Wake Up Bradford!

As some of our older readers will recall, Bradford’s Labour led Council has a history of both political and financial corruption. In return for used notes in brown envelopes, councilors gave permission for the demolition of some of the city’s most attractive buildings. Rather than raising its game for the 2025 City of Culture, the Council totters on the precipice of financial and political bankruptcy. We note that, with regard to the city center, things are going from bad to worse. The Interchange, which is the responsibility of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, like so many newer buildings in the city was constructed with low grade materials, has now closed for bus users and as a result the traffic flow alternates between slow and gridlock on a daily basis. As workmen have informed me, the Council’s project oversight of the current road alterations, costing £43million, consists of digging up a particular site, cordoning it off and leaving it for months on end. According to a T&A report, council leader Susan Hinchliffe remains unapologetic regarding this shambles. Similar remarks could be made for the delays to the opening of the Bradford Live and Darley Street market buildings, not to mention the One City Park building.

That Bradford Council is tottering on the verge of bankruptcy is, in large part, due to its decades long appalling record on child protection; i.e. the sexual exploitation of girls in Council care. Rather like a school receiving a bad OFSTED report, our Council was initially put into “special measures” and later had its statutory responsibility for child protection taken away and given to a private profit making Bradford Children and Families Trust. Many of these ‘trusts’ are, according to press reports, making hefty profits by charging councils for child protection and care services the sum of £6,000 or more per week per child; it may be noted that it would be cheaper to send them to a top private school such as Eaton. The scare quotes are appropriate because often these ‘trusts’ are in practice run by private equity firms, so called because unlike public companies, they only provide the legal minimum of information in their annual accounts. Who knows how well, or otherwise, the most vulnerable girls and boys in our city are being looked after by these private sector, profit maximising, organisations. I do not hear too many of our Labour councillors, most of whom remain committed to the privatisation of as many services as possible, speaking out on this scandalous state of affairs. In fact, council leader Susan Hinchliffe recently claimed the Bradford Children and Families Trust was “well led”.

Yet, despite claiming to have no money, Bradford Council publishes, often glossy, documents, one of which is entitled Poverty and Deprivation. The document acknowledges that the city is “the 5th most deprived local authority area in England”. It features an array of unflattering numerical statistics, taken from various sources, which at best hint at, but do not by any means capture, the lack of qualitative wellbeing of many thousands of Bradford’s working class inhabitants. Not surprisingly, the most deprived areas are the inner city wards where unemployment, crime, lack of educational resources, child poverty, poor housing and limited life expectancy are at their highest. The document closes with a discussion on the increasingly strict sanctions being imposed by a Tory central government on those claiming Job Seekers Allowance and other state benefits. This is rich coming from a Council led by a party whose leader, Sir Kier Starmer, recently praised Mrs Thatcher, best known for her public spending cuts/privatisation agenda. Starmer has now distinguished himself by not taxing the rich but rather cutting government help with heating bills for pensioners; which may well lead to 4,000 deaths according to one press report, well done sir Kier!

Another council document, which is little more than an elaborately produced marketing exercise, with lots of coloured photographs, is entitled Bradford District’s Economic Recovery Plan. The text acknowledges the input of the great and the good of the city’s academic, banking and finance, and business communities. Given these contributors, including a quotation from then prime minister Boris Johnson, it comes as no surprise that the document offers only the “ambition” that Bradford’s recovery from the Covid pandemic will be brought about by what amounts to, yes you have guessed: more of the same. That is, despite the mass of percentages, graphs and tables, along with lots of fancy economic jargon, the core of the city’s socio-economic relations will continue to be the low wage labour system. So, workers will continue to receive below average wages, which will be eaten away by food and energy price inflation, rising private sector rents and the rest. At best there will be more low productivity service sector jobs and little or no investment in manufacturing. In short, more of the deprivation recorded in the document referred to in the previous paragraph.

As noted, overall control of Bradford Council and its various subcommittees, as for most of its history, is held by the Labour Party. However, despite this party’s name there is little, if anything, in these documents to suggest any commitment to Bradford’s labouring class, i.e the people whose efforts actually produce the food, clothing, shelter and more, without which human life cannot continue. As regards the Labour Party’s councillors, few seem to be prepared to challenge their party leader’s commitment to the Blair-Thatcher privatisation austerity agenda.

Simeon Scott