On the night of Saturday 26 May, violence exploded onto the streets of Oldham, Lancashire, with Asian youth engaging in running battles, with riot police in the town`s rundown and impoverished Glodwick area.The events made international headlines.

From Graeme Atkinson, European Editor of Searchlight, in Oldham.

In the confrontation ­ which was reported idiotically by the British and international media as a "race riot" ­ petrol bombs were hurled, cars burned out, a pub attacked and several police vehicles demolished. Only at dawn on Sunday morning did the situation calm down. After fifteen years of ignoring the concerns of Oldham people, both black and white, the authorities were finally forced to sit up and take notice.

What happened in Glodwick was not the "race riot" which New Labour and Tory politicians queued up to denounce when the news broke. It was, on the contrary, the outcome of incandescent frustration felt by Asian people at years of mass unemployment, bad housing, social deprivation, racist policing and humiliation at the hands of white racists, some of them organised in fascist groups like the British National Party (BNP), the National Front (NF) and the nazi terrorist Combat 18 (C18).

What set the spark to the powder keg of resentment and anger, however, was a more immediate cause: the invasion of Glodwick by fascist gangs who attacked the homes of Asian people, smashing windows, damaging property and shops and savagely assaulting a pregnant woman.

Enough was enough
The patience exercised by the Asian community for the previous seven weeks of fascist intervention and media vilification had expired, leaving Asian youngsters with no choice but to take to the streets in militant and legitimate defence of their homes, families and community.

In the aftermath of the so-called "riot", the media painted a picture that was so badly distorted that few people, except the racists whose violence had ignited this situation, would recognise. Articles and broadcasts quickly regurgitated the media-invented claims that Asians had turned areas like Glodwick into "No-Go area" for white people: a lie that even the police had ridiculed weeks earlier.

The horrifying photograph of 76-year-old ex-serviceman Walter Chamberlain, beaten up in a criminal attack by some Asian kids a month before, was routinely flashed on TV screens as if to prove the earlier lie about "No-Go areas".

Mr. Chamberlain¹s case was mentioned repeatedly on the radio and in the press. Again, it was a lie, publicly denounced as such by Mr. Chamberlain and his family who, immediately after he was assaulted, dismissed suggestions that the attack, which had also been massively condemned, by the Asian community ­ was racially-motivated and had appealed to the media to desist from presenting it as such.

As to the incursion of a violent gang of organised fascists and racist football hooligans into Glodwick, well, that was barely mentioned in the media¹s rush to turn the victims of violence into the perpetrators.

Before 26 May, few people abroad had heard of Oldham and probably fewer could locate it on a map and therein resides a fundamental truth. Oldham is an impoverished former coal-mining and cotton mill town. When the collieries closed at the end of the 1950s, all that remained were the 150 mills and a few engineering factories. Thatcher¹s brutal policies in the 1980s finished off what remained of industry and job prospects. But between the 1950s and the 1980s, there had been demographic change, forced by the demands of the capitalist labour market. Shortages of workers were met by the arrival of migrants from the Indian sub-continent.

Through housing policies that put Asians into virtual ghettos, and work practices that meant that in the cotton mills the night shift was known as the "Paki shift", most of the migrant community has been ghettoised in the poorest parts of the town. Of Oldham¹s 219,000 residents, 24,600 are Asian: 14,000 of Pakistani origin, 9,000 Bangladeshi and 1,600 Indian.

Since the collapse of the textile industry unemployment has been high and the entire working class community ­ black and white ­ made to live on the breadline. The Asian community has been the hardest hit: 25 per cent of the Bangladeshi community and 16 per cent of the Pakistani community are out of work.

Deprived of work and ignored by the policy makers, the Asian community has been left to vegetate and fend for itself in an increasingly racist environment. The level of racial attacks in the town is one of the highest in Britain, a fact seemingly confirmed by the head of the Oldham Police, Chief Superintendent Eric Hewitt, when he issued statistics claiming that most reported "racist" incidents in the town were by Pakistanis and Bangla Deshis on whites, conveniently ignoring the fact that attacks by whites on Asians are so commonplace that few Asians bother to report them any more.

Statistics, however, can take on a life of their own and Hewitt¹s have been the signal for racists to head for Oldham in defence of the "white race". It was a picket ­ praised by the police ­ "against Asian racist attacks" at Oldham Police Station by the nazi BNP in March which actually lit the slow-burning fuse of tension. (This, by the way, took place amidst an intense racist campaign in the national media and by politicians against "bogus" asylum-seekers!)

Where the BNP led, the NF, C18 and an assortment of football hooligan riffraff followed every weekend thereafter, rampaging through Asian housing estates and staging demonstrations. Even after all demonstrations were banned in the town and 500 extra police drafted in to enforce the ban, the NF and the football hooligans marched illegally on 5 May. Police efforts to contain the racists were totally ineffective. Afterwards, they attacked a mainly Asian area.

By the weekend of 26 May, these marauding bands of louts had succeeded in turning the centre of the town into a real No-Go area's for Asian people and white shoppers alike. Confident that they could swagger around unhindered, they turned up again. Gathered in a pub on the edge of an Asian area, they were penned in by police who later allowed them to leave in groups of six. Their subsequent movements were left unmonitored but their destination was Glodwick.

The results we all know. It is a shame that the international media joined its British counterparts in recycling sensationalist garbage of the kind that had only the faintest contact with the truth.

Related artcles/documentation

Hooligans united in racism (From Searchlight june 2001)

Anti-racists fight on in Oldham (From Searchlight june 2001)