A week after the riot there are many boarded-up shop windows in the centre of Bradford. However there are only a few more than there were a week before the riot.
The city centre has looked increasingly run-down over the past few years. This is symptomatic of its economic malaise, which has fed the frustrations of both Asian and white working class youth.
This is a contrast with Leeds, Bradford’s bigger neighbour. Chapeltown in Leeds was the site of riots in 1980 when African-Caribbean youth clashed with the police.
West Yorkshire has lost much of its textile industry, along with engineering and other older industries. However Leeds has found a replacement in governmental institutions, commercial legal firms, financial services and the like.
Chapeltown is not prosperous, and many other areas of Leeds are pockets of poverty. However the city overall is a economically buoyant.
Bradford has found few significant replacements for old industries. Poverty is more widespread, and with the collapse or export of industries the trade union movement has become much weaker.
Large swathes of the city’s housing are ageing and in disrepair, much of it dating back to the 19th century. Having been an educational pioneer, Bradford also has many nineteenth-century schools, often with playgrounds full of temporary buildings.
Bradford also has a black ethnic minority with a greater weight in the city’s population. The Pakistani Asian community is a growing part of the city. Although some have prospered economically, as entrepreneurs, it also includes many of the poorest workers in the city, some of them dependent on taxi driving, home working and other precarious employments, living in ageing privately owned housing stock.
Meanwhile the poorest of the white working class are often concentrated on outlying housing estates like Ravenscliffe, also lacking decent opportunities to work. Much of the housing is still council-owned, and more modern, but nevertheless decrepit and in need of refurbishment.
One of the problems between white and black is physical segregation. As Asians have moved from the areas in which they originally concentrated, their new white neighbours have also moved. This well-recognised phenomenon is known as white flight.
This is less the behaviour of poor working-class whites, who whether they like it or not cannot afford to move, than of middle-class whites. This means, for example, but many of the teachers in inner-city schools largely made up of ethnic minority children themselves live in white neighbourhoods many miles away.
Many of those who live in Bradford’s suburbs and satellite towns do not work in the Bradford district at all. They commute to Leeds, or even to Manchester. Accordingly they have little connection with the city.
The continuing problems were recognised by the local authority before the recent riot. They led to the establishment of a "Bradford Race Review" chaired by Herman Ouseley. The panel’s report was coincidentally delivered in the week after the riot.
"Self-segregation is driven by fear of others, the need for safety from harassment and violent crime and the belief that it is the only way to promote, retain and protect faith and cultural identity and affiliation."
The Ouseley Report ("Community Pride not Prejudice - making Diversity Work in Bradford"), p16
The report’s focus is on ignorance and "self-segregation". It proposes measures to audit and ensure equal treatment in institutions and work places. It also calls for citizenship education to overcome ignorance.
Beleaguered
However if the roots of antagonism live in poverty and powerlessness, such measures will not address them. The way forward for the left in Bradford and for beleaguered working-class communities is better expressed in the perspective that the Socialist Alliance was advancing at Saturday’s rally:
"We believe that neo-Nazis represent a special and immediate threat to the democratic rights, and even the lives, of those who disagree with them, particularly members of black ethnic minorities. We believe we need to respond by building unity across the ethnic divisions in the city.
"This means getting together to fight privatisation of council services and the threat to 14,000 jobs – we demand a decent level of services and facilities in all areas.
"It includes defending and improving council housing, protecting public education and demanding from government measures and resources to fight growing poverty and inequality.
"And it also means standing up for the right of communities to defend themselves against attack by racists."