This summer will mark the 25th anniversary of the Bradford race riot, one of the worst outbreaks of inter-communal violence Britain had seen in decades.
If previous anniversaries are anything to go by, the mainstream media will be looking back at the events of July 7th, 2001, not in anger, but with sympathy.
Journalists will present the rioting, which saw more than 300 police officers injured in clashes with men of Pakistani/Kashmiri heritage, as a sort of outgassing of pent-up frustration. Not quite justifiable, but comprehensible nonetheless. An explicable reaction to what the liberal Left saw - and still sees - as the provocations of poverty, racism and marginalisation.
Anyone who doubts my prediction ought to look at how the MSM covered previous anniversaries. For the 20th anniversary, the Guardian ran a headline which noted ‘How The 2001 Riots Boosted the Far-Right’.
I am not cherry-picking stories. Mount a Google search about the riot, and it’s the Guardian headline that pops up first, with its all-too-predictable take.
In my opinion, the riot was, first and foremost, an expression of territorial domination by young Muslim men. Testing the limits of how far the State would go to make its writ run.
But the Guardian, like so many liberal outlets whose journalists have never lived in a city like Bradford, turned the story into one about how the violence had acted as a recruiting sergeant for the ‘far right’.
All while playing down any idea that white folk could be just as vulnerable to racism, poverty and marginalisation as their brown-skinned neighbours.
This kind of asymmetrical coverage is not new. On the 10th anniversary of the Bradford riot, the BBC went with a headline which said ‘Victims of Bradford riot fire feel no bitterness’.
The story was based on an interview with two women who were among 23 drinkers inside a Labour Club in the Bradford suburb of Manningham.
It was burned to the ground by local Pakistanis on July 7th. The doors to the Club were barred, and the fire brigade bricked when they arrived to extinguish the fire. Multiple fatalities were only avoided because people were able to hide in the cellar.
As a Christian, I admire people who can forgive and set aside bitterness. But, as a journalist - the kind the Guardian would probably describe as ‘far right’ - I wonder how representative those two women were.
The awkward truth is that the majority of white Bradfordians are quite inclined to remain embittered about their city falling prey to a spasm of racial conflict that was only quelled by the introduction of more than 1,000 riot police.
The feelings of Bradford’s dwindling white population are rarely consulted by the MSM. And if they are, the voices which secure an audience are those which subscribe to an approved narrative of healing and harmony. Angry, implacable voices don’t get a look in.
Had they been, Bradford might not be where it is. And, had things gone differently in Bradford, Britain itself would now face fewer intractable difficulties related to race and religion. Why? Because the city is where some of our woes around social cohesion are rooted.
The mainstream media has lied to us for 25 years: the Bradford race riots were just a prelude - Colin Brazier | Reuters
The riots of 2001 were bad enough, but the real damage - though less obvious - was done a dozen years earlier. That was when a thousand Muslim agitators gathered outside Bradford City Hall to burn a copy of Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses.
They were acting in response to a ‘fatwa’ - an assassination order - handed down against the British author by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomenei. He considered the novel blasphemous and, judging by the response of hundreds of Bradford Muslims, he wasn’t alone.
The sight of a book being burned in public was shocking to the British people, for whom the practise of book-burning was the stuff of totalitarian regimes we’d fought in World War Two and the Cold War.
It was what the Nazis or Soviets did. It was shocking too because, hitherto (although not in Bradford), many Britons thought Muslims were a quiet, wholly peace-loving subset of England’s immigrant population.
Purveyors of curry sauce and enthusiasts for cricket. Here now was something else. An uncompromising militancy based not around politics, but religion.
That moment, in Bradford in 1989, is a key part of British Islamism’s origin story. More importantly, it was also the moment when the powers that be could have taken a stand.
Here was an opportunity to make an example of those who burned books. Or those who publicly called for those who committed ‘blasphemy’ to pay with their lives. But the British State fluffed its lines.
Rather than hand down exemplary sentences to those who challenged our democratic norms, we let it slide. Islamists saw that they could get an easier ride for their intolerance than they might have done in ostensibly Muslim countries like Turkey. It was a green light for militant Islamism in England.
The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions. In the 1980s, Bradford’s council committed itself to a doctrine of multiculturalism.
It announced that every community had “an equal right to maintain its own identity, culture, language, religion and customs". In practise these weren’t just warm words.
The local authority used taxpayers’ money to fund organisations like the Bradford Council of Mosques in 1981. The idea of Muslims ‘speaking with one voice’ must have sounded appealing, given how divided by denomination and ethnicity the Muslim community was (and is).
But in 1989, it was that same Bradford Council of Mosques - set up by well-meaning civil servants and bankrolled by the rates - which helped organise the Satanic Verses book burning.
The fact that none of this is widely known, outside of Bradford, is all of a piece. The city, where I was born and raised, is as important as it is ignored.
And it is a harbinger of many of the problems Britain will face in years to come. Demographically, Bradford is the city with the youngest population in Europe and the highest rate of first-cousin marriage (with all the consequences of congenital deformity that entails).
Bradford is also home to Britain’s biggest mosque, and - as the author Ed Husain has pointed out - the tussle between hardliners and moderates in Bradford speaks to a bigger national conflict.
While London, Luton, Manchester and Birmingham are home to an established Kashmiri diaspora, it is Bradford which is the most densely populated and is given to the least mixing.
In 2014, a YouGov survey claimed Bradford was Britain’s most dangerous city. It certainly is a dangerous place to be a vulnerable young white girl, given the ease with which grooming gangs were able to operate for years.
I remember interviewing the former Labour MP Anne Cryer, who lived in Bradford, about the gangs in the 1990s. She was a lone voice, trying to get media outlets like the Guardian and BBC interested in the plight of exploited young white girls, and getting nowhere.
Perhaps this year’s 25th anniversary of the Bradford riot will be an opportunity to face up to some of these problems honestly. As campaigning on the other side of the Pennines, in the Gorton and Denton by-election, showed, sectarian divisions in British society are mounting.
If multiculturalism has been a failed experiment, then Bradford provides a test case like no other. We need to understand what’s happening in the city.
Many Britons may think they can live in ignorance of places like Bradford. But 'out of sight, out of mind' is not a way to run a country. Bradford’s problems are no longer confined to the city. Increasingly, they are nationwide.
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