- guardian.co.uk, Saturday June 30 2001 17.02 BST
It is hard to find anyone here who bothered to vote. But at the working men's club, drinker after drinker said that if he had voted, it would have been for the British National Party. In June the BNP picked up 4,151 votes in Burnley, 11.2% of those cast. It was the party's second best result of the election.
"I'm a bit racist," said Lee, 19, in a Burnley FC top. "I'm being honest - I know it's a bit bad."
What does it mean to Lee to be English ? "You have to be white, and born in England."
Lee's cousin Ashley is half-Asian. His aunt had a teenage fling with a Pakistani boy at school. So is Ashley English ? "I don't class him as an Asian," Lee replies. "He wouldn't class himself as one. He lives everyday like a white. He doesn't practise the Muslim religion."
Lee's grandmother, a middle aged woman, is drinking with him. Her husband, a plumber, voted BNP. "He says he's ashamed now that he voted BNP," she said. "He didn't know what it meant. But they do get more than we get. It was a protest vote."
"They get more than we get," is the constant refrain. Whites suspect that the Asians have got the lion's share of the millions spent on regenerating the Lancashire town.
Harry Brooks, independent councillor for Burnley Wood, says he abhors the BNP but believes the vote was a backlash against the favouritism shown to the town's ethnic minority communities.
"Daneshouse and Stoneyholme [predominantly Asian areas] have been first in the queue and the impact of that has been to produce resentment. Burnley Wood, which I represent, has had virtually no assistance of any kind from the council and it is an area of great deprivation and dereliction.
"I think that many of the people who voted BNP aren't racist. They are resentful and slightly bewildered and don't understand the decline of the town in the sense that we are living in a period of prosperity, but none of this is rubbing off on them."
House after house in Burnley Wood is empty, boarded up against vandals. Many people are trapped in unsaleable properties.
As the bitter flows in the working men's club, the drinkers make wilder accusations. Asian shops undercut white businesses and close them down, they say. Asian shops are fronts for heroin dealers.
The feverish atmosphere in the club is ripe for exploitation. The arguments take on a surreal quality as people complain that the Asians get better speed bumps - "like helicopter pads" - while their own area only gets "a lump of tarmac in the road".
It always comes back to: "They get more than we get."
"It's because the council are scared of them."
Burnley's Asians are not getting more than whites. The biggest investment in the town over the past decade has been the government's single regeneration budget, which has ploughed £19.5m into reviving the economy. Of that, £4m has gone into south-west Burnley - which is predominantly white - and £4m into the Asian areas, while the rest has gone into projects across the borough.
Burnley Wood has seen little investment, but that is be ginning to change. In the next big tranche of government regeneration money, millions are going into Burnley Wood. Initiatives will be launched to tackle crime and disorder, drug abuse and teenage pregnancy. Demolition work to clear the empty properties has begun.
But in a climate of suspicion and desperation, politicians willing to play on people's fears can make headway with frightening ease. Last weekend, there was a reminder that race hatred in Burnley is about more than electioneering.
It began at 4am on Saturday when an Asian family asked white party-goers to turn music down. Some whites allegedly responded with threats. Soon afterwards an Asian taxi driver was hit in the face with a hammer, which broke his cheekbone.
Mobs of white and Asian youths went on a three-day rampage, smashing cars and shop windows, firebombing a pub, and fighting riot police. In Burnley Wood, a mob of white youths surrounded Amit Stores, a corner shop near the working men's club. They smashed windows and terrorised the Indian couple who ran it.
A few local women tried to defend the shop from the mob, telling them: "Mrs Patel's not Asian [meaning Pakistani], she's Indian." The reply came: "She's still black."
The drinkers in the working men's club draw a distinction between "Indians" and "Asians". They use the latter to mean Muslims of Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin, the majority of Burnley's 4,400-strong Asian population who face the worst of the prejudice.
The BNP has shrewdly exploited this Islamophobia, even claiming to court other racial minorities while focusing its attacks on Muslims. The size of the far-right vote set alarm bells ringing among Burnley's Asians. In Duke Bar, a mixed area with a high Asian population, student Buddus Khan, 19, said: "When they got 4,100 votes I told all my mates there will be trouble coming."
Unemployment here runs at 5.4%, above the Burnley average. Many of the young men are studying for business or computing degrees. They dream of better things.
They laugh when they hear what the white drinkers have said, that they get the best of everything. "Why do you think it is that our parents can't get good jobs?" said Buddus. "Would they drive taxis if they could get good jobs?"
As with last month's race riots in Oldham, ignorance and suspicion have been the factors behind the votes for the BNP and the rioting in Burnley.
In an atmosphere tinged with paranoia, minor incidents spiralled out of control. Confrontation between Asians and whites turned into clashes with the police. Shahid Malik of the Commission for Racial Equality was allegedly assaulted with a riot shield.
Britain's summer of racial strife began in Bradford in April, when a fight at a Hindu wedding reception prompted rumours of a racist attack on Muslims.
In Oldham in May a fight between two youths, one white, one Asian, was followed by an attack by a gang of white youths on homes and shops. That led to a violent confrontation between riot police and Asians, who accused the police of failing to protect them.
Last weekend rioting broke out in Burnley and yesterday police were investigating petrol bomb attacks in Accrington.
Communal strife has spread like a brushfire between northern towns where economic deprivation has fostered jealousy, and the far right has whipped up emotion.
Burnley council's Labour leader, Stuart Caddy, a postman, admits that his party failed to challenge the roots of the racist vote. "The people who voted for the BNP did not have a racist agenda.
"I've spoken to people who voted BNP and they said : 'We just did not want to vote for you.' That is because we haven't been putting our message across."
Three nights of rioting have shown him how costly that failure can be.
