serious sexual crimes, including the rape of a child, the rape of a young woman, sexual assault and sexual activity with a child.

At the same time as we were being told that a similar case in Keighley was under control and an isolated incident, GMP along with Manchester social services were, in effect, doing the same. And we know now that there were other cases in dozens of other towns and cities including Rochdale, Rotherham, Birmingham, Dewsbury and Bradford. Far from being isolated incidents, we had a pattern of abusive and exploitative behaviour directed to vulnerable teenage girls right across the country.

Since this became clear, we have seen individual reports from each of these places, some more telling than others but all showing the same detachment as public authorities repeatedly ignored representation, dismissed exploited girls as 'making their own choices' or 'sexually aware', and hinted as other sensitivities contributing to the lack of action to protect the abused or deal with the abusers. Beyond these public reports there is a lot more information, detailed and granular evidence, hidden away in Serious Case Reviews and Court Files. Public authorities have used every trick in the book to avoid their failings being revealed - that the victims were mostly children means that these authorities feel able to hide behind the laws intended to protect young people, extending them to protect social workers, police officers and the CPS lawyers from proper scrutiny. Too many people responsible for failing to protect young girls from exploitation, abuse and rape have avoided being held to account.

There have now been dozens of similar cases across the UK and it is time to ask how it is that, despite the attention supposedly given to correcting past failures, the cases still keep coming forward, each one showing public authorities being slow to respond and hesitant in taking action. Every case involves failures by social services to protect children in their care and most involve the police giving a disturbingly low priority to the abuse. We're told by councils and police that all the past problems are resolved (this, in my experience, is definitely the argument in Bradford) but we get no actual evidence to substantiate this assertion. Meanwhile, anecdotally, the problem on the streets persists with girls (often as young as eleven) targeted by young, mostly Pakistani heritage, men.

It is time to think seriously about how we are responding to this problem and the words coming from police and councils, while sympathetic and carefully crafted, seem complacent and intended to give the impression that all is right when evidently it is not. There is a very strong case for a properly constituted - as Ed Miliband would doubtless say, judge-led - enquiry into the failures of public authorities to protect vulnerable girls from abuse. If government can find time and money to do enquiries into the gender pay gap (and to pass legislation too), I'm absolutely sure they can find the time and money to look into the far more serious issue of the industrial exploitation, rape and abuse of girls, many in the care of the state.

Such an enquiry can, as well as considering actions to take in response to public sector failures, look at why girls in public care are given so much license and at how young men - and some not so young - feel able to treat those girls as the trashiest sort of disposable chattel. There are some who say that we can't do this because the Pakistani community would feel put upon in some way but, from conservations I've had over recent years, I'm absolutely sure that this is not the case and that many from that community (and the wider Muslim community), especially those trying to provide a voice for women, would welcome a robust and honest examination looking at a problem they know persists with a minority of Pakistani heritage men.

In failing to respond openly to the problem - as we know from Rotherham, partly from fear of being accused of racism - public authorities give oxygen to those who are racist and anti-Muslim. The complacency of council leaderships, police and crime commissioners and those leading social services risks building up to a further problem as exploitative grooming continues on the streets of many towns and cities. A public enquiry would provide some restitution for victims, would put the problem in a national context instead of as a series of local challenges, and would provide the basis for government to consider whether changes to law, regulation or resourcing are needed to provide better protection for girls and a tougher response to those men who want to exploit, abuse and rape those girls.

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Learning from Labour's mistake - thoughts on anti-Muslim sentiment and an enquiry for the Conservative Party

First, if you want to get an understanding of antisemitism in the Labour Party read this long piece from Sara Gibbs, a Jewish socialist:

One of the most devastating aspects of Labour’s antisemitism crisis has been seeing the sheer volume of people I like, respect, even consider friends, denying or minimising this issue which has caused me so much personal devastation. Tweet after tweet from moderates and pals, suggestions that people who don’t hold their nose and vote for Labour are “idiots” or “as bad as Tories” or “responsible for homelessness”. I will speak more about this at the end of the article, if you get that far. Knowing what I know about Labour and antisemitism and seeing it so callously disregarded by people I hugely respect has been one of the most tiring and demoralising things I’ve ever been through.

One caveat is that I don't recognise Sara's description of the Conservative Party (much of it is a crude caricature) however, when Sara talks about not wanting to throw her Muslim friends under the bus, us Conservatives should pay heed. Just because nine out of ten Muslims aren't going to vote Conservative doesn't mean we can indulge those too frequent tropes about Muslims all being terrorists or invaders and how they are going to breed white people into minority status if not actual extinction.

I do not consider that the Conservative Party is institutionally anti-Muslim but I can see how we could become so given the persistence of support for the lines peddled by people like Katie Hopkins and David Vance among a minority of our members. After all, Corbyn had been a backbench MP for 30 years before, in an act of derangement, the Labour Party elected him leader. It is entirely possible that a similar disaster could befall the Conservative Party if we don't maintain a robust attitude to racism (and especially anti-Muslim racism).

I live in a city with one of Britain's biggest Muslim communities - over 100,000 live in Bradford these days. And this community isn't even a community but rather a pot-pourri of different communities. We have Muslims who adhere to an austere version of Islam with strict dress codes and veiled women and Muslim women who wear western clothes and don't cover their hair. There are shia and ahmadi mixed in with the myriad versions of sunni Islam. If you take a brief peek into Muslim twitter or facebook you'll see robust arguments about attitudes to women, Saudi-promoted salafism and a host of other debates filled with words us non-Muslims can only guess at. Plus cricket, football and cars, of course.

I can tell you of my good (or maybe not so good) Muslim friend whose description of veiled women makes Boris Johnson's letterbox seem mild. And how I find myself gently and kindly pointing out casual antisemitism - from the political activist and armed forces veteran who told me the jews control the media to a businessman I know and love who described how the seller in a property deal "jewed" him.

Then there's the racism towards Muslims - "Asians". Always described as 'them' and where every bad thing in the city - the declining city centre, flat house prices, crime, bad driving, bins not being emptied, litter - is laid at the "Asians" doorstep. It's not that some within these communities aren't a problem but rather that, in the manner of all racism, the faults of a few are extended to the whole community. The hard-working young solicitor who has a nice BMW is seen as a problem because other young Asians (and non-Asians if we're honest) with similar cars drive like idiots round our streets. And the Asian businessman building a big new house in Heaton is, of course, a drug dealer rather than someone running a chain of takeaway pizza shops.

Then there's the terrorism thing. I remember holding a big rally with Keighley's Muslim community when I stood for Parliament in 2001. These rallies are quite difficult to control (especially when someone else is organising it for you and you don't speak Urdu let alone Mirpuri dialect Punjabi) and at mine a young man was called up by the master of ceremonies, only to be rapidly shut down and bundled away from the microphone as my host muttered about 'mujahadeen' and 'nutters'. I gathered later that he was launching into an impassioned speech backing a Kashmiri terrorist group banned in the UK. It's not that there's widespread support for terrorism within Muslim communities but rather that there's sympathy for the causes (Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan) that those terrorists exploit.

In addition many Muslims - with a modicum of justification - consider that their belief is unjustly singled out for criticism and this leads to a very defensive response to problems such as street grooming or a growing drugs culture. I'm pretty sure these things are haram but too often representatives of Muslim communities react prickily with comments such as "they're not all Muslims" or "most rapists (or drug dealers) are white, y'know". Very few Muslims are rapists, drug dealers or terrorists but, too often, concerns about county lines, street grooming of young girls or Islamist extremism get a response designed to deflect and an assumption that the concerns are directed at the whole community.

None of this, however, excuses the 'othering' of Muslims or the sort of "all Muslims are liars" or "London has fallen" tropes that are popular with racists like Tommy Robinson. Nor should we tolerate those who claim that street grooming, crime and terrorism are in some way required of believing Muslims. It is in this context that the Conservative Party needs to frame its promised enquiry into racism and prejudice - it's less that there's a need to seek out bad apples but rather that we need some clarity as to what will not be tolerated and how the Party will respond to breaches of this guidance. I hope this is what we will get and that it will strengthen our resolve to be a One Nation political party. I remember when John Taylor was selected as Conservative candidate in Cheltenham - he lost (to a decidedly racist Lib Dem campaign) but worse he faced horrendous racism from within the party. That we now have a front bench including people from Muslim, Hindu and African heritage shows how far the Conservative Party has come - we still have a long way to go and any enquiry must be honest enough to take us further on that journey.

More than anything, though, we should learn from what we've seen in the Labour Party and resolve not to try and obfuscate, deflect, ignore and cover up racism without our ranks. If we do it won't end well.


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Being poor is bad for your health and being ill is bad for your wealth

Babbling on about health inequality has become the latest obsession of the sort of Labour politician who rises to being a council leader or perhaps the shouty sort of backbench MP. This obsession leads to this sort of nonsense:

‘Shocking’ health inequality and poverty go hand-in-hand, meeting told

So says Susan Hinchcliffe, leader of Bradford Council as she comments on a report showing that people living in Ilkley - one of the wealthiest places in the North of England - live 21 years longer than people in Tong, one of the UK's most deprived communities. That both these places are in the Bradford metropolitan district is a quirk of political geography.

What's nonsense here is, of course, the idea that we should be shocked that poor people have less good health outcomes than rich people. This fact has been pretty much common knowledge since people first started thinking about health. So the solution isn't to, in some way, redirect resources from Ilkley to Tong (at a guess the per capita spending on healthcare in Tong is significantly higher already) but rather to reduce the poverty.

The second common misunderstanding here is that there is something about the place that means people are healthier - or for that matter richer. While place has some impact on health (air quality, for example) most health outcomes are entirely unrelated to where people are born or where they live. People in Tong are less healthy because they are poorer. And they live in these places because they have the affordable housing that poor people need.

And for some of the people in Tong, the reason they are poor is because they have poor health. Illness and disability can and does lead directly to reduced income. We can probably all think of someone we know who, because of their health, dropped out of a career or because of their disability never embarked on one. It's probably true that we could do more to reduce this effect but it's also true that we can only really resolve the poverty not the inequality.

So Bradford's "shocking" health inequality is entirely a consequence of Bradford's income inequality. And we don't fix this by making people in Ilkley poorer (or less healthy) but rather by making people in Tong richer. Indeed, we should stop using geography as a measure - especially given the degree to which otherwise intelligent people completely fail to grasp what local area statistics tell us - and should focus on people who are poor wherever they live.

Nationally we spend something like £6 billion on public health and a further £6 billion on various activities dubbed 'prevention'. If we were serious about improving health outcomes - and reducing that health inequality contingent on geographical concentrations of wealth or poverty - then we would shift most of this spending away from nannying people about booze, fags and burgers and spend it instead on programmes to reduce poverty. But I guess that doesn't fit the script.

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Of course the Brexit mess affected this week's election results...thoughts from Bradford

Loads of other people will have a great deal to say about the local elections so I won't join in the debate about how Liberal Democrats taking control of Mole Valley represents a seismic shift in English politics. Or that the results reflect some sort of 'opinion poll' on Brexit (or the lack of Brexit) - although it's mad to suggest that this dominating national issue didn't have a major impact on people's voting, or not voting, choices. Anyone who knocked on doors will have experienced people - lots of people - exploding with anger when asked about their voting intention.

But it's not just Brexit, there are other trends and changes that need consideration - the continuing shift away from Labour in the Midlands (and, it now seems, in places like Teeside) and the shift away from Conservatives across the Home Counties (most obvious in the gentrified seaside). It does sometimes seem like nothing has changed - Conservatives are still the biggest party in most of those shire districts and Labour still dominates the cities. But what's less noticeable is that majorities are sharply reduced - where once the dominant party won with 60% of the vote it's now winning with 40% - in Bradford Labour won Royds ward (for lovers of 1980s movies, this is centred on Buttershaw the location for 'Rita, Sue & Bob Too') this year with 43% of the vote compared to 59% in 2012.

Bradford can also illustrate what we might call the 'remainer effect' - Ilkley is safe Conservative territory but also the most remain voting ward in the City (over 70%). Here's this year's result:

In 2012 the Conservatives got 49% of the vote when the Labour candidate was Anne Cryer who'd been the local MP from 1997-2010. Contrast this with another safe Tory ward (the best one) which was strongly leave voting:

The result is almost identical to the 2012 result (58%) although the Green Party did significantly better this year and Labour slightly worse. It is notable that the Greens, despite not making any gains, did very well. We've seen how they did well in wealthy Ilkley, here's Bradford's poorest ward, Tong:

This was a tie - the one vote majority was drawn by lot. Labour have never lost this ward, not even in the great meltdown of 1992 when the Conservatives won every ward in Bradford South. This result, however, probably isn't (unlike Ilkley) down to remain voters - that UKIP vote tells us this is leave territory - but more what I'd call 'Lazy Labour' and a turnout of just 19% plus, depressingly, that Labour's candidate is Asian.

Yesterday's results were a disaster for the two big parties (not in Bradford though) - the Conservatives expected to lose seats but did so on a scale not seen since the mid-1990s. Labour - the beneficiary of Conservative collapse back in the '90s - failed to pick up seats. There were precious few Labour councillors across England's shire districts - after yesterday there are precious fewer and the party still has no councillors at all in dozens of councils. To answer why I'll give the canvasser's feedback - on doorstep after doorstep the conversation went something like this:

Me: Hi
Voter: You're brave!
Me: No, people are lovely...
Voter: Brexit....
Me: Indeed. What a mess. Not Labour surely?
Voter: Corbyn...omg we don't want him

Yes there are lots of local factors and people do vote purposely differently in local elections but these results have been affected by the Conservative government's failure to deliver on a promise we'd leave the EU on 29 April 2019 and by Labour being led by an antisemitic, terrorist fan boy.

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Evidence-free policy-making is the norm

The main point of Chapman's article is that no adequate process of evaluation has been put in place for this policy.

This quotation, lifted from Chris Snowdon's article about the limiting of stakes on FOBTs (fixed-odds betting terminals) could apply across a huge range of public policies. Worse than this, there is very often no way in which an evaluation can be better than informed opinion or observation.

Take, by way of example, Bradford Council's planning rules on the opening on new hot food takeaways. These rules ban new takeaways within 400m of a school or place that might be widely used by children and young people. To date the latter part of this definition covers parks, playgrounds, halls and community centres. Within the city proper there is almost nowhere (other than the city centre which is exempted from the regulation) where someone can open a hot food takeaway.

I opposed the ban and was told that, despite me pointing out the complete absence of any evidence linking hot food takeaways to child obesity is was (to quote Bradford Council's leader) "common sense" that there is a link. On a later occasion I asked the leader, via a question at full council, how the planning authority intended to measure the effectiveness of the policy. It seemed that they had no plans to do so but, when I pushed the leader, apparently this is part of a "raft" of policies that taken together will be effective in reducing levels of child obesity.

We're told by public policy folk that what they do is "evidence-based" but it seems that, where controlling public behaviour is concerned, there is no need for evidence or a framework for evaluation. When Bradford Council presented its consultation on a new PSPO (public space protection order) across the whole district meant to deal with 'anti-social driving', it was clear that while the things covered by the order - loud music, car cruising, loitering around cars - might be annoying they are not the things that the public consider the real problem: speeding, aggressive driving, road rage. And, just as with the ban on takeaways and the FOBTs stake limit, there is no indication as to how this PSPO will be evaluated so as to assess whether the limiting of civil liberties is justified by a reduction in car-related anti-social behaviour.

We will be having a 'review' but, like other policy reviews, it will feature how many orders were issued, how many people breached the orders and opinion from senior police officers saying how much they value the additional powers.

Finally, by way of example, lots of august bodies and respected individuals have responded positively to the government's consultation on introducing a register of home schooled children.The evidence for there being a need for this? None. But the LGA is keen for local councils to be de facto in charge of your child:

‘A register will help councils to monitor how children are being educated and prevent them from disappearing from the oversight of services designed to keep them safe.’

This is seen as a loophole by local education authorities (which probably should be abolished) and they are using safeguarding as an justification despite the evidence being that homeschooled children are significantly less likely to be abused than children attending regular schools.

It is clear that 'evidence-based policy-making' is almost entirely a myth - public authorities rely instead of expert opinion, referencing themselves and political popularity to justify intervening in private choices and behaviour.

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That's all folks (my last speech to Bradford Council)

Strictly not my last as I used my right to reply to thank the hundreds of Council officers who helped make my job as a councillor possible - but here's the prepared speech.

"On my bedside table there’s a copy of The Little World of Don Camillo, Giovanni Guereschi’s whimsical evocation of life in a little Italian town back in the 1940s. More than any other book, this one has shaped how I think about politics. Let me share a bit from its opening:

…I want you to understand that, in the Little World between the river and the mountains, many things can happen that cannot happen anywhere else. Here, the deep, eternal breathing of the river freshens the air, for both the living and the dead, and even the dogs have souls. If you keep this in mind, you will easily come to know the village priest, Don Camillo, and his adversary, Peppone, the Communist Mayor. You will not be surprised that Christ watches the goings on…and that one man beats the other over the head, but fairly – that is without hatred – and that in the end the two enemies find they agree about essentials.

Those ‘essentials’ are in the simplest terms community, neighbourhood and pride in the place we live.

In this grand room we talk about Bradford in sweeping terms but outside, our attention is, as us pompous urbanists put it, more granular. Most of our work as councillors – and probably the thing that gives us most pleasure – is done in the communities we represent.

I was sat on top of Denholme Edge the other day eating a ham and tomato sandwich, admiring the view. Much of what I see from there is Bingley Rural. And it is beautiful.

Anyway I was sat there and I got to thinking. Each way I looked, into every nook of the places in that view there was a story – something that had been done to make the place a little better. Some of those stories were about stopping something – the ten year campaign, ending in the High Court, to stop a landfill blighting Denholme – but most were about improvement, little acts of betterment. A new kids playground, some traffic lights, a crossing – small things that matter to people far more than the big things we usually talk about in these Council meetings.

Bradford is a place of a thousand little worlds, each one different and each one precious to the people who live it them. It is those little worlds that my motion is about. First that we should celebrate the ordinary folk who, every day, do something to make those places better or the people in them stronger. And second that, even in these financially constrained times, us councillors – individually and collectively – can do something to help those good people with their betterment.

The idea for a loan product starts with a meeting I had with the then Corporate Services Director, Stuart McKinnon-Evans. I happened to mention the efforts to raise the cash to build a new village hall in Cullingworth and that they were looking at a soft loan from Unity Bank or Charity Bank. Stuart’s response was “why not ask the Council?”.

We did, and tomorrow £50,000 will be loaned to the hall by the Council – the final bit of funding for a £900,000 project.

The new hall is built and, with a fair wind, will open after Easter this year – nearly six years after former Heaton councillor, Bryan Hobson – then chair of the hall committee – announced the need for a new hall because the old one, a 50 year old wooden hut, was falling down.

My motion simply asks officers to look into how we might make this approach more widely available – Cullingworth was lucky because I was leader of the Conservative Group and sat in a meeting with the Council’s most senior finance officer.

There is a lot of criticism – not always justified – directed at the council for giving too much attention to the city centre. This motion, at pretty much zero cost to the council, allows us to provide another way to support local communities – those little worlds we each represent - do those little acts of betterment.

If you want to be flash, you could call it social venture capital – investing in social enterprises like community centres, sports clubs and pre-schools. Add to this the consideration of planning gain, some advice and support around planning and licensing, and we have a little package that can perhaps get a few more local initiatives out of the ground.

It’s not a panacea and can’t replace the loss of grant funding or the reduction in neighbourhood support or community development but it would help and, I feel, show that the Council is thinking about those thousands of little worlds than make up our city as well as the grand projects that might make the centre of that city great again.

Lord Mayor, I’ve sat through – and made the occasional contribution to – over 200 council meetings. A lot of what we do features much sound and fury but little real purpose beyond political campaigning. But in and amongst this are little ideas – often quiet – that we soon forget about but which make a real difference to some of those little worlds.

In the end we’re not measured by the titles we had, the power we wielded or the things we said, we’re tested on whether we did good and if, at the end of our time, we made the places we represent just a little bit better.

In Rudyard Kipling’s paean to his home county of Sussex he starts like this:

God gave all men all earth to love
But, since our hearts are small
Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all…

We are vessels for the love that people have for their communities, their neighbourhoods – you all know this – and I hope that, in our small way, we can help those people make their little worlds just that little better."

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Rewilding the city - greening Bradford's dereliction

Today they blew up Jacob's Well. Another ugly concrete lump is removed from the skyline of Bradford following in the unmissed footsteps of the National & Provincial Building and soon to be joined by some equally foul tower blocks running up Manchester Road out from the city centre. Elsewhere in the city centre there are plans to demolish the Oastler Centre and the now empty Morrisons Supermarket attached to this market. After a tragic fire, Drummond Mills a short walk from here has been cleared leaving behind another few acres of open land. Add in land at Leeds Road, at Barkerend roundabout and alongside the former Forster Square station yard (now featuring a bunch of retail sheds). What we have is a huge amount of land, supposedly for development. The problem is that everyone knows that this development isn't going to happen because most of the land has no - or even negative - value. Even a site at Fairweather Green, halfway to popular Thornton village remains derelict because the cost of remediation, highways and related infrastructure makes building houses there impossible without subsidy.

Meanwhile developers are frustrated at the lack of development sites in places where building houses on a speculative basis is possible. Vast swathes of unproductive and not especially attractive open land sit languishing within the 'green belt' safe from the hands of those developers. And this is despite the fact that other protections ranging from special landscape area designations through conservation areas to habitat protection zones and areas of outstanding beauty (to mention just a few) provide strong planning protections for the attractive, the ecologically-important and the historically significant.

So what to do? What we're doing now doesn't seem to be working. The council is stuck in the mentality that if you bung in some up-front subsidy it will somehow transform how the market behaves - despite the evidence from just about everywhere that this doesn't work. We can add that the council is also lumping most of its eggs in the basket of a high speed rail line that, right now, is unlikely to be built and, even if it is, may not have a stop in Bradford. I'm being slightly unkind here as the Council has some strong ideas around skills and education that are beginning to bear fruit. But the development point is still important - that anti-development masterplan of Will Alsop's still presents the best hope for a transformative approach to Bradford's inner city.

Which means we should green the city - rewild it even. Instead of trying to find a developer to build another ugly square box on the Jacob's Well site (that we'll have to knock down in 25 years), lets turn it into an orchard, get some beehives, plants some trees - rewild the centre. And let's do the same for all those other empty, derelict and unattractive sites that litter the centre of our city - instead of growing houses that we don't really need (at least if the house prices are a guide to demand - which they usually are) lets grow trees, have allotments, perhaps a duck pond, maybe a maze for kids to get lost in.

Instead of building houses on that Drummond Mills site and the other big clear sites in Manningham, let's cut and cover - putting car parking underneath parks, recreation and open space. And then let's gate off all those narrow terraced streets nearby to provide safe outside space for the families in those homes. Let's set a target of pedestrianising half of our inner city terraced streets - we'll see the great benefit of fewer kids run over and lots fewer young folk with asthma. I know there'll be people - mostly men - who'll moan about not being able to park their car in the living room but the world is changing and Bradford can be ready for a society where car ownership isn't an assumed status and where driverless cars, buses and taxis provide safer transport for all.

Imagine the difference if, in twenty years time, flying over the city means looking down onto woodland, park, orchard and meadow rather than urban decay and crammed, amenity-free housing developments rejected by the better off and dominated by social housing and the private landlord.

Let's say this will cost £100 million to do (that's not a quotation just a convenient round figure). Where does the money come from? If I told you that Bradford Council already has plans to borrow £80 million for regeneration - only part of this on a spend-to-save or income generating basis - you'll see that this is possible. A one-off 5% increase in Council Tax would provide enough revenue to fund the programme and this is without looking to other possible funding sources from the Environment Agency's flood mitigation funding through funds for air quality improvement to a vast range of private and charitable sources. And then there's income - maybe from that car parking, perhaps from users of the new open spaces. We can do it - and make Bradford a better, healthier and, above all, different place. Wouldn't that be worth the risk?

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Can you salvage an unpopular brand (or "Maybe Bradford should Change its name?")

Polling company YouGov recently looked at how "well-liked" UK cities were, with the findings placing Bradford at the bottom on 23% and York at the top on 92%. Obviously, when local politicians in Bradford as asked their view the response is to attack the poll - "really annoying", "people haven't visited", "misleading" - rather than ask why it is that people have such a poor opinion of Bradford's brand. Nor does it help to say "Bradford is wonderful", babble on about "diversity" or list a load of attractions. We must shout louder is another favourite line, as if mere communications volume is sufficient to turn the UK's worst city brand into a winner.

All this raises an important question - can we turn round a really unpopular or damaged brand? There are always suggestions out there including:

Listen to what consumers are saying

Engage with what they say even if it hurts

Seek out the most negative and talk with them

Shooting the messenger - what my colleagues are doing by attacking YouGov's poll - merely reinforces the problem. We also seek out only those people who have positive things to say, surrounding ourselves with a protective bubble of that positivity. It feels good but gets nowhere near the job at hand of fixing the brand's problems. And, let's remember too, that brands are defined by the interaction between the consumer and the identity not just by the spin we create around that identity.

A more constructive response to YouGov's work would have been to go talk to them about the polling, perhaps even commission them to dig a little deeper into why people don't like Bradford (or taking on board that most won't have been here, don't like the idea of Bradford). Anecdotally, we all know that many residents in large parts of what makes up the Bradford district would really rather they weren't lumped in with that city. This is, after all, why we don't describe ourselves as a "city", choosing instead the less grand word "district" - the only UK city hiding its light under a bushel in this way. Most of us have witnessed (or even done it ourselves) people going through convoluted locational descriptions - "near Leeds", "Aire Valley", "just off the M62" and so forth - to avoid using the "B" word. I've a tendency to say "the next village to Haworth" as a short description of Cullingworth's place in the world.

What happens right now is a focus on what us marketers would call features, a sort of "hey look at all these things we've got, how can you not love us!" The problem is that - as the poll showed - people don't love us even though we've got City Park, The Alhambra, Science and Media Museum, and St George's Hall. Nor does the prospect of the Rugby League Museum, the refurbished Odeon and a new market add anything to this love. People's perception of a place are not a function of its features but reflect the interaction between those features (and others like idiot young men driving too fast) and the consumer.

I wrote recently, drawing on the work of American urbanist, Aaron Renn, about how Bradford needed an unique selling point suggesting that, for the old City, this USP is the Asian community - instead to trying to ape other cities through shiny regeneration projects (that mostly don't work) maybe we should set out our stall as the capital of Asian Britain. But to do this we would need to deal with the problem that half the district will hate this idea - they'd either have to lump it or else we'd need to find a parallel positioning that reflected these (in the main more successful) parts of the City.

The thing that connects Haworth, Queensbury, Bingley, Ilkley and villages like Cullingworth isn't that we're all in the Bradford "district" but that we're all in the South Pennines - Yorkshire's South Pennines. No-one owns that positioning and it allows us, instead of pretending that calling Haworth, Ilkley and Bingley 'Bradford' is any kind of help, to create an uniqueness for these places and it doesn't matter really if some of this leaks over into Calderdale or Skipton.

We have in 'Bradford' a broken brand that we've then dumped on a load of places that have so much to offer - Haworth, Ilkley, Saltaire - resulting in them losing impact because of the association with a city brand that is not liked. Given the realities - for all the "look at all the things we've got" rhetoric - it seems likely that association with Bradford will act only to harm those strong South Pennine brands. The options are to have two brands - "Bradford: Capital of Asian Britain" and "Yorkshire's South Pennines", to split the district into the City and the District, Bradford and South Pennine Yorkshire, or to focus on the positive and drop the name Bradford.

South Pennines* Metropolitan District Council anyone?

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*Update: For those who think the South Pennines are in Derbyshire, here's a link to a funky map from Chris Sands. 

*And OS 021 South Pennines

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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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Imagining the city as a garden (without cars)

Most of us will have paid a visit to one of England's stately homes and wandered round the gardens. Many of these gardens are designed as a set of distinct spaces - 'rooms' - each with a different sort of planting. This allows for (given enough space) everything from formal box hedge gardens though ponds and cottage gardens to the walled kitchen garden or the long vista of a herbaceous border. As you move round these gardens you'll see that each 'room' is designed to give the visitor a tantalising glimpse of the 'room' beyond.



We need to begin thinking of our urban spaces in the same way. Not just to see these spaces as places of leisure and pleasure rather than work and commerce but to play the game of tempting the visitor from space to space using the same design ideas as the gardeners who laid out the attractions of our stately homes. Urban designers have already grasped the importance of water - fountains, pools, river banks - but the idea that city spaces should be intimate but linked is too often drowned in what are seen as essential, pragmatic things like bus access, traffic controls and the panoply of instructions beloved of the urban manager.

Part (but not all) of the problem is the car. We live in a world where people want to drop their child off right next to his school desk, where the prospect of walking 400 yards says "we won't park there", and where swooshing dual carriageways bang in the centre of town are seen as essential features of the civilised city. Now I understand the psychology of all this - we're lazy animals - but I don't see why we should make so much else less pleasant just to indulge this laziness. Especially when that laziness, combined with the mobile phone, is killing the traditional role of the town centre.

Kracow, probably more by luck than judgement, has most of the old city pedestrianised and surrounded by a circular park marking the route of the old walls. Visit Lucca (with walls designed by Leonardo da Vinci that form a strolling park around the city) and, although there's some cars, the bulk of the city is pedestrianised and blessedly free from the need to give over huge spaces to buses. Why do so many cities - like Bradford - persist in the myth that you can't get traffic out from the centre because then people won't visit. If you move the bus stops to the purpose built bus station, all of a sudden folk will stop coming because they've to walk that extra 400 yards?

If you get rid of the roads in a place like Bradford, you create the chance to start thinking of our city as a garden, as a set of rooms each offering a different experience - some formal, some laid back, some for kids, some for the old or cool, all for everyone. Right now - just as with so many other places - the visitor is put off by huge roads filled with buses, taxis, delivery vans and cars all that have to be negotiated. Let's stop all this and make our city and town centres places where people can dwell a little, stroll, meander, smile and relax; a urban version of the gardens at those stately homes.

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