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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Steamrollers for cracking nuts - on demanding ID at polling stations

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The Electoral Commission is suggesting that we should have to show identification in order to vote:

"Looking ahead, the time has come for England, Scotland and Wales to move towards a requirement for voters to produce ID at polling stations. This would strengthen the system and bring Great Britain into line with Northern Ireland and many  countries where this is already in place."

This proposal isn't made because the Electoral Commission has any substantive evidence that personation is a real problem in UK elections merely that there have been lots of complaints and lots of stories about allegations of possible personation (mostly in places with big immigrant populations and especially Pakistani or Bangladeshi Muslim populations).

That there is fraud in our elections is a fact that no-one disputes. However, the real problems don't lie with personation but with voter registration and postal voting - yet the Commission refuses to tighten up postal voting systems. Instead we get demands for ID - another example of how we are no longer a place where the default position is to trust someone, to assume he is telling the truth.

In Bradford we get these complaints of personation at every elections. Typically the anecdotes tell of a young campaigner going to houses of people he knows and having a conversation something like this:

"Hi Auntie, where's uncle?" "He's at the mosque."

"Has he voted yet?" "I don't know - his polling card is on the table"

"I'll take it."

The cards are gathered up and handed over to others to vote - "vote early, vote often" as the saying goes.

I suspect that something like this - or variations on it - does happen but that it is less common than the stories make out. What is interesting is that there hasn't been a prosecution for this sort of personation (as far as I know). There have been prosecutions - some successful - for mishandling postal votes and for abuse of voter registration but these are also rare.

This seems to me a proposal more in response to the cries of foul that political parties in some places routinely throw out when they lose elections. We have a small nut in the form of problems in a few places (and these are about allegations of wrongdoing rather than actual evidence of wrongdoing) to which - for its own convenience - the Electoral Commission proposes to employ a large steamroller in the form of requiring ID.

In the end the truth about voting fraud is this - as the Chair of the Electoral Commission says:

"Proven cases of electoral fraud are rare..."

The response should be for local councils and police in areas where there might be a problem not for national legislation. And certainly not for legislation that institutionalises an assumption of mistrust and especially mistrust based on someone being from an immigrant population.

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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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