The leader of a major political party cannot be expected to have time to watch too much television. Nonetheless it was a tad unfortunate, when visiting Bradford on Saturday, that Ed Miliband had not heard of Make Bradford British. This was the much criticised reality TV experiment that stoked racial tensions in the West Yorkshire city by shoving Bradfordians of different colours and creeds together earlier this year.
It wouldn’t have mattered had one of the first guests he met on his mission to woo Bradford not been Sabbiyah Pervez, a young Muslim mother sent by Channel 4 to pull pints in a local pub and then filmed being racially abused by the customers.
“I was on Make Bradford British,” said the petite 23-year-old by way of introduction to the Labour leader. “Great!” said Miliband, beaming at her camouflage print headscarf and exquisitely made-up face. “Tell me about the scheme!” Pervez paused. “Didn’t you watch it?” Miliband cocked his head to one side: this clearly had not been in his briefing pack. Pervez helped him out: “It was a TV programme.”
In that case, said Miliband, he would most certainly be watching it now. Good, said Pervez, launching into an exuberant precis of her short life that not only detailed the racial intolerance she had experienced taking part in the documentary but also the forced marriage she suffered in the city as a teenager.
It was a little hiccup in what was an otherwise admirable and assured attempt at persuading the Muslim women of Bradford that the Labour party cared about them and their city. Miliband had been invited by the Bradford Muslim Women’s Council (BMWC), an organisation set up in 2010 to give Muslim women a voice and access to a national political, social and cultural platform.
He had a mountain to climb. The 70 women who turned up to the event at the Media Museum were a polite, if sceptical audience, warned at the start to demonstrate the “Islamic etiquette of respectful dialogue”.
Many of them had voted for George Galloway in the byelection in March and, like Pervez, had plumped for councillors from his Respect party at the local elections in May.
Worse, most of them had come to the conclusion that the Labour party did not welcome women like them. “It’s an old boy’s club!” shouted one woman. Another told Miliband that she had been a paid-up member of the Labour party for 15 years, but had relinquished her membership after being shunned by the men who dominated her local branch in the Manningham area of Bradford.
The women told Miliband his party had taken their support for granted.
He could not disagree – it is a source of particular embarrassment that he had been so assured of a Labour victory in Bradford West that his advisers were briefing journalists even after polls closed that he would be on the first train north in the morning to celebrate the continuation of 38 uninterrupted years of Labour rule in the constituency.
But worse than looking smug and out of touch, Labour’s dramatic defeat – a 5,000 Labour majority was transformed into a 10,000 majority for Respect – revealed some extremely uncomfortable home truths about the modern practices of a party that has always prided itself on its inclusiveness.
A postmortem revealed Bradford’s Labour party had become dominated by powerful Pakistani elders who played clan politics, exploiting the so-called Biraderi system, which demanded loyalties of those whose families came from the same Kashmiri villages. While Galloway recruited an army of women in niqabs and hijabs to talk to their sisters in Urdu and Gujarati, male Labour canvassers were knocking on doors and asking grown women if their husbands were in.
This from a party whose deputy leader, Harriet Harman, was breastfeeding in the House of Commons in the 1980s.
Sensibly, Miliband began with a mea culpa. “I’m here, honestly, partly because of what happened in the Bradford West byelection, because that was a big wake-up call for the Labour party,” he told the women. “We lost very, very badly and we didn’t realise we were going to lose until we had lost.” The party, he said, had “specifically failed in relation to Muslim women and younger members of the Muslim community” in the city.
But, he said, the defeat had actually been a blessing in disguise. “Because it’s a reminder to us that no area can in any way be taken for granted,” he said. “It’s also a reminder that people are pretty fed up with politics; people think all politicians are the same, that they break their promises and that people think it won’t make any difference who we vote for. And I think part of the attraction of George Galloway was that maybe he offered something different – it’s not something I agree with, but that’s what I think the attraction was.”
Talking to many of the women on Saturday, it was clear that while few shared Labour’s support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, many identified with the party’s core values – a belief in wealth redistribution, a rejection of austerity as a way to make good the deficit. They’d just fallen out of love with Labour and voted instead for a party that seemed to care about them. As Sarah Khan, an interpreter with the courts service, put it: “Voting for George Galloway was a protest vote. Bradford women were disappointed with Labour.”
Another said that she never even knew the name of her old Labour councillor and only ever saw him when he was asking for her vote (or rather her husband’s) around election time. “Now I even have my Respect councillor’s mobile number!” she exclaimed, waving her phone.
Reconnecting with voters all year round is one of Miliband’s key aims as he tries to reshape Labour as a “ground-up rather than top-down” party.
But it’s difficult to win over an audience if you can’t offer solutions to their problems. Miliband was forced to admit that many of the women’s gripes were issues over which he had no control. He explained, for example, that the much maligned “black hole” in the city centre where a shopping centre was supposed to be built (now site of the Occupy Bradford camp) was owned by Westfield, not the Labour-led council. Sorting out this development was one of Galloway’s key campaign pledges, along with bringing troops back from Afghanistan and Iraq and scrapping university tuition fees. “I’m not going to make promises to you three years before a general election without knowing what I can actually deliver,” said Miliband.
But he came up with some ideas that went down well – schools from his constituency in predominantly white Doncaster could link up with their Muslim-heavy counterparts in Bradford so that children can learn about diversity first hand, he suggested, to murmurs of approval.
Miliband was sent back to London with a warning from the event organiser ringing in his ears. Underestimate Muslim women at your peril, said Bana Gora, chair of the BMWC and Bradford programme director for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. “There’s a lot of men who fear strong women, who want them to be wallflowers,” she said.
“Whereas the prophet, that’s not the type of people he encouraged. His wives were women who talked back.”