Less than four months ago the country saw a spate of riots that lasted just about a week in different parts of the country.
What began as a North London community’s anger at the police shooting of gangster Mark Duggan, soon escalated into disturbances around the country.
Commentators in the media, politicians and students were quick to diagnose the cause of the malaise. The events of August were used by both sides of the political divide to project their own deep-rooted views about wider society. For some these riots were a cathartic release of rage, a dispossessed, disenfranchised underclass kicking back at a consumer society in which they had no stake and nothing to lose. For others it was feral outpouring of thuggery. Those in the latter camp point to the co-ordinated nature of some of the violence by gangs. The debate on the origins of the violence continues to this day.
With these events still in our collective subconscious, it’s worth examining events of the past to see what lessons can be learned for the future.
A forty-minute bus ride from Piccadilly Gardens takes you to a place swimming with rich history. Oldham, just seven miles north east of here, is known for many reasons. Once recognised as the most productive cotton mill town in the world, it made its name as a powerhouse of the Lancashire cotton industry during the Industrial Revolution. It was in 1899 that one Winston Churchill became this area’s MP. As if this wasn’t enough, 1978 saw the world’s first test tube baby born in the town.
For all too many people, however, these achievements are not the first thing that come to mind when the town’s name is spoken.
Between the 26th and the 28th May 2001, Oldham was the scene of violent race riots, eerily familiar to the carnage seen in Brixton and Toxteth 20 years previously. These events formed part of a wave of racially motivated violence that erupted across the North of England that summer. Burnley and Bradford saw similar scenes of unrest in June and July respectively. In the media Oldham, however briefly, earned the grim mantle of ‘Britain’s race-hate capital.’
Since then the authorities have made concerted efforts to improve community cohesion in the area. Have they been successful? In order for to answer this question it’s important to understand the background to the unrest.
Unlike the events of last August, there was in fact a very clearly defined focus to the violence. Gangs of white and Asian youths waged running battles both against each other and against a police force totally unprepared to deal with the fighting.
There are conflicting accounts about what started the disturbances in Oldham. One catalyst was the mugging of a 76-year-old white man by an Asian youth. Another account tells, rather trivially, of a fight starting outside a chip shop after some racist name-calling. Before long larger groups of young white and Asian men (and it was mostly men) were fighting in the street.
In the aftermath of the riots the government set up an inquiry to investigate what had caused the disturbances and to see how community relations could be improved in the future. The result of this investigation was the Cantle Report. It found in Oldham a “depth of polarisation”. However, it didn’t take an official inquiry to see how savagely demarcated the town was.
In almost every respect, many white communities and those of Asian origin lived ‘parallel lives’. In Oldham and Bradford, many spoke of the existence of so-called ‘no-go’ areas, such was the divided nature of the towns.
The lethal combination of a fall in the amount of heavy industry and social decline led to mutual suspicion on the part of many in Oldham. Despite these factors, however, not everybody saw the unrest which emerged as inevitable.
Kashif Ali, a life-long resident and the Conservative candidate in last year’s Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election, sees things slightly differently: “I think many of the problems that Oldham had were problems that many northern towns and cities had.
“Traditional industry had seen a decline, large immigrant populations had moved in and yes there were problems with housing and schooling and so on, but those applied in many places across the country. Towards the end of the ‘90s things were looking good, generally there was economic growth and socially there was mobility. Looked at relatively [the riots] came as a bit of a surprise.”
David Ward, a journalist who worked for the Guardian for 33 years and covered the disturbances, has his own assessment of the situation then.
“In Oldham, it’s very hard to separate the particular kinds of problems that rose through tensions between racial groups and the economic situation that Oldham found itself in anyway. It was a classic mill town, all the mills go and the Asian blokes who come over to work in the mills end up driving taxis. And you can imagine if you were 17/18 coming out of school with a couple of GCSEs perhaps and seeing your dad driving all hours in a taxi, taking hassle from white kids in savagely demarcated areas you start thinking ‘what the hell has this place got to offer me?”
Ward, now retired from the Guardian, relays his observations from reporting on the aftermath of the riots:
“We began to get this sense of division between what you might call the community elders and the young (Asian) lads. What we did discover was that there had been a background. It had been building up for a bit. The British National Party was flexing its muscles and had been around Oldham causing a bit of bother. They’d been leafleting. The Daily Mail had run a story I think about an elderly white man who’d been attacked apparently by Asian kids and quite badly bashed.”
What lit the touch paper to the violence, Ali says, was the rise in activity by the BNP in the area. The strength of feeling over ethnic divisions was shown when, in the general election shortly following the unrest, the party polled their strongest result in a decade. Michael Meacher, the Labour MP representing the seat of Oldham West and Royton said in 2001 that the BNP’s election gains were the result of a “systematic campaign of violence, intimidation and bigotry…perpetrated on the people of Oldham”.
This was already very fertile ground for the far-right. Ward recalls in 2002, speaking to a number of older white residents in an entirely white area. The overriding impression he got was that a number were ‘baffled’ at what had happened to the town.
Given all of this, is community cohesion in a much healthier condition than it was a decade previously?
While advancements have been made, the picture is indeed a mixed one.
Ali’s outlook is decidedly pessimistic. “How things stand ten years on, certainly from my point of view, I think not enough has been done and I don’t see the situation very different from where it was back then,” he says.
“In terms of perceptions and the way people live their lives, sadly it’s still very segregated and that’s true of both communities.”
One big driver of change was a concerted effort at integrating the town’s schools. The Ritchie Report, an independent enquiry looking at Oldham’s problems before and after the disturbances, saw a causal link between housing segregation and educational segregation.
One of the recommendations to come out of the above mentioned Cantle Report was that all schools should ‘consider ways in which they might ensure that their intake is representative of the range of cultures and ethnicity in their local communities.’
The report continues, ‘Ideally admissions policies should avoid more than 75 percent of pupils from one culture or ethnic background in multi-cultural areas.
One of the headline changes to occur in the area’s educational provision was the foundation of the 1,500 pupil Waterhead Academy. The Academy was founded in 2010 and is the result of a merger between two of the town’s most racially segregated schools. Of course, this is part of a long-term plan; at this stage it is too early to tell how successful the project has been. However, early signs have been positive.
With integrated schooling and economic renewal seeing the community becoming more cohesive, what does the future hold?
Ali has his own view:
“With our generation where most people drive, everyone can speak English, all those factors that limited where you could live and how you lived don’t really apply so it’s more of a shame when you see our generation or the current generation behaving in that way. It’s sad and it’s true and I think there’s got to be action across the board to change that and it’s got to be voluntary.
“I don’t think you can force it and you know this is one area where I perhaps disagree with other people. You can’t just tell people they have to live somewhere they don’t want to or go to school somewhere they don’t want to but its got to be cleverer than that and genuinely change the way people think about things.”
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