Leeds, UK
Mission Title: "Inglan is Sick" – Race Riots in Northern England
Mission By: Jasper Moelker, Sanne Plomp
Mission Finished on Date: 11-06-2008
SCRIPT
- Go to the district of Dewsbury, the site of the most recent racial conflict and interview diverse people about the stories of the different incidents, and furthermore what they feel about what’s happening.
- Be sure to get as many different signs and markers from the streets that represent the different ethnic minorities that line around Leeds.
- Interview a representative from the British National Party from in or around Leeds. Ask them about how they and their party feel about the history of race riots in the North.
- Also speak to David Jackson a representative from the Leeds City council community intelligence officer, and to Rose Simkins, Stop Hate director Stop Hate UK Ask him what’s going on to fix the problems stemming from difference and intolerance.
- Pay particular attention to the Ravensthorpe quarter, cited as one of the top three most deprived areas of Britain.
- In your research, explore how race and more importantly poverty play into tensions in the city.
- Interview various people from different ethnic and immigrant groups about the problems in the city.
- The question is a heavy one to answer, but do your best to capture the different voices at the center of the conflict, especially people in the street.
TRAVEL BAG
What is at the core of the racial problems in Northern England?
Around Leeds, from city center to Chapeltown to Burnley to Bradford to most recently Dewsbury, every couple of years, buildings are burned, police are attacked, protesters and rioters clubbed, windows smashed, and just recently in Dewsbury, youths were chased through the streets by men wielding machetes. These aren’t football hooligans, a problem of their own, but race riots involving one of the many groups sharing Leeds as a home, nativist Britons (often supporters of the British National Party), immigrants from Asia, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe, and religious minorities including Sikhs and Moslems.
“Inglan is sick.” Linton Kwesi Johnson first said these words almost thirty years ago enumerating all of the injustices suffered by the Afro-Caribbean minorities living in many parts of England, much of which led to riots across the country. Though tensions in and around the Afro-Caribbean community still exist, the ethnic and immigrant map of the UK has changed and now includes people from all over the world. With the exacerbation of poverty, and for the BNP and its supporters, the multicultural policies of the Blair years, have brought the multi-ethnic neighborhoods of the North to a boil.
