Bradford in Yorkshire doesn’t look like you’d expect it to. It’s notorious as the home of several of Britain’s worst race riots, and, since 2012, as the parliamentary constituency of George Galloway, the Soviet apologist and anti-Israel demagogue whose 1994 salute to Saddam Hussein’s “courage” marked the start of a new and more vicious phase of his career as a hater of the West. So you’d expect Bradford to be a post-industrial wasteland. Instead, it’s a city with a heart of broad, strong, Yorkshire stone and beautiful vistas over the dales. Rarely does a place look so much better than its reputation.
But you know what they say about appearances.
I was in Bradford to follow the Conservative candidate, George Grant, for a day of canvassing in his constituency of Bradford West. We met at Kashmir Crown Bakeries, a thriving business with a “Sorry, No Jobs” sign on its door. The mile-long walk from the train station to the bakery takes you through a neighborhood that gets worse with every step. By the time I arrived there, I’d seen more “For Let” signs on the buildings than people on the sidewalk. There were also lots of signs for George Galloway.
If Grant’s career makes anything clear, it’s that he’s got guts and decency to spare. A towering blonde with a wicked gift for mimicry, he’s unashamedly posh. His ancestors built one of the woolen mills that made Bradford — and then helped to destroy it when they closed — and though he could hardly fit in less in today’s Bradford, being a local boy is still an asset.
And as he candidly admits, this was an opportunity to help Bradford and fight Galloway at the same time. Grant went from his position as an associate fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, named for the proudly American Democratic senator and Cold Warrior, to being the Times correspondent in Libya after Qaddafi’s overthrow, a job he left only after his life was threatened. Bradford’s safer than that. Probably.
But after the walk from the train station, I had my doubts. Virtually everyone in Bradford refers to its majority population as “Asian,” a word that has a very different meaning here than in the U.S. The name of the bakery tells the tale: Bradford isn’t Asian; it’s Kashmiri. Grant’s speech to the bakery workers was translated as he delivered it into Urdu. The bakery owner, Asim Saleem, a charming entrepreneur who makes an excellent tea biscuit, didn’t try to disguise his frustration with the corruption, incompetence, and ethnic politics that make doing business in Bradford so hard. After we left the bakery, Grant and his wife hammered up a sign outside the home of a supporter. They’d not been working for 15 seconds before a local tough showed up to intimidate them, and to record their efforts on his phone. The sign’s unlikely to last the day.
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Though most bookies have him as a 50–1 shot — and, to be realistic, he’s going to lose — Grant does have a slight chance. He’s taken the high road of talking about the issues in a campaign filled with mudslinging between Labour candidate Naz Shah and Galloway. One of Galloway’s rhetorical dodges is to describe himself as a great parliamentarian. But just being in parliament doesn’t make you a parliamentarian, and after three years it’s becoming clear even to many of the voters of Bradford that he’s all hat and no cattle. Prattling about Gaza and blaming the Jews for Putin’s aggression in Ukraine is irrelevant to Bradford’s problems. Of course, his stock among the “English” voters — as they call themselves — could hardly be lower. As a local farmer put it during our day’s campaign, “I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire, unless I was pissing petrol.”
To deflect attention from his failures, Galloway — supposedly a man of the Left, though actually a thorough-going authoritarian — has taken to attacking Shah for escaping from a forced Islamic marriage when she was 15. Galloway’s the head of the Respect party, a name that accurately conveys the nature of his campaign against Shah: It’s the demand of a young thug, like the intimidator we encountered over Grant’s sign, for respect — a demand entirely divorced from conduct or achievements worthy of respect. If Galloway and Shah fight each other to a standstill, Grant might slip in between them. More realistically, though, tactical voting from potentially Conservative voters against one side or the other will doom his already slender chances.
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If Galloway goes down on May 7, it won’t be because the people of Bradford don’t want to be represented by an Israel-basher. It’ll be because they have figured out that he’s a windbag.
Bradford is in no way a representative constituency. It’s majority Muslim, Kashmiri, and — appearances aside — it is indeed post-industrial. Yet it’s not entirely removed from the rest of Britain. One of Bradford’s strongest and yet weakest points is that it does have a sense of community. It’s hard to get the aforementioned English voters — not just in Bradford — to take much of an interest in politics, or attend political events. But in Bradford, a hundred Asian voters were willing to take their Bank Holiday Monday off to attend a Conservative-party event. The problem with this sense of community is that it rests in considerable part on what’s known as biraderi politics — or patriarchal loyalty to Kashmiri clans — which Galloway both challenges and exploits. If you want to be taken seriously as a candidate in this world, you need to work at it.
Grant’s worked hard, and his dignity and professionalism are even more appealing when one considers his pie-tossing opposition, but a single campaign likely isn’t enough. It’s not utterly inconceivable that a Conservative could win in Bradford West, but it would take a generational effort, and a willingness to work within the existing community structures — not blindly accepting them, but recognizing that the job of an MP is to represent a constituency, not to fix the deficiencies of his constituents. But a sustained effort is the last thing today’s Conservative party at the national level is interested in making in Bradford: In its eyes, if a constituency can’t contribute to a majority on May 7, it’s negligible.
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It’s small-minded to say this is bad for the Tories. It’s bad for Britain. But, to consider the situation merely from the Tory point of view, the Conservative party tends to show up to make its case only when there are votes to be won, and it lacks the advantage of being willing to promise more public money for everyone. Yet everywhere, including in Bradford, people are more subtle than you give them credit for: One of Grant’s fondest memories of the campaign is listening to a Kashmiri Asian complain about immigrants — by which he meant Eastern Europeans — coming in to steal jobs from English people like himself. If Galloway goes down on May 7, it won’t be because the people of Bradford don’t want to be represented by an Israel-basher. It’ll be because they have figured out that he’s a windbag. The Tories can’t win if they, too, stand for little more than talk.