This book is about what it means to speak of a political mood. Can the electorate be in a mood? How do they express it? How can moods be captured in a meaningful way? This book attempts to answer those questions by looking at one city during the December 2019 British general election. This is not a book about campaign strategies, target voters, turnouts and poll swings. It is about how people feel. The research approach is ethnographic. The telling of the story is lyrical. It may not be hard political science but it contributes significantly to an understanding of the health of contemporary democracy. Focusing upon the ways that voters and non-voters perform their enthusiasm or indifference, the stories that they tell, and photographic images of Bradford in what is supposed to be a vital democratic moment, this book invites readers to engage with the affective texture of an election.
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This chapter sets a context for the study of political mood in the city of Bradford during the 2019 general election. It explores the particular characteristics of the city and of the historical moment in which this election occurred. It focuses on the ways that events are experienced ‘from the inside’ and ‘from the outside’. It raises important questions about how political experience is formed.
Keywords
MoodPlaceHistoryBrexitInsidersOutsiders
End Abstract
What does it mean to speak of an election as an event that is shaped by its mood? This is not a book about the policies voters wanted an elected government to enact; how they decided who to vote for; whether they conformed to the ‘swings’ identified by psephologists; or how many, and which socio-demographic groups, turned out on election day. There are plenty of informative books and articles addressing these questions. Some of them will include passing reference to ‘the mood of the electorate’, often as an impressionistic touch intended to add colour to an otherwise authoritative account. But such fleeting references beg the question we are asking in this book: What exactly is an election mood? Is it like the mood of a person who is feeling ecstatic or depressed, or a collective mood as in a street party or a funeral? Do elections reflect or generate moods? If so, how should we read them? How should we tell their story in ways that make sense? (Fig. 1.1.)
Fig. 1.1
Way in election morning. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)
Our approach to answering these questions is threefold. First, go to a place where an election is taking place. Second, observe and hang out with people as they are in the midst of experiencing an election. Third, ask them how they feel. (Not what their political preferences or considered views are, but how they feel). It is hardly rocket science. But neither could it be done by sitting at a desk looking at a computer screen. We had to be somewhere—and have a real sensibility towards that place—if we were going to do this properly.
We chose Bradford because we both live within its political boundaries and vote in its elections. We chose Bradford because it was not London. It was one of those places that people from London head up to when they want to see how ‘real people’ are making sense of the election. We chose Bradford because, in many respects, its story of imperial affluence and recent decline is a microcosm of British history. This is a place which at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the most prosperous cities in Europe, just as Britain was the most powerful empire in the world. Twenty-first-century Bradford bears the scars of urban post-industrialism. But we were not there to expose scars. Our aim was to understand what happens when people are sent the message that their future is in their own hands; that they have the power to vote for their own destinies; that they are citizens of a democracy. Does it feel any different being a citizen of a democracy rather than a waged or salaried worker, a shopper, a worshiper, a native, an immigrant, a scratch-card player or a junkie? We know what the (uncodified, unwritten) constitution is supposed to allow citizens to do, but rather less about how it makes them feel. In this book we attempt to trace those feelings.
Beyond the pages of politics textbooks, elections are not abstract phenomena. They are events that are located in particular places at specific times, with contingent cultural shapes. There is a qualitative difference between experiencing an election from the centre of the London bubble and the post-industrial wastelands of West Yorkshire. An election taking place in a hot summer amidst an economic boom will be experienced differently from one in the deep winter surrounded by precarious post-Brexit anxieties. People do not simply cast votes in elections but inhabit them as inclusive or estranging events. It is to these specificities of the Bradford election of December 2019 that we turn in this chapter (Fig. 1.2).
Fig. 1.2
Newspapers, W H Smith. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)
A ‘Grim but Not Mean’ Place1
Lost in its smoky valley in the Pennine hills, bristling with tall mill chimneys, with its face of blackened stone, Bruddesford [Bradford] is generally held to be an ugly city, and so I suppose it is, but it always seemed to me to have the kind of ugliness that could not only be tolerated, but often enjoyed; it was grim but not mean. (J.B. Priestley)
Bradford is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as a farming area that had been ravaged by William the Conqueror in 1070. It took some time to recover, but by 1251 Henry III permitted a weekly market to be held in the town every Thursday. (Interestingly, the tradition of people coming into town for Thursday markets is the reason that British elections are always held on Thursdays).
Bradford was hit hard by the Black Death, which first hit the town in 1359. By 1379, its population had halved to 300. Economic recovery from the plague took a long time and it was not until the fifteenth century that the town began to prosper as a producer of woollen clothes. There were some disruptions when mainly Republican Bradford was besieged twice by the Royalists during the Civil War of the seventeenth century. After the Restoration, the worsted industry in the West Riding really took off, but it was only with improvements to canal and road links in the late eighteenth century that Bradford became the main economic centre of the region, rivalling Leeds, but outstripping Halifax. The city assumed the boundless confidence that came from industrial prosperity, even though both confidence and prosperity were never shared out equally. The first bank in Bradford opened in 1771 so that the new industrial capitalists could deposit their textile profits locally. The Bradford canal was built in 1774 and was connected to the Leeds-Liverpool canal three years later, turning the city into the hub of one of the richest economic networks in the world.
Bradford’s first industrial mills, including newly invented spinning machinery, were established in the 1780s and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become a global centre of the textile trade. German merchants came to settle in the town (in an area still known as Little Germany) and networks of overseas commerce were established. Industry attracted workers to the town; the population grew from 13,000 in 1801 to 103,000 in 1857. The railway reached Bradford in 1846 and from 1882 horse-drawn trams ran in the streets. Electricity was first generated in Bradford in 1889 and the first electric trams ran in the streets in 1898. The first motor buses in Britain began running in Bradford in 1897, the year in which city status was conferred. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the city stood as a model of industrial modernity.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, Bradford’s textile industry began to face fierce global competition. Prosperity was maintained during the two world wars, but it was becoming clear that Bradford’s textile industry was facing fierce global competition. Industrialists responded by bringing in cheap labour with a view to cutting production costs. After the Second World War immigrants from Poland, Ukraine and Yugoslavia were recruited in large numbers. In the 1950s and 1960s, New Commonwealth immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh were recruited, mainly from villages in Azad Kashmir and Mirpur, to work on the night shifts which opened up with the introduction of 24-hour production. By 1971, 10% of the city’s population was Asian. This increased to 18% in 2001 and 27% in 2011. Bradford came to be seen as a national testbed of multiculturalism. When things go wrong in the city, it is too glibly described as a failure of race relations. However, Bradford, as a post-industrial city, is faced with a much deeper problem that cuts across ethnic divisions: poverty.
The Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) states that Bradford is the fourth most income-deprived district in the country and has the largest gap between rich and poor of any local authority district in England. Within the poorest parts of the city, infant mortality rates are twice the national average. Bradford has the fourth-highest rate of child poverty of all local authorities within the UK, with over a third of all children in the district living in poverty. According to the city’s 2019 Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, ‘In Bradford District, children who grow up in low-income households have poorer mental and physical health and are more likely to leave school with lower educational attainment’. The city’s housing stock is the oldest in Britain: a third of its houses were built before 1919. A total of 60% of its privately rented dwellings are rated as being below decent standards.
Mood is often assumed to be a product of ephemeral temperament and sometimes dismissed as a self-indulgent whim. But moods can be deeply rooted in material constraints. The mood of prisoner facing a life sentence is not a mere psychic proclivity, but a very understandable reaction to coercive restraint. When people are in a mood there is usually a reason for it, and living in one of the poorest and unequal cities in the country where much of the housing is indecent, the mortality rates are obscenely high, and your children’s life chances are unjustly curtailed is probably a good enough reason to feel perturbed (Fig. 1.3).
Fig. 1.3
Wibsey Conservative Club. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)
Caught in a Long Moment
We remember great political events as occasions in time. And we remember periods of time by their affective textures. We think of a date or an era and recall mood-states. The British general election of 1997 is commonly remembered as a moment of exhaustion from nearly two decades of Thatcherism, prompting the rhapsodic insistence of New Labour that ‘things can only get better’. Swept up in a mood of modernising renewal, voters did not simply elect a government, but signed up for a new ‘cool’ world. In 1979 Thatcher’s victory had responded to the metaphor of ‘the winter of discontent’, inducing a minatory mood which called for the protection of a strong government. The 1945 election is perhaps the best example of affectively inflected political time. To understand that great political turning-point, suggests the historian, Peter Hennessy (2006:88), one must consider ‘the atmosphere of 1945 – the grain of everyday existence, the humdrum as well as the hopeful and the glorious’. Consider Barbara Castle’s account of her eve-of-poll election meeting:
the atmosphere buoyed one up because there was such excitement and such enthusiasm. Our eve-of-the-poll meeting at St George’s Hall in Blackburn, which was a very large public ...
