Liz Harris follows an independent candidate running for election in Blackburn, and finds that racial politics is never far from the surface.

Britain’s election campaign is well underway and the upstairs room at the Shahi Qila is awash with aunties, the Punjabi-suited matriarchs of Blackburn’s Pakistani community. Yvonne Ridley, the former Taliban captive turned Islamic convert is – literally – putting the fear of Allah into them.

The role that Labour candidate Jack Straw played in the Iraq war as foreign secretary, she says, makes him a murderer. “A vote for a murderer,” she thunders, “makes you as bad as a murderer yourself.”

This, she warns, could get them into very hot water on the Day of Judgement.

Despite the serious faces in the audience, I have a feeling that they are not quite getting it. Bushra Irfan, the independent candidate whose campaign Ridley has come to endorse, thinks so too. “Which language would you like me to speak in?” she asks as she takes the stage. “Urdu!” the crowd choruses back at her.

Irfan speaks Urdu slowly and carefully. It’s not her natural tongue; born and bred in Blackburn, she speaks English with a robust Lancashire accent along with the Punjabi of her forefathers.

Her thrust is gentler than Ridley’s, appealing to more humdrum, everyday concerns – the shortcomings of the hospital’s gynaecological ward, jobs and how small businesses should be helped. Standard stuff, relevant to all.

Then there are concerns more specific to the audience – in 2008, Labour raised the marriage age for spouses from overseas from 18 to 21, a move designed to prevent forced marriages in the Asian community and to discourage the practice of bringing over marriage partners from ‘back home’. This, says Irfan, is against human rights. There are emphatic nods from the women.

The meeting has gone well; as it breaks up there are hugs and promises of votes. Irfan is radiant, bubbling over with enthusiasm for her mission to oust Straw from the seat he has held for 30 years.

She faces a tough fight. As an independent, she lacks the support, funding and recognition that candidates standing for the major parties enjoy. Despite the current trend for going it alone, sole runners very rarely win; out of the 643 MPs in the Commons when parliament was dissolved, there are only two who were directly elected as independents.

What’s more, difficulties in her past are bound to be thrown at her by the opposition; in 1996 her career in law came to an abrupt end when she was found guilty of breaching the rules governing a search order, and was struck-off by the Law Society (something she vehemently contested).

Even so, she was selected by the Liberal Democrats last year to stand in Sheffield South East. Why, then, did she walk away from this chance?

“As a local person, it’s Blackburn I feel most strongly about,” she tells me. “I applied for selection here, but my application disappeared.” She gives me a knowing look. Forces within the town conspired to keep her from standing in her home constituency as she is a serious threat to Straw, she says.

This doesn’t seem to make much sense - but then this is Blackburn, an insular northern town of bewildering, labyrinthine political relationships. A town where everyone knows each other, yet where the divisions between communities run deep, a matrix of faultlines often invisible to the untrained eye.

Tensions between whites and Asians are sad but predictable. The enmity between the Pakistanis and the Gujaratis, however, is harder for an outsider to understand. “It’s like this,” one man of Gujarati descent tells me. “The Pakistanis are the ones who get into trouble, but it’s all of us immigrants who end up taking the flak for it.”

Irfan believes she has the ability to unite the people of Blackburn. While her heritage is Pakistani, she claims close links with the Gujarati community. But can she reach out to the whites – or the ‘English’ as they are referred to here?

The next day we head to the predominantly white area of Ewood to find out. Irfan has discarded her lemon yellow shalwar kameez and headscarf for a smart linen skirt, jacket and dark red stilettos.

She shrugs when I ask her how it feels to have to adopt different personas according to her audience. “I’m used to it,” she shrugs, “I’ve been doing it all my life.”

Irfan is used to straddling the cultural divide. Convent school educated, she was one of the few Asian women in the UK to run her own practice.

It’s matchday in Blackburn and probably the worst time to go canvassing. People have either decamped to the stadium across the road to watch the Rovers in action or are glued to their televisions.

The first few knocks go unanswered. On hearing the doorbell, one man throws up his arm reflexively, flicking his fingers in a ‘V’ sign at the band of canvassers outside his window. And he doesn’t mean victory, either. It’s unlikely this is because of Irfan’s skin colour, however, as he hasn’t actually turned his head to see who is disturbing him. We move on.

An elderly lady clearing matchday debris from her front yard is friendly. She, like many others, says that Jack Straw “does nothing” for them. Perhaps because of Irfan’s Asian background she stops short of saying what is commonly heard on the doorstep in Blackburn: that Jack Straw only works for the Asians – or the ‘Pakis’, depending on who you are speaking to and which part of town you are in. Later on a man says this to her openly. Irfan is unfazed. “Well I’m one of them, aren’t I?” she answers cheerfully, “so I can do something about it.”

It’s no secret that it is the Asian community in Blackburn which has solidly supported Straw over the years. Whether true or not, the perception that Straw has done more for ‘the Asians’ at the expense of the whites is dangerous, creating a political fissure the British National Party has persistently tried to widen.

But the concerns of whites and Asians are often the same. When I ask one Asian man what bothers people in Blackburn he first mentions Iraq, but swiftly goes on to talk about domestic concerns: “Fuel, jobs, taxes, immigration. It doesn’t sound nice – we came from outside – but illegals, you know? They are taking our jobs.”

While Irfan may be genuine in her desire to unite the communities of Blackburn, in a town divided so starkly on ethnic lines it is easy to fall into the trap of playing to one’s religious or ethnic community. Yvonne Ridley was brought in because of her status as a latterday Muslim icon, and Irfan openly argues that the Asians will choose her over Straw and the other candidates because of her ethnic and religious background.

“They’ve been let down by one white face for so long – why would they vote for another,” she says to one Asian man who expresses doubts that she can beat the main parties.

“You’re playing the race card there,” he answers flatly.

Perhaps the fault is not hers. Politicians, after all, generally play to their audience, whether it’s the working classes or the landed gentry.

As the town’s ‘English’ will tell you, in Blackburn it’s been going on for a long time.

Photos by Liz Harris