This afternoon I went for my Otley Back Road ride, a ten miler not yet leafy but promising to be so. I was thinking about Bradford MP and friend of lycra, Gorgeous George Galloway.
The day the Yorkshire route for the Tour de France was announced I responded to a link in a friend’s tweet which complained of Galloway’s divisiveness in the press when along with other Bradford MPs he complained that the Tour route seemed to “deliberately avoid the city, going to the leafy areas of Ilkley, Otley, Haworth and Keighley instead”.
Our little exchange went like this:
Me @‘myfriend’ @georgegalloway a glory of Yorkshire: any time of any day the backroads round here are occupied by the democracy of cycling
Me @georgegalloway & surely the point is Le Tour takes the roads the people cycle our/themselves
GG @SteveDearden wrong. Le Tour takes the roads councils pay them to take
Me @georgegalloway just possibly the two might coincide, talk the route with some cyclists & watch the pleasure as they imagine the ride
You can read the Guardian Northerner article yourself, there are some good things said once you get past the blather of politicians, blather symptomatic of two of Bradford’s great failings:
– its Cinderella syndrome, why not me, why everyone else? Defining itself by not being as lucky as elsewhere while destroying its own unique cultural assets like Bradford Libraries’ pioneering work in reader development, or the Mela, once the biggest in Europe.
– its ugly sister syndrome, its fear of beauty, even its own beauty. Ilkley, Haworth and Keighley are of course part of Bradford, stunning parts, and as Kate Wellham says at the end of the Guardian article, ‘That’s ours, that.’ It is here for all of us. And not everyone who lives or takes their pleasure here fits Galloway’s class war stereotype.
It is hard to remember now when Bradford was Bouncing Back on the coat tails of Glasgow’s Miles Better. We all thought Bradford was going to be the next Glasgow, full of regenerative and cultural optimism. Then came Pickles with his ur-Thatcherism, followed by years of political and executive cowardice. Things are looking up, the festival is being revived, we now have a pond to go with the hole, and after years of Ilkley’s most embarrassing export occupying the portfolio, culture at last seems to have an engaging and articulate spokesperson in Cllr Susan Hinchcliffe.
Oh yes, and another bit of good news. Shane has bought his bike.
