Author:
Publication: The Economist
Date: May 31, 2001
Islam and hopelessness are a dangerous
combination
WHITE Britons are used to thinking
of Asian immigrants as those nice industrious people who keep the corner
shop and the local curry house. So it was a shock to see youths of Asian
descent on the streets of Oldham in Lancashire from May 26th to 28th, hurling
petrol bombs at pubs and the police. Over three nights of rioting, cars
and shops were trashed, scores of people, including 15 policemen, were
injured, and 49 people (two-thirds of them white) were arrested.
The people who were out on the streets
of Oldham last weekend are angry. They do not see themselves as the instigators
of trouble, but as the victims of economic change, oppressed by white-dominated
police and officialdom. They feel the media has failed to report their
side of the story, and so they firebombed the offices of the Oldham Chronicle,
thus rather undermining their argument.
Stereotyping Britons of Asian origin
is as useful as lumping all whites together as European. Around half of
Oldham's 30,000 Asians (who make up 14% of the borough's population) are
of Pakistani origin, and about 12,000 originate from Bangladesh-two quite
different cultures. The rioters were mainly Pakistani youths. Nearly all
of these two groups are Muslim, while Oldham's 1,600 Indian-origin people
are Hindu.
Class and wealth create further
divisions. People of Indian origin tend to be fairly prosperous. Many are
Sikhs, from the wealthy province of Punjab, or the families of businessmen
thrown out of East Africa in the 1970s.
Pakistanis and Bangladeshis come
from a very different class. Most were recruited by cotton mill-owners
after 1945 to work poorly-paid night shifts. They settled in the cheapest
and poorest parts of town. As the mill-owners' efforts to compete by using
cheap labour failed in the 1970s, they were thrown out of work. Custom
dictates that these immigrant families should send surplus cash back home.
Few had built up any capital to enable them to move into different jobs
or start businesses. Unemployment rates in parts of Glodwick, where the
riots broke out, stand at 40%.
The council has tried to help these
areas, securing government cash for housing regeneration and job-training
schemes. But Phil Woolas, MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth, says that
the whites believe that the Asians are getting a better deal, although
just as much money is spent on white as on Asian areas. "Both sides believe
they are victimised," he says.
Mr Woolas believes that right-wing
agitators were also responsible for what happened. The British National
Party (BNP) has candidates in all three of Oldham's parliamentary seats.
While the BNP claims it is doing nothing more than exercising its democratic
rights, police suspect local National Front types have been aided by reinforcements
from outside Oldham, just as Asian militants have been coming in from places
such as Bradford.
But even without the extremists,
relations between Oldham's races are terrible. The Commission for Racial
Equality (CRE) reckons that the town 's ethnic communities are more starkly
segregated than anywhere else in Britain. Divisions amongst the Asians
look likely to make bridge-building perilously difficult. An oldish Asian
man, watching police vans crawling along his street every 10 minutes, says
the police are there to intimidate rather than protect. "If they had done
their job properly and been fair to everybody, none of this would have
happened," he says. But he refuses to give his name, fearing that Asian
youths who don't want residents speaking to the media might threaten him.
Nothing in Oldham will get better
unless the prospects for teenagers of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin
improve. Council statistics say that more than 40% of Asian-origin people
are aged under 23. Their parents are poor, and often illiterate; and they,
predictably, are at the bottom of the educational pile (see chart).
Schooling problems can be overcome,
says Sir Herman Ouseley, a former chairman of the CRE who is compiling
a report on Bradford, whose Asians have much the same background as Oldham's
and where there was a similar riot in 1995. Exam pass-rates amongst Bangladeshis
in the London borough of Tower Hamlets have improved markedly, he says,
but it requires expensive and skilled teaching.
Part of the difficulty in Oldham
and Bradford is that the Muslim youths have to cope with two different
schooling systems-British state education, which teaches a questioning,
assertive attitude, and Mosque schools, which their parents make them attend
in their free time, and which teach total obedience to Islam. Together,
the two systems produce questioning, assertive people driven by a strong
sense of cultural identity and religious fervour. As Oldham has seen, it's
a powerful combination.
