LONDON -- As predicted, the Labour Party won the June general election, giving Tony Blair a second term as prime minister. This is bad news for the media monster which, as we all know, has a voracious appetite but nonetheless a fastidious and restricted diet: sleaze, scandal, violence, betrayal. A large part of the energy of Labour goes into brushing away the sticky fingers of these media stories from its sober skirts. So if it won't provide the stories, who will?
Somehow, the things that matter are not treated as political stories, in the sense that parties and Parliament exchange hostile, angry words about them. In the old cotton towns of Lancashire in northwest England, Asian and white youth and police have been hurling more than hostile words.
The violence doesn't fit the familiar patterns of black youth fighting the police with local white people mere bystanders to the archetypal conflict of 20th century urban life. Here, the large Asian population, drawn from Pakistan and India in the 1950s to run the old cotton and wool mills for wages the white workers could not stomach, had always been thought of as a placid, law-abiding, humble people.