Oldham riots

Brickbats for Oldham

Special report: race issues in the UK

Lee Jasper
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday May 29 2001 17.09 BST

Oldham has always been a foreign land for black people and remains so today. My own Caribbean community was scattered after the local council decided to rebuild Glodwick, the small area close to the centre and backdrop of the current disturbances. The newer Bangladeshi communities who are widespread owner-occupiers will not be so easy to deal with.

I spent some years growing up in Oldham, and I am often forced to describe it to Londoners. I say, "It's an old cotton mill town, nestling in the bosom of the Pennines. Coronation Street in the countryside." Its character was predominantly northern working class, best represented by the classic 1950s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

Oldham was hard, and extremely hard if you were black. In Glodwick, the reality for the majority was terraced houses, outside toilets, electric meters and "tick" from the corner shop when you were skint. Glodwick was Caribbean from the late 60s to the mid 80s, with probably fewer than 5,000 families from Barbados and Jamaica. Most of our parents, mine included, did shift work at the cotton mills.

Unemployment in the 70s brought the town to its knees. At that time we young black people were in the process of breaking the hearts of our parents by rebelling against a school system that found it impossible to deal with us. Having been born here, I was able to advise my newly arrived friends about the cultural nuances of the town. It wasn't difficult: don't go out with white women in town, stay out of areas such as Fitton Hill, Limeside, Sholver and Abbeyhills, have nothing whatsoever to do with the police. We were a small community, surrounded by a largely hostile mass of white people. It was that simple.

Within the school's manufactured environment the odds were a little more even. A third of my secondary schoolmates were black, a third white and by 1974 about a third were from Bangladesh. But education was typical of the attitudes of the time: the posh kids got all the attention. Those from the poorest sections of the white working class, British-born blacks, those from the Caribbean (particularly the boys), and the Bangladeshis were all in the bottom class. That we could speak English counted for nothing.

The teachers were in the main unreconstructed, ex-grammar-school racists. That they were forced to teach blacks and Asian children was an insult to both their professional standing and the notion of Empire. They made their distaste known by the expression of their extreme prejudice. They simply refused to teach us.

In sports where our talent could not be denied we were constrained by the racism implicit in the school's athletic system. A close friend of mine could bowl so fast he would snap wickets. Yet he was denied his chance to play on the grounds his technique was dangerous.

Policing was a joke. Random stops and searches were frequent. Young black people were arrested and charged in their thousands. You expected to be beaten up and if you were not, this was grounds for suspicion that you had exchanged information for freedom. Police racism was cruel, violent and unremitting. Once my mother was trying to find out why I was in a police car. She was told by the officer: "Fuck off, you nigger bitch." Police response to victims of racial attacks was: "If you don't like it, move."

I f necessity required us to pass through estates where white gangs were in control, we always jogged all the way there and back. The fear of racist attack was so real you could smell it. Black kids were battered by whites until the early 70s when our numbers began to grow and, emboldened by Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Rastafari and the Jackson 5 who were kicking the Osmonds' candy asses all over the charts, we decided to fight back.

Oldham did not pretend to like anyone who was not a genuine "Oldhamer". It made virtually no concessions to the great campaigns against racism of the 70s and 80s. Education, employment and policing policies were imbued with a crude racism that would have been considered intolerable elsewhere.

The experience of my friends who still live in Oldham provides proof. Mental illness is rife. Friends who left school with me in 1976 have never worked. Over half will have become career criminals and those left will be strung out on crack or heroin. A community was devastated by racism, destroyed by lack of opportunity and left to rot in the twilight zone of the urban underclass.

The Bangladeshi community in Oldham is following the path trod by the Caribbean community 20 years earlier. I see lots of echoes of our own experience. Undoubtedly they have had to fight to protect themselves from vicious racial attacks without any protection from the police. Those estates still exist where Bangladeshis cannot walk without fear. Educational achievement will be poor, as will health. Unemployment, particularly youth unemployment, will be severe. Drugs will increasingly become the main economy. The third and fourth generation will destroy their own community in acts of sheer frustration and fear.

It ought to be no surprise that communities suffering such extreme economic marginalisation and social segregation should seek to defend themselves. There is a historical failure of the town to challenge its own institutional racism. Islands of exclusion imprison within them boundless talent and creativity, confined by sheer walls of discrimination and lack of opportunity. People will inevitably cleave tightly to the central tenets of their culture and faith. Occasionally when provoked they will react like a cornered tiger.

I would love to blame William Hague and the National Front for the current troubles. I can't do so in all honesty, odious as Hague's recent comments on asylum and immigration have been. For the rot set in when Thatcher allowed the British manufacturing base to go to the wall.

• Lee Jasper is policing adviser to the mayor of London

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Useful links
Oldham Evening Chronicle
Greater Manchester police
Commission for Racial Equality
Institute of Race Relations
Campaign Against Racism and Fascism
Oldham metropolitan borough council
Br-Asian, British Asian e-zine
BNP campaign for boycott of Asian businesses in Oldham