Riots, Racism, No-Go Areas and Drugs Riches: A Tale of An English City

BRADFORD, England – Hamza was driving when he received a text message asking him to defend his city from the far-right. The message said drunken neo-Nazis from the National Front (NF) had come to Bradford, in the north of England, ripped off a woman’s head scarf, stabbed a teenage boy, and smashed up an Asian-run shop. “Come and defend your city from attack,” the text said. 

Hamza and his other teenage friends sped into town. By the time they got there, the NF had melted away, but a mix of Anti-Nazi League (ANL) protesters and hundreds of young British Pakistanis were clashing with police, decked out in full in riot gear. 

“I just started throwing anything I could get my hands on,” says Hamza, now 37. “The police were trying to push us back and we were throwing stones, wood, I mean anything. Things got out of hand, we got a bit excited. Some of the lads were burning cars. We didn’t fight the police because we hated white people, it wasn’t like that, it was just taking out frustrations on the way the police had treated us all our lives.” 

By the evening, police had pushed rioters from the city centre into Manningham, a run-down neighbourhood home to a large population of British Asians with a Pakistani heritage. Rioters hurled petrol bombs and torched shops and pubs along the way, most notably looting and firebombing a BMW dealership, a place where many young Asians had dreamed of one day being able to drive a car out of. 

“We smashed the windows and went in there. I was the first person to drive a BMW out of the showroom,” says Hamza, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak openly about his role in what took place. “Some silly bastard started burning the building. There was smoke everywhere, but I managed to get in a car and drive it out. It was pure madness. The police were nowhere to be seen, it was like they pushed us back into our area and disappeared. We were driving the cars around like we were playing some kind of computer game.”

This was 20 years ago, in what was at the time the UK’s worst post-war disturbance since the 1981 Brixton riots. What started as a dash to defend their area from racists ended up a two-day pitched battle between rioters and police that scorched its way through the city’s streets. When the dust had settled, the damage to property was estimated to be £27 million. But the true damage to the city has gone far deeper.

The footage of burned out cars and businesses shocked Britain. The rioters were condemned by Home Secretary David Blunkett, who rejected the notion the riots were anything to do with racism or police relations. The local Telegraph and Argus newspaper described it as “A vile orgy of violence,” declaring that “Sheer criminality is the root cause”.  

With their faces captured on CCTV and plastered over the front pages of the Argus under “WANTED” headlines every week, many rioters were identified and rounded up. Because of the shame of them being publicly branded as criminals, some parents handed their own children in. But they never bargained on the tough justice that was to come.  

Three months later on the 11th of September, Al-Qaeda terrorists carried out a devastating attack on the World Trade Center in New York and Pentagon in Washington DC. It was an act that rippled across the world, and further widened the rift between already segregated white and, predominantly Muslim, Asian communities in Bradford. 

It was amid this atmosphere that the Bradford rioters were brought in front of the courts. Most of them received sentences of between four and five years, often for throwing just a few stones. In total 200 people, many of them young and with no criminal records or experience of prison, were locked up for a combined total of 604 years. 

Judge Stephen Gullick, who passed most of the original rioting sentences, said he was “not concerned with the origins of the violence”. A 2003 appeal against the harshness of the sentences, led by Michael Mansfield QC, said Gullick had failed to take into account that rioters were living under a “matrix of fear”. The Court of Appeal acknowledged that the riot was almost certainly triggered by the stabbing of an Asian man in central Bradford and that “the Asian community was understandably concerned to defend itself against right-wing groups”. But still it opted to uphold all but a few of the sentences.

Twenty years on, VICE World News went to Bradford to speak to those who rioted and to ask whether the divisions and friction that led to young British Pakistani Asians burning down their own neighbourhood in anger have been addressed. Ironically, it appears that while criminality wasn’t the cause of the riots, it became the consequence. Because where the city’s economy has failed to recover from the impact of the riots, the criminal world has gladly moved in to take up the slack. Many of those involved in the riots have become embittered by what they see around them, not only alienated from the authorities, but from their own community too.

Hamza got four and a half years. He says his imprisonment as a teenager ended up defining his life. “It was hard. I got out and I was a man. Things were different, life was not the same as it was before I went in. Lots of people my age got locked up. We were an embarrassment when we came out, our community had turned on us. It was sad to see.” Hamza says there was no support after leaving prison, and he found it hard to earn a living. He worked stints in factories on a minimum wage, but was rejected from better jobs because of his past. He ended up selling drugs to get by. 

“People with criminal records don’t get good jobs. Some of the rioters I went to jail with became junkies to forget about things, some of them became criminals. If I’m honest I was lonely after I was released. I was going out a lot, drinking, taking drugs, trying to be the big man. Before you know it you're in prison again. I've been hustling [selling drugs] but it’s not like I’m making loads of money. Lots of us found ourselves getting into a cycle of criminality.”

On the back of its huge textile industry, which was based around wool, Bradford became a boomtown of the Victorian era. It is a city dotted with grand, listed buildings, including huge old mills, to show for it. During the 1950s and 1960s immigrants from Asia, most notably from the city of Mirpur in Pakistan, were encouraged to come and work in factories in the Midlands and north of England. Many came to Bradford, arriving to join family members in close-knit communities while working low paid jobs in the city’s huge textile factories. Now, the city has the largest proportion of people of Pakistani ethnic origin in England.  

When its centuries-old textile industry started collapsing from the 1970s onwards, Bradford’s economy nosedived. Unlike other cities in the region, such as Leeds, it failed to establish a viable post-industrial economy. It was a recipe for trouble in a city with the youngest population in the country – almost a quarter of people are under 16. Those worst affected were the city’s new and burgeoning Asian population, of which over half were aged under 25, and who lived in the most deprived neighbourhoods, where child poverty, school qualifications, wages and unemployment were some of the worst in England. 

A dearth of work and money in Bradford, alongside increasing segregation between white and Asian communities, bred antagonism and anger and cranked up racial tension. Far right groups such as the NF and British National Party (BNP) took advantage of hard times and divided communities to spread hate. Meanwhile the racism that had been absorbed by the first generation of immigrants was increasingly being felt by young British Pakistanis, particularly due to police harassment such as stop and search. In 1995 young Asians rioted in Bradford, a precursor to what was to come.

In the weeks running up to the riot in July 2001, racial tensions in northern English towns and cities had already bubbled over, with riots in Oldham and Burnley in the preceding months. The evening before the riots kicked off on the streets of Bradford, Nick Griffin, the notorious leader of the BNP had held a rally in one of the city’s white neighbourhoods, on the back of a growing wave of support for the party in northern cities. 

What so angered Bradford’s young Muslims back in 2001, and has left many still embittered and anti-authority today, was a sense of injustice. At how their parents were treated like second class citizens, working long hours on low wages while taking racist insults on the chin. And at how the young generation, with little hope of their own jobs, were regularly harassed and abused by their own police force, who did so little to clamp down on the far right they felt it was up to them to police things themselves. The riots were a war cry against inequality and years of racial abuse, which the older generation had absorbed, but which their children could not take anymore. 

Sections of the British media may to this day be obsessed with Bradford having no-go areas for white people, but this is more about segregation than neighbourhoods where white people enter at the peril. However back in 2001 Bradford did have no-go areas, but these were zones where Muslims could not go for fear of being attacked by white racists. 

Yusuf, who has changed his name to protect his identity in order to speak openly, and his four friends – all in their late teens or early 20s in 2001 – were born and bred in Bradford. They still find it hard to open up about the causes and impacts the rioting had on their generation and their city. They have a distinct distrust of overwhelmingly-white institutions such as the media and police. They have always found it hard to take the racism meted out to them from everyone from teachers to police to far-right thugs lying down.  

“You have to remember that back in those days there were no-go areas for us in Bradford, we couldn't walk through many of the city's council estates,” says Yusuf, who was 19 when he was jailed for four years for throwing stones during the riot. “Asian bus drivers and taxi drivers were getting attacked by white people but the police never helped us, they were not there to protect us, in fact they were the enemy. We were always getting strip searched and stopped in our cars and made to feel we were the lowest in the food chain. 

“Our parents used to say it was best not to react. But we were different from them, we were British Asians, we were born here and we were not going to just take it,” says Yusuf, now a long time dealer in heroin, crack and weed.  

Among Yusuf and his friends, three ended up being jailed for rioting, but it was an event that would stamp itself on all their lives. Their imprisonment and the backlash to the rioting on the city’s Asian community has left permanent scars on race relations and the economy of the city, and led, indirectly, to all five men becoming prominent members of Bradford’s criminal underworld. 

Yusuf found it hard to get legitimate work when he was released. Some were rehabilitated, but others were not so lucky. Many of them were young Muslim men with a clean criminal record who had never been to prison. Some had dreams and ambitions to do well and to go to university one day but who struggled upon release from prison. 

When they left jail, alongside other young people in Bradford who could not get decent jobs, Yusuf and his friends decided to take advantage of the community’s links with the global heroin trade. They found it was not hard to source the drug from older importers and to run a supply business themselves. As the years passed, with some spending stints in jail for Class A dealing, Yusuf and the others climbed the ladder of the city’s drug trade to become well-off players.   

Now Yusuf and his crew drive high end SUVs and ramped-up sports cars, spending time in the gym and the tattoo parlour. But they have a love-hate relationship with their city. 

Today, the events of two decades ago are still felt in the city’s damaged economy, in entrenched segregation, and in the life chances of a new generation who were not even alive when the petrol bombs were flying and for the rioters jailed back then. 

If the riots were meant to act as a wake up call to everything that was wrong with Bradford, it didn’t happen. No-one bothered asking the young Muslim men who rioted why they felt so angry, about the racism, the police brutality or their dismay at being trapped in poverty with little sign or hope of escape. No-one asked them what could be done to make their city a better place.

A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation published four years after the riots found that, apart from being sparked by police brutality and the far right, the rioting was a response to young Asian men’s “frustrations at being disempowered and disenfranchised” and a failure of older community leaders to understand their plight. 

Additionally, the city’s extreme segregation also played its part. Two separate studies, a Home Office report into the Northern riots published at the end of 2001 and an independent report into race relations in Bradford completed in the run up to the riots, concluded that damaging divisions between racial groups meant that white people lived “parallel lives” to Asians. Neither reports acknowledged the part played by socio-economic factors. Instead, bizarrely, one of the solutions to this segregation, suggested in the Home Office’s report, was for immigrants to take an oath of allegiance to Britain. 

While some areas synonymous with race riots, such as Brixton in London where mass rioting and burning took place over three days in 1981, have moved on and become gentrified, Bradford has stultified. While other northern cities have flourished, Bradford has stagnated. The evidence shows that, unfortunately, this beautiful Victorian city on the edge of the Pennines has become an even more troubled place than it was in 2001. 

According to the latest figures, out of 317 local authorities in England, Bradford District is the 13th most deprived, six places lower than it was in 2015. It is in the top six most income and employment deprived zones in the country. Bradford’s employment rate is worse than it has been for 30 years. Between 2015 and 2019 the proportion of children living in poverty in Bradford East and Bradford West rocketed to almost 50 percent, compared to a national average of one in six. The city has one of the worst school qualification records in the country. 

Despite the reports demand for action to deal with racial segregation, the situation appears to have worsened. But, apart from the area around the train station and few main streets, two decades after the riots, it is still undeniably two cities in one. Inner city Asian Bradford and outer city white Bradford. 

In many parts of the city it is a rare sight to see white and Asian people hanging out together. In some parts of Bradford, mainly around more crowded central neighbourhoods such as Manningham, Toller, Bradford Moor and Little Horton, the perception is that a white person talking to Asians must be either a police officer, a drug user or a lost tourist. Likewise, it is rare to see Asians venturing into white dominated Wharfedale, Ilkley, Worth Valley and Craven. A 2016 government review by Dame Lousie Casey found Bradford had one of the worst records in the country for segregated schools. White and Asian people in Bradford still lead parallel lives. 

Even as some Asian families start moving into more desirable areas, into the homes of the former Victorian mill owners, those areas have slowly emptied of white residents. The BMW showroom on Oak Lane that was torched in the riots is now a halal butchers and some takeaways below some low rise flats.

Stories of “white flight” – when white homeowners and businesses flee an area that is being populated by ethnic minorities – from Bradford are very real. White families and businesses were leaving the city before the riots, but the violence in 2001 escalated the phenomenon, as did wider economic factors. Since the riots, according to the 2011 census, the proportion of white British people in Bradford fell from 76 percent to 64 percent, while the ratio of Asians, of whom most are Pakistanis, increased 19 percent to 27 percent. Many of the white-owned businesses, such as pubs, that were firebombed in the riots never returned. Families too. 

Colin Halstead, 66, who worked as a lecturer at Bradford University at the time of the riots, and who taught several students who were jailed, says negative media coverage of the city after the riots played a big part in what followed. 

“The riots accelerated white flight. Bradford received nothing but dreadful coverage by the tabloids and unfortunately people believe what they read. After the riots they were in a hurry to get out, because there was a media storm whipped up. People were afraid for their property. White flight was for people who read the Daily Mail and ran away,” he said. What the media would later call “no-go areas” for white people were in fact neighbourhoods that had been abandoned by them. 

He says the city has been “left to moulder” while other cities with areas of deprivation in the early 2000s such as Liverpool and Hull have received investment. “Once we had a beautiful thriving city, we now have a place that people jeer at.” 

Where the mainstream economy has failed, the criminal world has gladly moved in to take up the slack. A generation of young Muslims, especially those involved in the rioting, has become embittered by what they see around them. They are not just alienated from the authorities, but from older generations of Muslims too.

The lack of opportunities in Bradford has caused a rise in young Muslim men turning to crime, particularly the sale of drugs, in order to make money. This in turn has resulted in a rise in gang culture and gang violence, including a worrying uptick in teenagers becoming involved in the drug scene. 

Ali Qadar, 69, is one of the original 1960s immigrants to Bradford from Pakistan. Known as “uncle” by the younger ones, Ali is a community leader. His father fought for the British army in World War Two and was a prisoner of war in Italy. He remembers England being cold, and the city’s fledgling Muslim community having to buy and slaughter sheep from nearby farms because there were no halal butchers. 

One of the things Ali has never been able to reconcile was the non-stop racism he and other Asian immigrants encountered after arriving in the UK. “Some shops would not serve us. Our English was very poor, so when they were abusing us I did not understand what they were saying. But I could tell it was bad,” says Qadar. “White people used to smash up our shops. They used to rob us every Thursday on wage day. Police never helped us. The police were racist, the way they spoke to us and looked at us, you could see the hate inside.” 

But he’s worried about the city’s future. “I’m scared of the younger generation. They don’t want to talk to us and most of them don’t speak Urdu and most of the Imams don’t speak English. They’ve gone to the negative side. Because of what happened in the riots, young people hate the system, because the system let them down. The real problems of Bradford were not given time and were not looked at in any real detail after the riots. 

“Young people had a lack of opportunities in 2001 and they have a lack of opportunities today. All the businesses here [in Manningham] are take-aways and taxis. Some leave Bradford but they come back to square one.”

Nevertheless, Qadar says, the Asian community has kept the city running.  “If it was not for Asian businesses, Bradford would be in a much worse economic situation. The white companies have left Bradford in their numbers. But look at all the businesses that have kept Bradford going, the curry trade, the wedding industry, it's all Asian owned, but they don't get any recognition for this.”

There are fears, even amongst the former rioters, that the youth of today are becoming more criminalised and aggressive compared to their generation. 

“Bradford has gotten worse over the years,” says Riz, 46, Hamza’s older brother. “It’s mainly because of the younger lot who are crazy and will fight you just because you stare at them. They don’t really care about the things we cared about. We cared about family, religion and culture, but for them, it’s all about the money and violence. I’m scared for my kids growing up in Bradford. If I stay here I fear they will become criminalised, but then where do I go? I can’t just move anywhere, I have family around here. It’s a Catch-22.”

There is one slice of optimism, according to Yusuf. Police relations with Bradford’s Asian community have slightly improved since the 2001 riots. “They are more friendly, they are trying. I see them in take-away now and have a chat with them. They wear body-cams, so it feels safer for us,” says Yusuf as we sip tea in one of Bradford’s many late night masala chai and hookah joints. 

But he admitted there remains an underlying tension between police and young Asians in the city, and stop and search is still a problem. “They stop even educated Muslims who work in proper jobs and search them. They speak to us as though you we are uneducated fools.” There are also concerns around what Asian youths see as a discrepancy in the sentences handed out by the courts to Muslim and non-Muslim offenders. 

In 2003, Professor Chris Allen wrote an independent report into the causes of the riots and their impact for a local Bradford group, the Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism (FAIR). In it he warned that the decision to imprison  such a large number of people from one community, particularly those who are young and first time offenders, could have a significant and quite detrimental impact on Bradford’s future. 

“It is a real possibility that the situation in Bradford, whether politically, socially or economically, will continue to deteriorate. The cause of the ongoing process of fractionalisation – along lines of racial, ethnic and religious differentiation – has been due to a lack of understanding in addressing the core, underlying factors that initiated the tensions that culminated in the disturbances.”

What Professor Allen warned against has happened. The rioters were locked up, ignored and shamed. The problem of segregation has worsened. The city, the youngest in the country and second largest in West Yorkshire with 350,000 residents, remains in an economic rut, with little help from the government or big business.  

“The ‘problem’ was deemed to be the city’s ethnic minority communities, in particular its Muslims. Irrespective of the exclusion, isolation and racism many within those same communities experienced, the need for greater ‘community cohesion’ demanded that ‘they’ – not ‘us’ – needed to do more. They were the problem and so they needed to find the solution,” says Alllen. 

“And this is in my opinion the greatest legacy of the riots. Instead of looking at issues such as inequality and poverty, since 2001 successive governments both Labour and Conservative have instead blamed and problematised. Accordingly, change can only come from within. Being more integrated, more cohesive, more British are nowadays the solutions to the problems irrespective of the fact that more than a decade of austerity measures have made the situation much worse for people in Bradford as indeed elsewhere.”

The question remains, what did the substantial prison sentences handed down to over 200 individuals, mostly Muslim men, achieve? And why was so little support given to the young men upon release from prison? It appears as in the case of the ex-rioters VICE World News spoke with, prison only accelerated a life of criminality, creating further hatred of the establishment. 

What can be done to help the city and its people? While poverty and deprivation continue to be real concerns, Bradford needs investment, not only from the government but also from large companies. At the same time the city needs leadership from people, regardless of their ethnicity and religion, who can relate to the concerns of the community they represent. There is a feeling on the streets of Bradford, from those involve in the riots, that the city’s Muslim leaders, such as mosque imams, councillors and MPs do not speak for their people. 

Overall, two decades after riots that drove a wedge through an already troubled city, Bradford is in need of unity, in order to help transform its reputation from being a place which harbours segregated communities to a place where people of all ethnicities and backgrounds live in harmony.  

For Hamza, the riots were a disaster for him and a missed opportunity for Bradford. “That hefty sentence changed me. I hated the police even more, I hated the courts, the judges, they screwed my life up. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have punished me, what did they achieve? Nothing. What did they change? Nothing. We needed help, education, we needed guidance, we were young and dumb and look at us now, criminalised with no real work opportunities.” 

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