GHETTO BRITAIN
Many people in this town live parallel lives
GLODwICk Road — in the heart of Oldham — is where, not so long ago, a pub with the unusual name of Live And Let Live could be found. The message of hope and tolerance was printed in big, bold letters at the entrance. You couldn’t miss it.
The building, at No 141, is still there. But it has been converted into a children’s nursery serving the now predominantly Asian neighbourhood. On display, in the front
window, is a photograph of the local mosque, next to the rather sweet caption: ‘My mummy comes here.’ Some of the area’s best-known shops — such as Bhatti Fabrics and Hussain & Sons Cash & Carry — are also pictured.
The transformation of the premises, from Boddingtons-run tavern, to Muslim bridalwear store, to nursery — with places for 200 youngsters, around 80 per cent from Muslim m families — reflects the seismic cultural and d demographic changes which have taken place, e, not just in Oldham, a former mill town on the he outskirts of Manchester, but in other towns.
Behind the demise of the popular pub, b, though, is another story; one that sits uncomfortably min with the vision of multicultural Britain sold to us by New Labour and perpetuated by a chorus of liberal voices. That vision, encapsulated pve in the establishments’s name — Live And Let Live — died on the night of Saturday, y, May 26, 2001, when the pub was firebombed d and drinkers attacked.
A petty argument, about football, l, between Asian and white teenagers rs earlier in the evening, had escalated d into a full-scale riot with barricades es of furniture and burning tyres erected d in the streets.
Mobs from both sides of the racial al divide fought running battles with h each other and the police culminating, t- just after 11pm, in the storming g of the pub. The violence continued d throughout the week and spread to o other Northern towns.
The Home Office- commissioned d report into the trouble found that at there were long-term causes which h obviously went much, much deeper er than a spat between schoolboys.
‘Many communities,’ the inquiry y concluded, were ‘living parallel lives’ s’ and often ‘these lives did not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap or promote meaningful interchanges’, s’, which, in turn, had fuelled ‘fear and d suspicion that is easily exploited d by extremists’.
The findings were an embarrassment s for Tony Blair, during whose time in office net annual immigration quadrupled reaching an average of 247,000 a year.
The Live And Let Live pub — unfortunate marketing in the post-riot era — closed shortly afterwards and the deep- seated racial tensions that resulted in three nights of mayhem gradually faded from the headlines. Until this week. Few could have predicted that when Nigel Farage, taking a break from campaigning with his new Brexit Party, rose to give a speech on the other side of the Atlantic at Lock Haven University in rural Pennsylvania, the spotlight would once again return to Oldham.
‘Let me take you to a town called Oldham in the North of England,’ he began in his own inimitable way, ‘where literally on one side of the street everybody is white and on the other side of the street everybody is black. The twain never actually meet, there is no assimilation. These, folks, are divided societies in which resentments build and grow.’
Farage knows Oldham because, as Ukip leader, he fought a by-election here but failed to unseat Labour.
Not surprisingly, his comments were met with condemnation in some quarters. Oldham MP Jim McMahon accused him of trying to ‘stoke up tensions and create division’ with his ‘us and them’ rhetoric.
Had Farage been speaking in Britain, instead of playing to an American audience in an area full of Trump supporters, he might well have chosen his words more carefully. He thrives on controversy, but he is no fool. The fact of the matter is there are relatively few ‘black’ faces in Oldham. Only 2,797 — 1.2 per cent of the 219,000 population — were classed as ‘black ’in the 2011 census.
Oldham has grown (by around 10,000) since then, but the number of black people is still statistically insignificant compared to the more than 40,000-strong Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities.
But take away the simplistic language and the inflammatory tone, and the truth is that, nearly 20 years after the Live And Let Live pub was targeted, many in Oldham are still ‘living parallel lives’.
Initiatives to break down barriers were introduced in the aftermath of the riots.
Glodwick’s all-Asian Greenhill Primary School was ‘twinned’ with the virtually all-white Rushcroft, two of nearly 60 primaries involved in such arrangements, where youngsters attended joint sessions on racism.
Millions were spent on regeneration projects. Yet, an ethnicity report by Oldham Council, based on census data and updated as recently as January, found that ‘geographical segregation, particularly between white and Pakistani and white and Bangladeshi, is exceptionally high and showing little sign of improvement’.
Because parents generally choose to send their children to the nearest school, ‘geographical segregation’ has resulted, inevitably, in ‘educational segregation’ with classes remaining overwhelmingly monoculture; in other words, either almost exclusively white or exclusively non- white, depending on your post code.
Now, as then, Oldham, remains racially divided. Anyone who has spent time in Savile Town in Dewsbury, Yorkshire, or Bradford or Luton or the Leeds suburb of Beeston will surely be quietly nodding their heads in agreement.
Such divisions are born, for the most part, not from hatred or prejudice but the desire for individuals of similar cultural background to live and socialise with one another. Neverthe
less, the Oldham riots — and too many other examples to mention — are a reminder, if we really need reminding in these uncertain times, of the dangers of communities becoming isolated.
Nowhere is this development — what Trevor Phillips, the former chairman of the Commission For Racial Equality, once called ‘sleepwalking to segregation’ — more evident than in St Mary’s ward, a tangle of mainly Victorian terraces, a mile or so south-west of Oldham town centre, where the majority of residents (around 66 per cent) are Pakistanis and Bangladeshis.
The highest concentration of Muslims is in Glodwick. One of the residents who answered the door to me was a woman, in traditional Islamic dress, who could not speak English; her son, 22-year-old Aqil, told me she had arrived in the country from Pakistan when she was in her 20s. She was now 60.
This is far from unusual in Glodwick, ranked among the most deprived areas in the country with more than one in five adults claiming out-of-work benefits last year. But less than a mile down the road is neighbouring — and sought after — Saddleworth West and Lees (97 per cent white).
On one side of the invisible dividing line — the Glodwick side — are shabby properties and takeaways. On the other — the Saddleworth side — there are cottages with shiny door knockers and hanging baskets; the area has tea rooms, and a golf club. In Glodwick, a terrace house costs around £75,000; in Saddleworth, twice as much.
This is perhaps as stark an example of the ‘ parallel lives’ phenomenon as you will find.
‘I grew up in Glodwick,’ said a middle-aged woman who now lives inside the Saddleworth ‘border’. ‘We were one of the few white families there and we never got any hassle. I would not even go there now. I just wouldn’t feel safe.’
Her anxiety is mirrored by some Asians in Glodwick who said they would not venture onto a ‘white estate’ nearby. ‘No, I would not go there alone,’ a young Asian told me. If you go on your own, it can be a problem.’
Such fears, even if they are unfounded, are corrosive. There were 68 religious hate crimes in Oldham in 2018, up 55 per cent on the previous year and 25 Islamaphobic crimes, a slight drop from the previous year, but still the joint second worst place in the Greater Manchester Police area for this category of offence.
In one incident, two women left slices of bacon on the door of a mosque (eating pork is forbidden in Islam) and, in another, a pig’s head was thrown through the window of a family home.
These are extreme examples, of course. But it is not hard to understand how resentment festers in such divided communities. On Roundthorn Road, Glodwick, the street where, back in 2001, the spat between white and Asian youths triggered the riots, I met a young mother who revealed that each morning she has to walk her children, aged eight and three, to school — one mile, one way with one youngster, and one mile in the opposite direction with the other.
She is among a small number of non-Muslims who live in the street — directly opposite, in fact, the local school. Almost all the 262 pupils at Roundthorn Primary Academy, according to Ofsted, ‘are from minority ethnic backgrounds and most speak English as an additional language’.
The mum was unable to get her own children into the school a few yards away from her doorstep because, she says, it was fully subscribed. How does she feel about that? ‘I’m not very happy about it,’ she replied. Her husband needs the car for work ‘so there is nothing else I can do but walk’.
In 2017, research by the Institute Of Community Cohesion found that, in Oldham, 62 per cent of primaries and 71 per cent of secondary schools were racially segregated.
One of the founders of the Institute is Professor Ted Cantle, who carried out the governmentbacked inquiry into the Oldham riots. ‘Schools are our best chance for integration,’ he said. ‘ But instead, schools appear to be compounding the problem and slowly dismantling the bridges.’
At the end of Roundthorn Road, a short stroll from where the young mum who spoke to me, is the Dog And Partridge pub, which looks like it has seen better days but is a clue to Glodwick’s past as a white working-class neighbourhood. The process began in the Sixties when immigrants, first from Pakistan, then Bangladesh, came to work in the cotton industry.
Recruitment was specifically targeted towards men who would work night shifts with wages that were unacceptable to locals. Many existing families subsequently sold up, a trend popularly known as ‘white flight’.
Even today, some Asians still feel resentful that their arrival caused this reaction. ‘We didn’t tell them to f*** off, did we,’ an Asian man, in his 30s, who lives in Roundthorn Road, said to me.
The transformation of Glodwick was replicated in neighbouring Werneth (76.6 per cent non-white) and Coldhurst ( 72.9 per cent non-white).
Because many Pakistanis and Bangladeshi own their own properties, they are discouraged from leaving which means that the diversity usually brought about by the rental market is reduced.
Segregation is not only about housing, though. From the Nineties
This week Nigel Farage crassly claimed there were streets in Oldham split down the middle between ‘black’ and white families. The truth? He’s wrong . . . but as this troubling dispatch reveals, his dog whistle politics is being fuelled by a far more complex division
‘If you go there alone, it can be a problem’
onwards, many Asians who found work in Oldham became minicab drivers or entered the restaurant business.
The ethnicity report for Oldham Council found that white people were more than twice as likely to hold managerial or professional posts than those of Pakistani origin, and four times more than Bangladeshis.
Back on Roundthorn Road, a group of young Asian men are congregating. Among them is Mohammed Usman, 25, who is married with two children and works in security. I ask him what his friends do. Pointing at each in turn, he replies: ‘Security guard, security guard, security guard, factory worker, security guard.’
Only one has a job which required training or qualifications; he is a paramedic. Unlike much of Glodwick, Roundthorn Road was a white neighbourhood until 1990. ‘When my family arrived [in 1990] there were only about five Asian families in the street,’ Mohammed explained.
Among the few remaining indigenous residents are James and Ellen Turnbull, who have been here for 45 years.
James was a plumber and Ellen ran a corner shop. The couple, in their 80s, live in an immaculate dormer bungalow. Ellen said they have been unable to get to know some of the Asian families because of the language barrier.
Sadly, James and Ellen Turnbull remain the exception in places like Glodwick.
In the aftermath of the Oldham Riots, a second report, by civil servant David Ritchie, was published. One of the key sections read: ‘The divisions are now such that we have to ask whether people in the different communities actually want to have much to do with one another.
‘For many white people the attitude seems to be that we would rather the Asians were not here, we will have as little to do with them as possible, and so we pretend that the Asians are not here.
‘For many Asians, the attitude seems to be that this is a difficult and alien environment in which we find ourselves, we must protect ourselves from it and its corrupting influences, and we can best do that by creating largely separated communities in Oldham modelled on what we have left behind in Pakistan and Bangladesh.’
The consequences of this assessment have become all too apparent.