Colin Brazier: 20 years after the Bradford Riots, we can't forget the lessons

This week an anniversary Britain would rather forget. Twenty years since some of the worst violence on the mainland in decades. The setting was my home city of Bradford.

Rioting, or as the BBC preferred this week – an “uprising” - that left 300 police officers injured, shops, businesses and pubs destroyed and community relations disfigured for a generation.

On the night of the worse disturbances, a Labour party social club was set on fire and the doors barricaded shut. When firefighters arrived to rescue those inside, they were attacked with bricks. That nobody died was a miracle and a function of what became a massive police operation to quell the violence, involving a thousand officers in riot gear.

Like many Bradfordians I felt those events in the summer of 2001 were brushed under the carpet, which is probably unfair. The courts made an example of 200 rioters. The long sentences they handed down may well have deterred a repeat of the violence.

As a journalist, it’s a story I’ve kept returning to. Partly that’s because what happens in Bradford matters. Far from being the ‘northern mill town’ it was routinely described as by London-based headline writers, Bradford is Britain’s seventh largest city.

Given the size and youthfulness of its expanding Pakistani-heritage population, Bradford’s Muslims will have a big and growing say in our national conversations about faith and race. They already have. It was in Bradford, before the TV cameras, that Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was burned in 1989.

As a journalist I spent months working in Pakistan. On one occasion I returned to Bradford from Islamabad to discover that the church where I was baptised as a baby had been firebombed.

Twice I took a camera crew to Bradford – in 2005 and again in 2013 - to try and unpick what happened there in 2001, not to pick at the scab, but to understand better a story that matters more than ever. I interviewed George Galloway, then a Bradford MP, and still – as we’ve seen recently in Batley – reaching out to a community that he says feels misunderstood. I went back to the home I was born in, and found the Kashmiri-heritage mother of three who lived there had recently ditched her jeans, and husband, to become a devout Muslim.

And I listened to my relatives who still live in Bradford, whose lives sometimes bump-up hard against the multicultural pieties they are encouraged to embrace.

Will there be a repeat of the riots? I have no idea. But then nor did Herman Ouseley, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality who wrote a report on race relations in the city. It caused a stir, painting a picture of segregated communities living parallel lives and viewing each other with suspicion and fear. People assumed that because the report’s publication came just after the riots, it was informed by them. In fact, it was written before they occurred, failing to predict the violence, even as it painted an unvarnished and, as it turned out, prescient picture of why they happened.