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Oldham's customary racial tensions had been crackling away uncomfortably all week.

On Monday, outside the Breeze Hill school from which a 15-year-old girl was recently removed after suffering racial abuse at the hands of a 13-year-old, a small group of white former pupils took to the school gates, taunting Asians and blacks and threatening staff.

They returned every day until Thursday when police were called in, though it was a group of Pakistani pupils in the wrong place at the wrong time who chose that day to retaliate and found themselves under arrest.

Then Saturday dawned ominously. It has become known as "no-go day" or "National Front Day" among Oldham Asians and blacks who say police have advised them that on this day the former mill town's shopping precinct is to be avoided at all costs. Greater Manchester Police deny this.

On a Saturday five weeks ago, the National Front's march here was banned by police and the local council but that has not stopped the British National Party activists who are planning general election campaigns for the Oldham's two parliamentary seats gathering in pubs and hotels at weekends.

On "no-go" Saturday four weeks ago, 16 people were arrested following racial clashes and this weekend was no different. Far-right activists had been tailing Anti-Nazi League supporters around the town all day.

With tensions running desperately high and the Greater Manchester Police helicopter circling overhead, it appears to have taken a mere squabble between a white and Asian teenager, in the early evening heat outside a chip shop in the deprived, Asian district of Glodwick, to incite the worst riots in the history of an already racially troubled town.

The boys were aged between 13 and 14 according to the owner of the Datta grocery shop, Mohammed Sharif, who saw them at around 8.30pm. After the row, the white boy's mother was seen speaking on a mobile phone and five minutes later two taxis full of men helped form a group of 25 whites who stormed through the Glodwick streets.

Mr Sharif and his son rolled down the steel shutters of the shop still daubed yesterday with red graffiti which read "OK White Power" and locked themselves in while outside the whites ran riot.

Bricks were thrown through the house window of a pregnant Asian woman. White men jumped on the stationary car containing Mr Sharif's sister and her two-year-old son, smashing the bonnet, windscreen and sunroof.

Police present in substantial numbers in the centre of Glodwick five streets away initially kept gangs of Asian and white youths apart but by 8.30pm the full Asian backlash was beginning to unleash itself.

By 9pm, Asians were hurling missiles at the windows of the Live and Let Live pub, believed by some to have harboured NF activists during the day. The eight-millimetre reinforced glass of the ground floor windows installed after attacks elsewhere in the town withstood the battering but the upstairs windows were smashed. A firebomb was hurled through a window, setting fire to curtains and the floor as most of the 40 drinkers ran for cover in the barrel room and the publican's living quarters.

"There were ladies in their sixties, hysterical because they didn't know what was going on," said one regular Kenneth Berry, 59, yesterday. "About 100 to 150 Asian youths came out from behind the trees."

Three regulars had already been taken to hospital before a second attack at 11pm. Paul Barrow, 48, the pub landlord said: "The [Asians] attacked the customers with whatever they could get their hands on, bottles, stools and glasses."

The NF was nowhere to be seen so it was police, with whom race relations have been tolerable here, who came under fire; officers fighting pitched battles with 500 Asian youths as they pushed back the lines of stone-throwers to escort ambulances and fire engines in.

As smashed-up cars, bricks and supermarket trolleys used against police were cleared away from the Glodwick Road yesterday, 70-year-old Jack Roscoe conducted what he later called "a chat with the Paks" a conversation with his Pakistani neighbours which underlines the depth of racial tension here.

Mr Roscoe, a former postman, later pointed to the spot where he claimed to have counted 31 Asian taxi drivers, gathered in solidarity at 8.30pm on Saturday.

"They were coming from all angles. They were throwing stones and I was thinking of my Mazda and cringing. There's so much arrogance among them. They blame other people and don't look at the fundamental issues."

Asian youth workers laid the blame for the riots squarely on a two-week campaign of "racist propaganda and agitation" by far-right activists.

The British National Party and the National Front's presence dates back to an attack in the town which turned a 76-year-old D-Day veteran into a cause célèbre. Returning home from a local rugby match in April, Walter Chamberlain was beaten up, just days after a national radio report that suggested some areas of Oldham had become "no-go" to whites.

"For the past fortnight, Asian kids feel they have been asked to stand back while skinheads walk around the town handing out literature," said Nanu Miah of Oldham's Bangladeshi Youth Association yesterday.

"Can you imagine the sort of corrosive effect that has? So, when they hear last night that an Asian street has been attacked and women injured by National Front supporters, then the whole place went up it was in many ways a riot waiting to happen."

But other community leaders privately despair of the young, second and third generation Asians who now provide 25 per cent of the town's youth population and are more willing to defend themselves against racism than those largely Bangladeshi, Bengali and Pakistani immigrants who first arrived 30 years ago to work in the mills.

Their determination to fight back provides some explanation for the fact that white victims of crime have been outnumbering blacks and Asians in Oldham for the past eight years: 71 per cent of violent racial attack victims were white in 1993, 72 per cent in 1997 and 69 per cent in 1998.

The statistics are the source of much conjecture Pakistani and Bangladeshis are still far less likely to report their own racial experiences but anti-white crime among the notorious local Glodwick boys and Coppice boys, small but potent groups of Asian trouble-makers, is high.

Riaz Ahmed, a local JP and councillor, told The Independent: "I see the same white youths before the court but once they turn 21 or 22 they don't seem to come again. The Asian youths are still before me at 24 and 25. They don't seem to be maturing. For some, it is a case of wanting to be European and copying white youths."

Beneath a sycamore tree opposite the Live and Let Live pub, in yesterday's afternoon drizzle, Abdul Bassit Shah, who sits on a local community forum, provided some demonstration of how hard rebuilding stability may now be as he was forced to remonstrate with Asians in their native tongue to desist from more violence.

"We need to calm the situation down together," he said later. "Everybody has felt the far-right presence but you cannot ban those with far-right views from entering the town."

Some of the young men who watched him were unconvinced. "Idiots like that are being diplomatic because they have a job to do but they don't make any difference," observed one young Asian, Parvis Nazir. "The young lads know what's going on. The answer is not to let the NF pump people up."

In Oldham's 'no go' zone, all it took was a scuffle to set off a terrible night of rioting

By Ian Herbert, North of England Correspondent and Cahal Milmo

28 May 2001

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