The shoppers and shopkeepers of White Abbey Road in Bradford well remember a time almost 25 years ago when the street was engulfed in flames after a protest march against the National Front turned violent. On east London’s Brick Lane, the British-Bangladeshi population remember the invisible lines they could not cross without being set upon by the far right.
For both communities, whose showdowns with racist groups came in different decades, the atmosphere in the UK today feels worryingly familiar, with far-right sentiment on the rise, stoked by politicians.
“It feels like it has cycled back around,” says Mohsin Shuja, 42, who works in a jewellery shop on White Abbey Road. As a teenager during the 2001 Bradford riots, he was involved in protests against the far right that descended into clashes with police.
This weekend will see demonstrations outside hotels housing asylum seekers across the country – some organised by far-right groups – with counter-protests also planned. For people in Bradford and London’s East End, there are fears history could start to repeat itself in parts of the UK.
Shuja does not predict trouble in Bradford, but feels other parts of the country could see unrest. “Not so much in Bradford – back then they stirred up something and that got dealt with, but since then I think cohesion is good. In other places though, definitely, especially smaller communities. They won’t be able to defend themselves.”
The riots in Bradford in 2001 were preceded by weeks of warnings that the far right was planning to target the city’s south Asian population and incidents of violence in other northern cities. The riot itself was triggered by reports of the stabbing of an Asian man.
In Brick Lane, similarly, the “battle of Brick Lane” in 1978 was triggered by the murder of the Bangladeshi textile worker Altab Ali at a time when the National Front regularly targeted the local British-Bangladeshi population.
Mohammed Abdul Sobhan, 69, a retired restaurateur who also goes by the name Gedhu, was involved in fighting the National Front during the 1970s and 80s, when the group would regularly attack Bangladeshis in east London.
He says young people would station themselves on corners along Brick Lane ready to push back against any attacks. They had little trust in police protection and he thinks their resistance is why the area is now safe for everybody.
“When I came there were teddy boys, then people got fed up with teddy boys so they produced skinheads, National Front, EDL. It’s the same group, just a different name. It’s a kind of disease,” he says. “We can come out and stop them but they will come back two months later.”
While decades have passed since the height of far-right violence in both east London and Bradford, the areas have not been able to completely move on. In the early 2010s, both were the targets of major rallies by the English Defence League (EDL) and there were concerns they could be hit by the unrest last summer precipitated by the Southport murders.
Fatima Mahmood was a baby during the riots but grew up in the Manningham area of Bradford where they were concentrated. Shopping areas such as White Abbey Road took years to bounce back while other parts of the area never did. After major damage to a BMW garage, which had provided local jobs, it was reopened in another part of the city.
The city is in a better place now, but Mahmood says that for its youth, the far right’s insistence on constantly bringing up places such as Bradford can leave people on edge.
“People were very much wondering: are they going to come again? Is it going to be a repeat of the 2001 riots or before that in the 1960s, 70s and the 80s as well,” says Mahmood, who works in anti-racism and community organising at the Bradford-based Race Equality Network.
Mohammed Amran, the Labour councillor for Bradford’s Heaton ward, says the city has made major strides in mending relations between communities but that he is worried about the tone of political rhetoric.
“It was scary – there was fire, smoke, bricks flying around,” says Amran of the 2001 riots in the city, as he drives along Oak Lane, pointing out the flashpoints during the riots.
“Nationally, the language [politicians] use, it worries people,” he says. He points to rhetoric around grooming gangs and asylum seekers or accusations that Turkish barbers are fronts for money laundering which create hostility towards minority groups.
The Race Equality Network argues that the cycle of far-right hatred against minority communities happens because structural issues are not being dealt with.
Mahmood says the government needs do to more than just encouraging community-level projects to bring groups together, especially when ministers are themselves responsible for what she described as anti-migrant rhetoric.
“Throwing pots of money at community organisations and expecting them to intervene and solve these problems is not the way to go. We’re more keen on the government coming [making policy] that is rooted in compassion, rather than in furthering hostile ideas,” she says.
