terça-feira, 24 de fevereiro de 2026
UK government will release papers on Andrew’s appointment as trade envoy
The UK
government has confirmed it will release papers regarding Andrew
Mountbatten-Windsor’s (formerly Prince Andrew) 2001 appointment as a trade
envoy.
Key
Details of the Release
Scope:
The government is now legally obliged to disclose all papers relating to the
creation of the trade envoy role and Andrew's suitability for it.
Included
Information: The documents will cover due diligence, vetting, and
correspondence involving senior figures like Peter Mandelson.
Timeline:
Trade Minister Sir Chris Bryant stated the release will happen "as fast as
we possibly can", but cautioned it may be delayed until the ongoing police
investigation into his conduct is concluded.
Context
of the Motion
Police
Investigation: Andrew was arrested on February 19, 2026, on suspicion of
misconduct in public office, specifically allegations that he shared
confidential government documents with Jeffrey Epstein.
Related
Arrests: The move for transparency coincides with the arrest of Peter Mandelson
on February 23, 2026, also in relation to the widening Epstein scandal.
Criticism:
During the parliamentary debate, ministers described Andrew as “rude, arrogant
and entitled,” arguing that the public deserves to know the basis of his
appointment.
UK government will release papers on Andrew’s appointment as trade envoy
UK
government will release papers on Andrew’s appointment as trade envoy
Minister
confirms documents about 2001 appointment will be available, but not until
police investigation is over
Pippa
Crerar Political editor
Tue 24
Feb 2026 14.53 GMT
The
government will not oppose a move in parliament to compel ministers to release
documents about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s appointment as British trade
envoy.
The trade
minister, Chris Bryant, responding to a Lib Dem motion urging that the papers
be published, confirmed they would be released but that this would not happen
until after the police investigation into the former prince had concluded.
Mountbatten-Windsor
became the first royal family member to be arrested in modern times when he was
held over claims of misconduct in public office. Emails appeared to show him
sharing confidential information with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein
while working as trade representative.
Bryant
said: “The government will, of course, comply with the terms of the humble
address in full. As I say, we support the motion. But as the house will know,
there is a live police investigation into the former Duke of York after his
arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office.
“As the
police have rightly said, it is absolutely crucial that the integrity of their
investigation is protected and now these proceedings are under way. It would be
wrong of me to say anything that might prejudice them.
“Nor will
the government be able to put into the public domain anything that is required
by the police for them to conduct their inquiries, unless and until the police
are satisfied.”
Bryant,
who as an opposition Labour MP called for Mountbatten-Windsor to be sacked as
trade envoy back in 2011, described the former prince as a “rude, arrogant and
entitled man” who could not distinguish between the public interest and his
own.
He said
the government was prioritising transparency over defending the initial
appointment in 2001, when Tony Blair was prime minister. “If there are things
that are embarrassing for the government, who cares? I want to make sure we end
up getting justice for the victims,” he said.
Keir
Starmer’s official spokesperson also said the government was “in favour of the
principle of transparency” but added that there was a “balancing exercise” as
it could not publish material that would jeopardise a police investigation.
The Lib
Dems used their opposition day debate on Tuesday to call for the release of
papers relating to he former prince’s appointment as trade envoy in 2001,
including any correspondence from Peter Mandelson on the issue.
The
party’s leader, Ed Davey, tabling the humble address said “the public is
rightly demanding to know” how Mountbatten-Windsor was first appointed to the
role.
“There’s
also a much broader principle at stake here. No one, regardless of their title
or their friends, should be beyond the scrutiny of parliament,” he added.
Davey had
to apologise for his past support for the former prince as trade envoy. In
2011, when he was a business minister, he said Mountbatten-Windsor was doing an
“excellent job” and dismissed concerns around him as “innuendo”.
Asked
about his defence of Mountbatten-Windsor during the parliamentary debate, he
said: “First of all can I apologise to all those victims of Epstein who may
have read those words and been upset by them? I really regret them.”
He said
that he “wasn’t really over the brief” and added there had been no MP who
mentioned Epstein in that debate. “I think that tells a tale about how
parliament and MPs don’t hold the royal family, didn’t hold [the former] Prince
Andrew in that really privileged position, properly to account.”
Mountbatten-Windsor
held the role of “special representative for international trade and
investment” between 2001 and 2011, giving him privileged access to senior
government and business contacts around the world.
Emails
released by the US Department of Justice in the latest tranche of files
relating to Epstein include claims that the former prince forwarded government
reports from visits to Vietnam, Singapore and China to Epstein in 2010.
Elsewhere
in the documents, he is also alleged to have forwarded to Epstein information
on investment opportunities in gold and uranium in Afghanistan.
Mountbatten-Windsor
has not responded to requests for comment on specific allegations that have
emerged after the release of the files last month. He has previously denied any
wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.
‘We’ve been paying for happy endings for Andrew for years’: the inside story of a royal disgrace, by his biographer
‘We’ve
been paying for happy endings for Andrew for years’: the inside story of a
royal disgrace, by his biographer
Andrew
Lownie spent years investigating the greed and excesses of Andrew
Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson for his book Entitled. Here, the writer
reveals the barriers he faced in getting to the truth
Zoe
Williams
Tue 24
Feb 2026 05.00 GMT
The
Saturday morning I meet Andrew Lownie, the author of “the most devastating
royal biography ever written” (according to the Daily Mail), the front page of
every newspaper carries the arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Some have
aerial shots of the police arriving to search his home, most including the now
infamous photograph of his face in the back of his car. He looks hunted,
because he literally has been, but his expression is curiously blank, its most
legible emotion grievance. One journalist, Lownie says, reported late on the
night of Friday’s arrest that: “Andrew still can’t see what the problem is. He
thinks he’s been hard done by. He’s obsessed with other details – whether he
can take his horses up to Norfolk, who’s going to get the dogs, where he’s
going to park his car. It’s a sort of disassociation.”
Lownie’s
office, in his home a stone’s throw from parliament, is a monument to the
success of his book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York (along
with his other books: one on the Mountbattens, one on Guy Burgess, one to come
on Prince Philip). One desk is piled high with books about Andrew and Sarah,
some of them by Ferguson herself, others warts-and-all, kiss-and-tell accounts
from confidants and clairvoyants. Lownie has stacks of rejected freedom of
information requests, from UK Trade and Investment; the Foreign, Commonwealth
and Development Office; the Information Commissioner – “They sometimes took so
long to respond that they haven’t even downloaded the request before it
expires.” He approached 3,000 people from all the way through Mountbatten-Windsor’s
life; only a tenth of them would speak to him, which to me feels quite
unsurprising, and yet Lownie is indignant. “I wrote to ambassadors, and they
said ‘not interested’. This was a matter of public interest. Others, very
cheerily when I wrote to them a third time, said ‘nice try’, as if it was some
sort of joke. These are the guys I want in the dock, in parliament, on oath.
This is the thing that makes me upset. I, perhaps naively, expect standards in
public life.”
Entitled
was published last year, after four years of research. It builds a
cradle-to-police-station picture (he is now updating the book for a new
edition) of a royal whose long association with a known child sex offender may
look like the nadir of his behaviour, but is also completely congruous with a
priapic, exploitative and money-grubbing life in which nothing was ever refused
him.
Before
her death by suicide last year, Virginia Giuffre stated that she had been
trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Mountbatten-Windsor, and raped by him on three
occasions as a minor (under US law) when she was 16 and 17. The third time was
an orgy on Epstein’s island at which girls were present whom she believed to be
underage, but didn’t know for certain because they spoke no English. After a
review, the Metropolitan police said last December that it would not be
launching a formal criminal investigation into Giuffre’s allegations about
Mountbatten-Windsor, which he has denied. He claimed first that he had “no
recollection of ever meeting this lady”; then, after a photo emerged of them
together, that he was “at a loss to explain this particular photograph”. She
brought a civil case against him in 2021, which he settled out of court the
following year on no admission of liability. There has been no transparency
over the amount, though the figure of £2m to Giuffre’s chosen charity, fighting
sex trafficking, is known to have come from the queen. King Charles’s office
has always denied that he contributed to Giuffre’s own settlement – estimated
at between £7m and £12m – but “since he was running the show with the queen [by
2022], he must have been aware of what was going on,” Lownie says. If 2022 was
an obvious moment to strip Mountbatten-Windsor of his royal title, it was by no
means the first.
There was
a complaint going back years from a royal protection officer on the north gate
of Buckingham Palace, who said, as Lownie describes it: “We were concerned that
prostitutes were being brought in; we weren’t being given names.” (This
witness, Paul Page, was himself found guilty of fraud, “but that doesn’t
invalidate what he says”, Lownie continues). In 2006, representing the British
monarchy at King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s diamond jubilee celebrations in Bangkok,
Andrew was said to have had more than 10 girls a day going in to his room at
the Grand Hyatt Erawan. “Often, as soon as one left, another would arrive,” the
Reuters correspondent reported, “and this was all juggled amid official
engagements.” Throughout Mountbatten-Windsor’s time as special representative
for international trade and investment, ambassadors would feed back that he was
a liability, rude and visibly bored at official engagements. His staff often
requested attractive women be invited to events, to which “one consul replied,
‘I’m a diplomat, not a pimp,’” according to Entitled. “One bean-counter had
complained about Andrew’s expenses,” Lownie says, “querying whether he could
put massages on the taxpayer’s tab, and it was pushed through. We’ve been
paying for happy endings for Andrew for years.” These warnings were unheeded:
“There was a safe at the Foreign Office to keep all this stuff,” Lownie says.
There
were so many moments that “should have been alarm signals, in the palace, the
government and the police”, he continues. An unrelated trial of a former
banker, Selman Turk (who is appealing against his jail sentence for fraud), in
2022 unearthed in passing a £750,000 payment made to Mountbatten-Windsor by one
of Turk’s clients, who claimed that he advised her to pay the sum to the prince
in return for assistance with a UK passport application. (Turk said the money
was a wedding gift for Princess Beatrice; Andrew repaid the £750,000 roughly 16
months after he received it and it remains unclear whether he was aware of the
money entering his personal bank account, or what it was for.)
“That’s
what the Chinese and Russian secret services realised – that the easiest
vulnerability of the British establishment is the royal family,” says Lownie.
“There’s no scrutiny. They’re greedy. They’re short of money.” And in Andrew’s
case in particular, “they’re kind of immoral because of the way they’ve been
brought up. And they mixed with lots of important people.”
Mountbatten-Windsor
went to Heatherdown, an aristocratic prep school, and then to Gordonstoun,
where King Charles also went. Lownie mainly met a wall of silence from the
public school, except among people he knew personally. (Lownie went to Fettes
College, another Scottish public school, and one of his friends from prep
school went on to Gordonstoun as a scholar and used to do Mountbatten-Windsor’s
homework. Lownie is very much part of the establishment, and isn’t driven by
radicalism. “What drives me is that I just hate bullies. I describe myself as
Winslow Boy meets Erin Brockovich,” he says, drolly.)
Mountbatten-Windsor
at school was known for being a bully, a loner, supercilious, entitled,
indulged. One story from Heatherdown says that he took someone’s exotic stamp
collection, simply crossed their name out and wrote in his own, and was never
punished. This foreshadows a toe-curling incident 30 or so years later,
described in Entitled, quoting Tim Reilly, a former risk management executive.
On a museum visit in Russia, Andrew “was angling to be given a Fabergé egg”,
Reilly told Lownie. “Even they were stunned by his undisguised avarice … Putin
could finish Andrew any time he likes with photos, tales and evidence he no
doubt has on Andrew in Russia.”
Anyone
who remembers the short marriage of Andrew and Sarah Ferguson will have bits of
their lifestyle filed away. The tabloids were salacious but forgiving towards
him, calling him “Randy Andy” one minute, then overwhelmed with patriotism when
he appeared in uniform. Towards Ferguson, they pulled fewer punches, reporting
on her ex-boyfriend Paddy McNally’s “cocaine castle” (in a News of the World
headline), her endless holidays, her excessive luggage. Over time, it was
priced in that Ferguson’s charity dabbling might not be entirely altruistic,
but also attention-getting. Entitled details the hotel suites she leveraged
from charities for visits of dubious usefulness, the organisations she
affiliated with that never saw any of the money she’d promised, or only saw
part of it, the rest going on the fundraising event itself, or on her staff or
costs. At the time it seemed par for the course; this is how high net worth
philanthropists operate. When you read about the conditions in the orphanages
that she was ostensibly fundraising for, you think: who would use that hardship
to fund their personal luxury?
The sheer
extravagance of the couple, meticulously noted, is bizarre: £150,000 on
flowers, scores of thousands on personal trainers Ferguson rarely troubled, him
never using a car when a helicopter was faster (which is always), her demanding
“a whole side of beef, a leg of lamb and a chicken, which are laid out on the
dining room table like a medieval banquet” every night, even when it was just
her and the kids. They’d often end up eating crisps anyway (as told by a
departing member of staff). They were both having affairs. One of Ferguson’s
highest-profile liaisons, with Steve Wyatt, a US multi-millionaire, appears to
have started when she was five months pregnant with Eugenie.
They both
often claimed to be broke, Ferguson regularly announcing bankruptcy, but it
never seemed to dent their spending. In the maelstrom of their divorce in 1996
were questions about what it might mean for the queen, for the constitution,
for Charles and Diana, for the royal family. There was also, I suppose, a
collective astonishment at the dissonance between the monarchy’s
self-fashioning (restraint, duty, asceticism, higher purpose) and this
completely trashy couple who would renovate their Berkshire residence,
Sunninghill Park, with teddy bears, a helipad and a swimming pool when they
were both half out of the marriage anyway. Amid all this, the questions that
really mattered were pushed to the margins. Where was the money coming from?
What were its sources getting in return?
“It
remains a mystery,” Lownie writes in Entitled, “how Andrew has been able to
enjoy such an extravagant lifestyle without any obvious sources of income
beyond his naval pension, family money he may have inherited and handouts first
from Queen Elizabeth and now King Charles. He travels by private jet, has a
collection of watches and expensive cars – including a £150,000 Patek Philippe
watch, a £220,000 Bentley and a brand-new £80,000 Range Rover … An acquaintance
told one paper, ‘I would compare Andrew to a hot-air balloon. He seems to float
serenely in very rarefied circles without any visible means of support.’”
The
couple’s relationship with Epstein is revolting on its own terms. “They have no
real moral boundaries,” Lownie says. “They go and see sex offenders not because
they’re concerned about their crimes, but because [these people] might be able
to pay some bills for them or introduce them to some useful people.” But what
we know of the Epstein files, as shocking as they must be to institutions
accustomed to making scandal go away, is only the beginning.
“I know
that Epstein was a Soviet asset,” Lownie says. “Robert Maxwell, of course, had
strong connections not only with Mossad, but also with Russian intelligence. He
had made his money with these textbooks, which he bought cheaply with Russian
money.” Ghislaine (Maxwell’s daughter) and Epstein were introduced in the 80s
by the grandson of another Russian asset, Armand Hammer, and the relationship
between them and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor goes back to 1985. “There’s a huge
national security scandal here of penetration,” Lownie says.
Since
Entitled was published, people contact Lownie all the time with more
information: the day Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested, Lownie received 760
emails. He was passed a letter, dated last December, from the Metropolitan
police reminding royal protection officers of their duty towards “the privacy
of the protected” – it’s ironic to hear the Met now reminding those officers of
their duty to report what they saw.
Lownie
had lunch recently with Epstein’s brother, Mark, who doesn’t believe the
suicide verdict and has brought in an expert coroner who increasingly doesn’t
believe it either. “However incompetent the correctional facility was, it is
the prime correctional facility in New York; it’s their most high-profile
prisoner; he’s on suicide watch; you take a cellmate out; you don’t make sure
the cameras are working; at a key moment, both the guards conveniently fall
asleep; you panic and get rid of the body so there’s no proper autopsy – it
just doesn’t make a huge amount of sense,” Lownie says. The FBI debriefed
Epstein’s cellmate on what he’d said. “Now, Epstein did make stuff up, so you
have to take it with a pinch of salt,” Lownie says. But he reeled off a list of
names before he died, one a high-level British politician, present at an orgy.
The
palace is in damage-limitation mode, it seems. “Keep it to the sexual side –
everyone understands that bit – and certainly not go anywhere near the national
security scandal,” Lownie says. “The plan [of the palace], I think, at the
moment, is to throw Andrew to the wolves.”
Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of
York, by Andrew Lownie, is published by HarperCollins. To support the Guardian
buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
This article was amended on 24 February 2026.
An earlier version said the recent photo of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was of
him in a police car; however, he was in the back of his own car.
What Brontë Country Tells Us About Britain Today
What Brontë Country Tells Us About Britain Today
The
windswept area of northern England where Emily Brontë wrote “Wuthering Heights”
remains a place of startling natural beauty.
Literature
fans flock to Haworth, the village where the Brontë siblings grew up,
sustaining a thriving local economy.
But the
wider area illustrates the economic stagnation and regional inequality that is
disrupting politics in Britain today.
In much
of the area, there is high unemployment — alongside talent, energy and promise.
Michael
D. ShearAndrew Testa
By
Michael D. ShearVisuals by Andrew Testa
Reporting
from Haworth and Bradford, England
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/24/world/europe/bronte-country-haworth-bradford-uk-today.html
Feb. 24,
2026
Nestled
among the wide-open moors of West Yorkshire sits Haworth, the English village
where Emily Brontë wrote “Wuthering Heights,” the gothic romance that inspired
Hollywood’s latest steamy adaptation.
The
cobblestone streets and rugged hills here still conjure the hardscrabble life
and wild forces of nature that underpin the novel.
As it did
in 1847, when the book was published, the region offers a window into the stark
contrasts and economic struggles that challenge Britain. Now, as then, social
and demographic change, rising food prices and widening wealth inequality are
driving populist political movements, calls for reform and spasms of unrest.
Haworth
is eight miles from Bradford, a town that Emily’s father, Patrick, visited
often in his role as an Anglican priest. In the mid-19th century, Bradford was
a wealthy, fast-growing center of textile manufacturing, home to powerful
parliamentary lawmakers and a destination for tourists and traders.
The
city’s decline is typical of the hollowing-out of many postindustrial towns and
cities in northern England, fueling the poverty and frustration that are
shaking up British politics.
A special
election on Thursday and countrywide voting in May are expected to underscore
how Britain’s traditional two-party political system is fragmenting. Many
voters say they will support Reform U.K., a right-wing populist party, while
the Green Party is winning over left-wing voters disillusioned with the
governing Labour Party.
Today,
Bradford has twice as many unemployed workers as the national average. Forty
percent of children live in poverty. And immigration, encouraged by the
government to fill labor shortages here after the second world war, has at
times prompted division and tension.
The map
locates the village of Haworth, and the city of Bradford, in northern England,
not far from Liverpool and Manchester.
“It’s
been very neglected,” said Naz Shah, a Labour member of Parliament who
represents the Bradford West area. “We do have some of the most deprived wards
in the country.”
Wool
Capital of the World
In the
1830s, Bradford was a symbol of England’s industrial prowess. Steam-powered
mills made it the wool capital of the world, turning owners into a new wealthy
elite and creating an underclass of impoverished workers.
In
central Bradford. Immigration from Britain’s former colonies was encouraged by
the national government after the second world war to fill labor shortages.
Now, the
city’s wealth and power has mostly evaporated. The wool industry fell victim to
globalization amid the shift to cheaper manufacturing in Asia and the rise of
mass-produced synthetic fabrics.
Bradford’s
City Hall, a gothic edifice inspired by the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, still
towers over the center, and some large businesses are headquartered here,
including Morrisons, one of Britain’s biggest supermarket chains. But the
downtown is filled with betting and vape shops and shuttered businesses.
Sign up
for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a
deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York
Times journalists. Get it sent to your inbox.
“Being
born here, I see the good and the bad,” Darren Edwards says in a walking tour
of his hometown that he posted to YouTube. He points out a few of Bradford’s
beautiful but “overlooked” buildings. But as he walks past an abandoned
shopping mall, he concludes that “everything’s filthy, neglected, grimy,
closed.”
For
decades a Labour stronghold, Bradford voted to leave the European Union in
2016, and polls show that Reform U.K., whose leader, Nigel Farage, championed
Brexit, is surging in popularity. “I do recognize there’s a rise of Reform,”
Ms. Shah, the Labour lawmaker, said. “You’d be naïve not to recognize that.”
Yet
Labour’s traditional dominance here is threatened by other forces as well. In
the 2024 general election, Ms. Shah held her seat by just 707 votes. Her
closest challenge came from an independent candidate, Muhammed Islam, who
criticized Labour for not being more condemnatory of Israel’s conduct in the
Gaza war.
Scenic
Haworth
One
afternoon in November, tourists gathered to listen to a banjo player outside
the Villette Coffee House in Haworth. Couples walked their dogs. Parents
struggled to push their strollers along the deeply rutted cobblestones.
Bradford’s
woes can seem far from here.
Many
people believe, incorrectly, that the Brontë siblings grew up in a remote,
backward place.
As Juliet
Barker writes in “The Brontës,” Haworth was actually “a busy, industrial
township” with 13 small textile mills in the area when Patrick Brontë became
curate in 1820. The village had its own surgeon, a wine merchant, a watchmaker
and three cabinetmakers. It was overcrowded, however, and had primitive
sanitation. An 1850 report found that more than 2 in 5 children died before
their sixth birthday and average life expectancy was under 26 years.
While
Bradford now struggles economically, Haworth became a destination for
literature fans around the world, exemplifying the value of Britain’s heritage
to its tourism industry, which employs over a million people and contributes
more than $100 billion a year to the economy.
A local
couple spent one Saturday stringing bunting from the wooden beams of Haworth’s
recently refurbished old schoolhouse building, where Charlotte Brontë, Emily’s
older sister and the author of “Jane Eyre,” had her wedding reception in 1854.
Down the street, tourists quietly filed through the Brontë home that is now a
museum. Outside, the moors stretch as far as the eye can see, rolling hills of
dark green and brown divided by bare stone walls.
The
heathlands, peat bogs and wetlands are now protected as part of a vast,
3,000-acre reserve. Last month, Condé Nast Traveller magazine called it one of
the seven “wonders of the U.K.”
Migration
and Backlash
Throughout
the area’s history, immigration and religion have been sources of tension.
Patrick
Brontë, who emigrated from Ireland, was subjected to abuse for his nationality
and accent. Hundreds of thousands of Irish immigrants came to England,
particularly after the devastating famine of the 1840s, and many found work in
the northern towns of Bradford, Leeds and York. Roman Catholics were viewed
with suspicion and, until the Emancipation Act of 1829, were barred from voting
or standing for election. Jews had to wait until 1858 to enter Parliament
without swearing a Christian oath, after a long political battle.
In
Bradford today, a third of residents have South Asian heritage, part of a huge
wave of immigration in the 1950s from Britain’s former colonies. As
Commonwealth citizens, the new workers had British passports, and many came
with their families to work in the textile industry.
The signs
in the city are everywhere. Restaurants featuring Pakistani, Indian and
Bangladeshi food sit next to the ubiquitous British pubs. The fragrant smells
of biryani rice and nehari, a dish made with beef or lamb shanks, tempt hungry
visitors.
But parts
of the community are hardly integrated. Racial and religious divisions have
fueled tension at various points in recent decades. In the early 1970s, there
were clashes between workers from different parts of Pakistan, increasing
conflict inside the still-operating textile factories.
In 2001,
after a wave of rioting, a government report concluded that the city had done a
poor job of integrating the large South Asian population. “Different ethnic
groups are increasingly segregating themselves from each other and retreating
into comfort zones made up of people like themselves,” the report found.
The
political impact has been profound. In 2012, after a Labour member of
Parliament lost a special election, an audit blamed the loss in part on a
Pakistani practice called “biraderi,” a system of influence in which families
and friends pledge loyalty.
“The
power structure associated with biraderi is highly patriarchal, socially
conservative and is regarded by its opponents in Bradford as promoting
mediocre, ideology-free stooges to the council,” the report, by the Joseph
Rowntree Reform Trust, concluded.
Ms. Shah
said that biraderi had made it harder for the community to come together. “If
you put people in positions of power, not because of accountability, but
because of who they are related to,” she said, “then that doesn’t contribute to
the development of a city.”
Nick
Ahad, a writer and broadcaster, has lived and worked in Bradford for most of
his life. His mother is from nearby Keighley, and his father is from
Bangladesh. He pointed out that the diversity of the area had brought benefits
as well as challenges.
“The same
thing that is perceived as racial tension — actually there’s a lot of richness
in the racial makeup of the city,” he said. “So you can go and have the best
curry that you will have in the country in Bradford, and there are great fish
and chips. You can go to some lovely pubs.”
Still,
the city’s history has made it ripe for the anti-immigration message of Reform
U.K., which last year announced plans to expel illegal immigrants through “a
new U.K. Deportation Command.” It would be called “Operation Restoring
Justice.”
Rebirth
and Recovery
As in
other parts of Britain, youth unemployment has long been an issue.
At one
point in 1839, when Emily Brontë was 21, all four adult Brontë children were
unemployed and living at home with their father in Haworth, Ms. Barker writes
in her biography. In the years that followed, Emily’s brother, Branwell, would
get — and lose — a job on the new railway line between Leeds and Manchester,
while the sisters would each work stints as governesses, enduring homesickness
and sometimes ill-treatment to pay their own way.
In
Bradford, jobs have been increasingly tough to find, with recent figures
showing that 6.8 percent of the city’s working-age population is unemployed.
Young people have struggled even more.
Part of
the reason for Bradford’s modern employment problems is a quirk of
transportation geography that prevents trains from traveling through the city
on their way to or from London. Over the years, train companies avoided the
city altogether, routing through nearby Leeds instead.
That has
had a marked effect on the city’s economic well-being. Iconic businesses like
Harvey Nichols, John Lewis and Liberty, along with flagship stores for Apple,
Lego and Nike, are in Leeds, taking jobs and economic energy with them.
In recent
years, Bradford’s council and the national government have tried to turn things
around.
Some old,
decaying buildings have been torn down or adapted. The Wool Exchange building,
once the heart of the wool trade, is a Waterstones bookstore. A new food hall,
the Darley Street Market, opened in July.
And last
year Bradford was named Britain’s “city of culture,” with the government
providing money and support for a year of events to highlight its cultural
heritage and to inspire tourists to visit.
There are
also plans to eventually fix the train stations. Last month, British officials
announced a plan worth £45 billion, about $60 billion, to improve the rail
system in the northern part of the country. Local officials have said some of
the money is earmarked to finally connect Bradford’s two rail lines with a
single station.
As part
of the yearlong city of culture celebrations, a radio play by Mr. Ahad was
performed to a live audience. He said the success of the events had made him
optimistic that Bradford could rise above its sometimes troubled history.
“I see
the other artists that have decided to stay. I see the artists that have said,
‘We can make work here,’” he said. “You look at Chelsea in New York — the
artists come first, the culture comes first. And if you build yourself around
culture, then you give yourself a fighting chance.”
“I see
the other artists that have decided to stay,” said Nick Ahad. “I see the
artists that have said, ‘We can make work here.”
Michael
D. Shear is the chief U.K. correspondent for The New York Times, covering
British politics and culture and diplomacy around the world.
.jpeg)
