Racism gets to work early in Oldham. Sahil Ashraf is the latest young victim of the daily racially-motivated violence besetting this working-class Lancashire town seven miles north-east of Manchester. The deep grazes on the swollen left side of his face are dark red now, two days after he was attacked in a park near his home in the run-down Pakistani neighbourhood of Glodwick, an area which this summer witnessed some of Britain's worst race riots for 15 years.
Sahil (13) says he was playing with other British-Pakistani boys when a group of white teenagers pulled him from his bike, punched him and dragged him along the ground, cutting his face.
"They called me a Paki bastard and said get out of the park. I said I'm not going," says Sahil, shifting nervously from one foot to the other amid the fresh mangoes and spices on sale in his corner shop, Hussain and Sons.
He said he knew one of the boys from his school. Has he ever had a white friend? "No," he replies softly, shaking his head. Would he like one? He smiles diffidently and looks away without answering.
Sahil reported the attack to the police, an unusual step in this town where the Asian community's deep mistrust of the forces of law and order continues to fuel race tensions.
These old mill towns - Oldham, Bradford, Burnley - have significant Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian minorities. Racism and racist attacks are nothing new but riots on the scale of this "Summer of Hate" are. British youths of Asian descent rioted in Oldham over a holiday weekend in late May, after weeks of racial tension and provocation by the National Front (NF), which had rallied in the town in defiance of a Home Office ban.
An attack by NF supporters on Pakistani homes in the Glodwick area, in which a pregnant woman was hurt, goaded hundreds of Asians to defend their community. Armed with petrol bombs and bricks they struck out at the police and damaged property. More than 100 people have been arrested since the riots. The three days of riots cost Oldham Borough Council around £150,000.
The rioting spread to other places, with street clashes in Leeds on June 5th after a local man said police squirted him with CS gas. Violence was also sparked in Burnley on June 23rd after an Asian taxi driver was attacked by a white man. In Bradford, young Asians fought with police and damaged city centre property after a march against the National Front on July 7th.
The recipe for such violence is a classic one which arguably has as much to do with economic deprivation as poor race relations. Take an already ethnically polarised working-class town that has not successfully made the transition from manufacturing and mines to the new economic order and add agitation by the National Front and the British National Party. It's not by coincidence that the riots happened in Oldham's most deprived wards.
Add to this a yobbish youth culture and rates of poverty, deprivation, death and crime all considerably higher than the national average and it becomes clearer why a Pennines town no bigger than Limerick should have become a by-word for racial tension.
"What you've got here is impoverished communities on both sides," says Dr David Baker, a lecturer in British politics at Warwick University.
"The white communities are searching for scapegoats for the fact that they see no future for their communities and feel abandoned by both the Labour and Conservative parties. The far right capitalises on this by offering to protect the interests of the white community and to downgrade the interests of the immigrant communities."
At its peak, in the early 1900s, Oldham was a thriving hat-making town as well as the cotton-spinning capital of the world, with 320 mills and 17 million spindles. Asians began arriving here in the 1960s to find work on the dirty, badly-paid night shifts in the mills. The collapse of its industries struck hard, particularly for the children and grandchildren of these original Asian immigrants.
This summer's riot, and the threat of more copy-cat violence to come in other towns with similar tensions is being taken seriously by the government, with investigations promptly established in Oldham and Burnley.
The seven-member Oldham Independent Review literally set up shop this week, opening a drop-in centre in Spindles, a busy town-centre shopping mall, a neutral venue used by both Asians and whites.
The review will investigate the causes of the riots and produce an action plan by Christmas, to help foster race harmony. It certainly has its work cut out in this town, which appears to be a textbook example of how to become infected by racial tension.
Oldham has 219,360 inhabitants, about 11 per cent of them of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin. By 2011, all minority ethnic groups will make up 19 per cent of the borough's population. Oldham Borough Council has 10,000 employees, some 2.5 per cent of whom are from the Indian sub-continent.
The segregation of Oldham's white and Asian working-class communities is stark; they live largely in separate housing estates, often attend separate schools and use separate taxi companies. It is entirely possible to grow up in Oldham without having any meaningful contact at all with the "other side" of the community.
Unemployment among people of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin is three to four times that of white people. Many working-class Asians live in badly-maintained small terraced houses in Pakistani areas such as Glodwick or Bangladeshi areas such as Westwood, which are plagued by poverty and drug addiction. They prefer to buy their homes as a form of investment rather than rent and, as many Muslims have large families, there is severe over-crowding. Where the Asians moved in, the whites generally moved out, a phenomenon known as "white flight". In one key area, a mini-Belfast-style "peace line" - a grill of about eight foot square - has been erected to prevent persistent attacks on Bangladeshi homes by white youths. Only the more prosperous neighbourhoods in Oldham are racially mixed.
It is clear that local authorities have made little effort to counter the trend towards segregated housing, although it was highlighted as a cause for concern in the early 1990s by the Commission for Racial Equality. Oldham is fertile ground for extreme right groups such as the National Front and the new-look British National Party (BNP), which hopes to take council seats at next year's local elections.
In last June's general election, in the wake of the riots, the BNP, led by Nick Griffin, took 11,643 of the total votes in two constituencies. Griffin, a Cambridge-educated lawyer with a conviction for publishing hate mail and who lives in Wales, got 16.4 per cent of the votes in the Labour-held Oldham West constituency. The party's local branch organiser, Mick Treacy, won 11.2 per cent in Labour-held Oldham East.
The NF national organiser, Terry Blackham, once jailed for gun-running to loyalist terrorists in Northern Ireland, said the organisation intends to hold a national march in the North this summer and to open a branch in Oldham. It cancelled a march planned for Birmingham last Saturday and the Home Office ban on marches in Oldham has been extended to November.
The increased BNP and NF activity has galvanised Oldham anti-racist groups such as Oldham United Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League.
Pub landlord Andy Williams, formerly in the British Army, is one such new recruit to the cause of enhanced community relations. Williams, whose Bank Top Tavern stands on a rise opposite the large Mecca bingo hall, joined the Anti-Nazi League the day after he was threatened by a group of men from Birmingham because he wouldn't bar Asians from his premises.
You stand behind that bar all day and you hear people talking and what they are saying is wrong and they are being fed it by the extreme right," he says. "They say the council has funded a new mosque in Glodwick and we can't even get money for a new front door. If you try to tell people the council didn't fund the mosque, they'll think you are lying."
Williams, who served in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and ended his army career with a spell in Bosnia-Herzegovina, is worried that the BNP could eventually take up to four seats on the local council, allowing it to hold the balance of power in the 60-seat administration between the Liberal Democrats and Labour.
He says he doesn't believe the 11,643 Oldham BNP voters are racists who support the BNP's policies of voluntary assisted repatriation of all immigrants, British withdrawal from the European Union and the return of hanging for child murderers and terrorists.
"People are voting for the BNP not because they believe in them but as a way of protesting about the complete inability of the council to run the town, to sort out the estates, cut down on drugs and crime and get the buses running on time - even just to get the buses running," he says.
But the BNP's Mick Treacy, who used to be a Labour Party supporter, says otherwise. "People knew damn well what they were voting for. I'm well-known here," says the taxi-driver, himself the son of an immigrant from Galway.
Treacy does not hide his contempt for the "liberal media", inquiring whether The Irish Times too is out to "bash the BNP". He records the interview so that he will have a comeback if his words are distorted.
Treacy joined the BNP after he applied for a computer repair course and was told there were no places left, apart from those reserved for members of ethnic minorities under positive discrimination measures.
He says he is proud to be white and wants Britain to return to being "99 per cent genetically white" as it was in the 1940s. In these days of pride movements, he declares that he is proud to be white.
"If you say white pride you are condemned as a Nazi and a racist," he says. "That just shows that our own people are intent on defeating us."
Most of Oldham's community leaders and politicians at both national and local level view the high BNP election turnout as a wake-up call.
"We are all to blame," says Riaz Ahmad, a Pakistan-born Labour councillor who will become the first Asian mayor in Greater Manchester County next year and was recently forced from his home after it was petrol-bombed days after the riots.
"The local authority, the police and community leaders have all let Oldham down. We must have made mistakes to be in the mess we are in. We now have to acknowledge the problem, understand the problem and work to solve it."
Suitably chastened by recent events, Oldham Borough Council has taken immediate steps to redress years of neglect. There are Church of England primary schools in Oldham with all Muslim pupils and all white teachers, where children turn up to school with limited English. Among other initiatives, The council has begun a twinning programme for all-Asian and all-white schools to try to counteract the racial stereotyping that is becoming more entrenched.
In the Fytton Arms bar in the exclusively white working-class estate of Fitton Hill, three young men say they don't vote but that the BNP turnout was "to show defiance against aggression by the Asians" and to bring them back into line. Local police officers say members of the neo-Nazi group, Combat 18, live on the estate.
"There was a programme about this estate being the most racist estate in the country. There's an awful lot of racist people here," says Graham (31) who works in a bacon-processing plant.
Is Graham one of them? "When I read about attacks on whites in the paper I get annoyed. I work with Asian people and the majority of them are alright."
The newspaper is the evening Oldham Chronicle, known locally as "the Chron". Asians claim it hypes Asian attacks on white people and downplays white attacks on Asians. The newspaper's offices were the target of an attack by Asian youths in the riots. In a recent editorial, the Chronicle defended
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