Commentary

Abstract

the northern English towns of Oldham, Burnley and Bradford saw violent confrontations between young Asians and the police, culminating in the clashes of 7±9 July in Bradford in which 200 police of®cers were injured. The clashes were prompted by racist gangs attacking Asian communities and the failure of the police to provide protection from this threat. In the scale of the damage caused and the shock they delivered to the nation, the 2001 riots were the worst riots in Britain since the Handsworth, Brixton and Tottenham uprisings of 1985.The ®res that burned across Lancashire and Yorkshire through the summer of 2001 signalled the rage of young Pakistanis and Bangladeshis of the second and third generations, deprived of futures, hemmed in on all sides by racism, failed by their own leaders and representatives and unwilling to stand by as, ®rst fascists, and then police of®cers, invaded their streets. Their violence was ad hoc, improvised and haphazard. It was no longer the organised community self-defence of 1981, when Asian youth burnt down the Hambrough Tavern in Southall, where fascists had gathered, or when twelve members of the Bradford Black United Youth League were arrested for preparing petrol bombs to counter violent fascist incursions into their community. And whereas the 1981 and 1985 uprisings against the police in Brixton, Handsworth, Tottenham and Toxteth had been the violence of a community united ± black and white ± in its anger at the`heavy manners' of the police, the ®res this time were lit by the youths of communities falling apart from within, as well as from without; youths whose violence was, therefore, all the more desparate. It was the violence of communities fragmented by colour lines, class lines and police lines. It was the violence of hopelessness. It was the violence of the violated. 1Colonialism has been interwoven with the history of the northern mill towns since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Cotton-spinning ± on which the towns' early success was based ± was a technology, borrowed from India, which became central to the emergence of northern England as the`factory of the world'. Cotton grown in the plantations of the Caribbean, the US deep South, or the ®elds of Bengal was brought to Lancashire and Yorkshire to be spun into cloth and sold back at pro®t to the empire. This was a global trade before globalisation.By the 1960s, the mills were investing in new technologies which were operated twenty-four hours a day to maximise pro®t. The night shifts, which were unpopular with the existing workforce, soon became the domain of the Pakistani and Bangladeshi workers who were now settling in the mill towns. But as the machinery developed, the need for labour diminished, and such labour as was needed could be got for less elsewhere. The work once done cheaply by Bangladeshi workers in the north of England could now be done even more cheaply by Bangladeshi workers in Bangladesh.As the mills declined, entire towns were left on the scrap-heap. White and black workers were united i...

Conflicting Narratives of Black Youth Rebellion in Modern Britain

“…91 On the other hand, the journal Race & Class focused on the riots as a reaction by young Asians in the north of England to concerns specifi c to them, which: signalled the rage of young Pakistanis and Bangladeshis of the second and third generations, deprived of futures, hemmed in on all sides by racism, failed by their own leaders and representatives and unwilling to stand by as, fi rst fascists, then police offi cers, invaded their streets. 92 For Arun Kundnani, the riots of 2001 were distinctively a response by young working class Asians, primarily young Muslim males, who had grown up in Britain, 'discarded for their class, excluded for their race, stigmatised for their religion, ghettoised and forgotten'. 93 A comparable process of categorisation of either 'race' or class can be seen in how these organisations and publications interpreted the acts of rebellion and resistance in the 1970s-1980s and in the twenty fi rst century.…”

Rivalries and Racisms: ‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Islamophobic Dispositions Amongst Football Supporters

“…First, a truly open view toward Muslims would not ignore the existence of Islamic terrorism but would possibly look toward structural reasons to account for such actions. Those who have sought to sympathetically explain the current political climate have suggested that issues related to the 'war on terror' fought in the predominantly Muslim states of Iraq and Afghanistan may be developing a resentment toward the 'West' (see for instance, Mythen 2007 andRai 2006 for just a few examples) and the uncritical criminalisation of many British Muslims are alienating many of Asian-descent in the UK (Kundnani 2001;Mythen and Walklate 2006). In the case of the Mido abuse, when one Newcastle United supporter came on to the Middlesbrough fansite to apologise for his fellow fans' disposition and blamed the way in which the media regularly frame Muslims as 'outsiders' or 'terrorists', his case was immediately rejected by supporters who preferred to label Newcastle United supporters as racist.…”

Ethnic inequalities under New Labour: progress or entrenchment?

“…Critical commentators have challenged the emphasis the government placed in these reports on cultural difference, 'Asian criminality', and self-segregation among Asian communities as the key factors in the disturbances, arguing that this played down the role of wider socio-economic inequalities and institutionalised discrimination (Kalra 2002;Kundnani 2001;Alexander forthcoming;Burnett 2004). For Amin (2002: 963), "rather too much has been made of Asian retreat into inner-urban wards to preserve diaspora traditions and Muslim values, while not enough has been said about White flight into the outer estates, which has been decisively ethno-cultural in character -in escaping Asian ethnic contamination and wanting to preserve White Englishness.…”