Comments on: Small Town Napoleons: Barnsley & the BNP

By: TomE

TomE — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:09:59 +0000

A typically eloquent post, but also a fundamentally necessary one – good on you

By: Neil

Neil — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:11:46 +0000

Thanks Sarah, and I can certainly recognise your experience of Pitsmoor. It’s not quite the same, but you can find a similar (albeit much less racially-tinged) conflict if you drive up to somewhere like Crookes, where there’s a grudging relationship between the people who live there and the student population. So these things can happen regardless of ethnicity, and whilst racism is obviously going to come into a vote for the BNP, it’s not going to apply for everyone and it’s not necessarily going to be the main motivating factor behind that vote.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:48:28 +0000

Really valuable post – and for an ex-Sheffield resident, an evocative one too. It chimes a lot with my experience of living in Pitsmoor. There, the Asian community and the white working class one lived separately mostly but shared amenities: in my time there I heard resentful mutterings about the supposed ease with which immigrants were able to access benefits, the number of non-whites in the doctor’s waiting room, and the impossibility of building a church in a Muslim state. People who saw problems, and believed for whatever reason that immigration and asylum were the cause.