Wajid Khan was half-watching his beloved Burnley football club when he received a WhatsApp message from a friend. It showed a banner reading, “White Lives Matter Burnley” being flown over the Etihad stadium in Manchester. His heart sank.
“It hurts because I love my town,” Khan said on Tuesday, the emotion apparent in his voice. “I was born and brought up here, educated here. You want to be proud of the town you live in. It’s not a good day.”
Khan, the Burnley-born son of a taxi driver, is one of the region’s leading voices on race relations and community cohesion. At 40, he is also the Lancashire town’s youngest ever mayor.
As a Labour councillor, he has fought for over a decade to heal the wounds of the town’s 2001 race riots and stop the far right from regaining a foothold in Burnley. He knows first hand how potentially combustible the “White Lives Matter” slogan could be in the town.
“We have come quite a distance from our early 2000 difficulties as a town and we want to move forward and support initiatives like Black Lives Matter. When you’re a Premier League town, you need a Premier League, progressive approach,” said Khan. “These aren’t fans of the club – they’re an embarrassment and they drag the town back with their backward thinking.”
The banner has been met with universal condemnation by Burnley FC, its players and many of its fans, who called radio phone-ins in their hundreds to express their anger that such a banner had been flown in their name. In Burnley’s busy town centre, lunchtime shoppers bemoaned the negative headlines that would inevitably follow the stunt.
“It’s wrong it was attributed to Burnley,” said Yvonne Evans, 68, who was out shopping with her husband. “I don’t think the majority of people have a problem [with Black Lives Matter]. Racism is not what Burnley is about – we’re a very tolerant place.”
The former textile town has worked hard to bring communities together since the 2001 riots, when interracial tensions erupted on the streets of Burnley, Oldham and Bradford. The backwash from the riots helped Nick Griffin’s far-right BNP to win eight seats on Burnley council by 2003, leading to a slew of unwanted media attention until the party was ousted in 2012.
Last year, the anti-Muslim activist Tommy Robinson – one of whose supporters has claimed responsibility for the banner – visited Burnley for a rally during his campaign to become MEP for the north-west of England. He was roundly defeated, gaining just 2% of the vote and losing his deposit, but his presence in the town reopened difficult conversations.
Those who work with Burnley’s marginalised communities felt a similar sense of dismay on Tuesday. “It is a bit of a setback to the good work that’s been going on,” said Fatima Shah, 50, who works with black, Asian and minority ethnic women in the town. “It undermines a lot of the work [we] have been doing to get communities together.”
Shah, director of community group Access Alpha, said there had been “some movement” in integrating Burnley’s mostly white residents with the Asian community, who make up about 11% of the nearly 90,000 population, but that the town was “still fragmented”.
In Burnley town centre, Sam Jackson-Smith had one word for those behind the stunt: “Bints.” The 18-year-old student and his friends are too young to remember the BNP and the riots, but they were disappointed at the support they had seen on Facebook for the “White Lives Matter” banner.
“It sends the wrong message about what the town is about,” said 17-year-old Alfie Morland, who is preparing to study classics at Durham University next year. “The fact people spent so much money to do it – it’s just fragile people, small-dick energy.”
On BBC Radio Lancashire, lifelong Burnley fan Julian Jordan said he “felt sick to my stomach” that the town had been “humiliated in front of a global audience”. It didn’t just besmirch the name of Burnley and its people, he said – it could harm the town’s future prospects.
“If you were looking to invest in somewhere now, I’d imagine community relations would be part of your agenda. This morning, Burnley looks like a less attractive option than it did yesterday,” he said.