GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
On Burnley Road: Class, Race and Politics in a Northern English Town
Salutary lessons to be learned from race riots in a ‘red wall’ Burnley
DECLINE: Abandoned factories symbolise Burnley's impoverishment in recent decades
[David Dixon/Creative Commons]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
IN JUNE 2001, there was a sudden outburst of racial rioting in the old Lancashire town of Burnley, one with a long weaving tradition and home to a settled minority community of Asian Muslims, mainly from Bangladesh, Gujarat and Pakistan who had lived in the town in seeming amity with their neighbours. That was clearly not the case.
Mike Makin-White, a former member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, was at the time working in community relations for Burnley Council, helping to promote community cohesion and good race relations during a decade when the BNP won seats on the council.
In this book, after a short but useful historical introduction to the town, he provides an incisive step-by-step description and perceptive analysis of what lay behind those riots.
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