George Galloway and the British Labour Party

It isn't often that I publish a blog post about politics, but occasionally I feel that there's a need to. Last night, nearly 40 virtually continuous years of Labour party dominance ended in Bradford West. George Galloway, representing his Respect party, was elected to Parliament by a majority of over 10,000 votes. No matter what anyone's opinion of Galloway may be, this is a colossal, historic victory. Such a victory doesn't happen for no reason, and cannot be written off as a glitch: Galloway also won Bethnal Green and Bow (also a traditional, staunch Labour party seat) in 2005. Galloway is perfectly correct when he speaks about the betrayal by the Labour party of its own voters. Although it was nine years ago, people will not forget that the Labour party wholeheartedly supported and collaborated in the destruction of Iraq.

But monstrous as this act was, it is but one of many very big errors leading to the self-destruction of the Labour party.

Clio Barnard's The Arbor, and Andrea Dunbar, from the Buttershaw Estate, Bradford, West Yorkshire

The Arbor (2010) is a documentary about the life of the playwright Andrea Dunbar, with the state of Thatcherite northern England in the 1980s as a backcloth. Or is it more about the aftermath, the heritage of Dunbar, both artistic and personal? Certainly it's one of the best films of the year, although don't expect it to win any Oscars: this is definitely arthouse only.

Andrea Dunbar was born in Bradford in 1961, and died there in 1990 at the age of 29. She wrote just three plays: The Arbor (1980), Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1982), and Shirley (1985), the first being performed at the Royal Court Theatre when she was 19, and had never even been to a theatre before. She initially sent director Max Stafford-Clark her first manuscript, written in green biro in a school exercise book, and the theatre commissioned the second play, on which a film of the same name was based and released to great success in 1986. Rita, Sue and Bob Too concerns a married man who has simultaneous relationships with babysitters Rita and Sue from the (then) sink estate Buttershaw, Bradford, Yorkshire, who are half his age, and who take turns to have sex with him in his car. His wife finds out and leaves him, Rita moves in with him and gets pregnant, Sue unsuccessfully moves in with a Pakistani, but in the end they become a threesome again.

The problem is that this is not the play that Dunbar wrote, and she was unhappy with the scriptwriters who were brought in to make this a much more upbeat version of her original play. Another problem is that some members of the Buttershaw estate were unhappy about how it had been depicted, although Dunbar herself claimed that only a few locals had complained to her.

If Dunbar had been aware of many of the locals' hatred of the depiction of some of the people in D. H. Lawrence's Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, or of Thomas Wolfe's depiction of the people in his home in Asheville, North Carolina, she'd perhaps have known that, in Wolfe's words: You Can't Go Home Again. But Dunbar didn't move from home, she stayed in Buttershaw, and, more or less enslaved to drink, collapsed in the Beacon pub on the Buttershaw estate.

Clio Barnard's film is experimental, taking the words of survivors - above all Dunbar's two daughters Lorraine and Lisa - with actors lip-synching them. One of the things that slightly disappoints me about this film is the absence of what Max Stafford-Clark said about a conversation he had with Dunbar, asking him about the limits of drama - and Stafford-Clark specifically stating that she clearly wasn't talking about Brecht (of whom she'd almost certainly never heard) - of how far she could go with sex in the theatre. But it's Brecht who is at the forefront of The Arbor: the lip-synching creates a distancing effect, a disjuncture between the real and the artificial, which of course is the effect that Clio Barnard wants to create anyway. So why avoid mentioning Brecht? He's definitely there.

What is the Arbor to which The Arbor refers? It's Brafferton Arbor, which is the council area where Dunbar lived, and where she played out most of her life. It's prominent in the film, which is a mélange of the lip-synched episodes, documentary television footage, and scenes from The Arbor performed on the grassy area of Brafferton Arbor.

Most of all, it's Lorraine's story that counts. Lisa doesn't have any real problems with her mother, but Lorraine is the product of her mother's relationship with a Pakistani, and at a time when the estate was racist, that was important.

Lorraine was raped at 14, became a prostitute to support her drug habit, and was imprisoned for the manslaughter (by gross negligence) of her two-year-old baby Harris. It seems to be a cycle of deprivation, and as Lorraine graduated from crack to heroin, her baby (born addicted, according to Lorraine), died of an overdose of Lorraine's methodone.

But this is a wonderful movie that I don't recommend to anyone expecting thrills galore. The lip-synching, and the various stories told in hindsight, tell us how impossible the truth is to find, or rather, perhaps, that truth is plural. Brilliant is a word that comes to mind for this engrossing film.

J. B. Priestley and Bradford, West Yorkshire

The writer J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) was born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and his imposing statue, with coat tails flying in the wind, is on the outskirts of the city's West End, by the National Media Museum on Princes Way.

On the plinth is a plaque which states 'This statue of J. B. Priestley[,] O. M.[,] honorary freeman of the city[,] was commissioned by the City of Bradford Metropolitan Council and unveiled on Friday 31 October 1986[,] by his wife Jacquetta'.

The sculptor was Ian Judd, and the plaque continues with a quotation from Priestley's Bright Day (1946). He used to fictionalize Bradford as 'Bruddersford':

'Lost in its smoky valley among the Pennine hills, bristling with tall mill chimneys, with its face of blackened stone, Bruddersford 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, and the moors were always there, and the horizon never without its promise. No Bruddersford man could be exiled from the uplands and blue air; he always had one foot on the heather; he had only to pay his tuppence [two old pence, equivalent to 0.66p] on the tram and then climb for half an hour, to hear the larks and curlews, to feel the old rocks warming in the sun, to see the harebells trembling in the shade.'

In 1958, Priestley very publicly re-visited Bradford for the filming of 'Lost City' to record his impressions of how it had changed since he lived there in his youth. His guide, journalist Mavis Dean, joined him at Forster Street Square train station.

The documentary showed 5 Saltburn Place – in Manningham in the north-west of Bradford – where Priestley had lived and where he began writing. A plaque remembers his time here, although he never wrote about 'Bruddersford' here. He remembered making bookcases out of orange boxes and writing a poem about Atlantis.



Priestley remembered going to nearby Lister Park every Wednesday and Saturday in the summer months to listen to the brass band. The bandstand was much as it was in Priestley's youth, and is probably so today.

They passed by the imposing Listers Mill, a former silk warehouse now turned into flats.

But the textile Bradford was renowned for was wool. Priestley was hardly cut out for office tasks, although he worked as a clerk for a wool firm in Swan Arcade, Broadway, from 1910–14, and commented that he must have been one of the worst wool clerks ever. He detested the demolition of Swan Arcade.

Lister Park displays several cameos of various stages of the wool industry around the statue of the inventor and industrialist Samuel Cunliffe Lister (1815-1906) at the main entrance to Lister Park.





Priestley also saw the Bradford Playhouse in Little Germany, which he said had not changed a great deal since his youth, although today it is also a film theatre, has jazz nights, and is known as The Priestley:

During the making of the documentary, Priestley stayed at the Midland Hotel in Cheapside, where his attempts to make contact with the friends of his youth by telephone were unsuccessful. He remarked that many of them were killed in World War I.