Preston, Lancashire has changed dramatically in the last two decades
Murder and the truth about the race hate capital of Britain
by DAVID JONES, Daily Mail
29th July 2006
Preston, Lancashire has changed dramatically in the last two decades
Good side of Preston: Preston North End football team.
Good side of Preston: Lancashire and England cricketer Andrew "Freddie" Flintoff
Bad side of Preston: racial violence.
The early years of my married life were spent very happily in Preston. My wife, two young sons and I had a two-up, two-down near Preston North End's then-dilapidated football ground.
The woman next door was the type who packed her husband off to the British Aerospace factory each morning with corned-beef-and-pickle sandwiches. She wore a hairnet and religiously scrubbed her front doorstep.
Despite the air of decline, in the early Eighties 'Proud Preston', which I left behind 25 years ago, still justified its civic motto. There were well-kept redbrick houses, friendly spit-and-sawdust Boddington's pubs and a wonderful outdoor market where we bought tangy Lancashire cheese and plump black-puddings.
But while the Preston I remember still clung resolutely to its North Country values and traditions, its ethnic make-up was gradually changing. Even then, all but one of my local shops were run by enterprising second-generation Pakistanis and Indians, whose parents had manned the mills. Other Asians were building the garment businesses that would later make Preston the cheap-jeans capital of Britain.
Newly prosperous, some were moving out of our Coronation Street-like neighbourhood to join the white professional types in posh suburbs such as Fulwood. I am not viewing the past through rose-tinted spectacles when I recall that almost everyone — white and black, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh — rubbed along perfectly amiably in Preston in those days.
Preston city centre.
I learned to cook curries with advice from my jovial Bengali grocer and played cricket with Asian teams in Moor Park; my sons were pushed on swings by a plump, sari-clad neighbour. In four years as a reporter on the local evening paper, I cannot recall a solitary story about racial disharmony, much less violence.
How shocking, then, and how terribly sad, to read last weekend that the friendly, tolerant town where my second son was born now has the highest percentage of reported racial incidents in the whole of Britain.
In 2004/ 5, no fewer than 500 reports were logged, ranging from insults to serious assaults. That equates to 3.82 incidents for every 1,000 citizens. In 2005/ 6, the number of complaints rose to 539. Preston's population of over 130,000 is 85 per cent white, but police say that in four out of five cases, the victim was Asian and the perpetrator white.
These figures, though superficially shameful, may not tell the whole story, as we shall see.
Nonetheless, the timing of their release, by the local Racial Equality Council, could hardly have been less opportune. For just as they were being digested, police were called to investigate the fatal stabbing — apparently racially motivated — of Shezan Umarji, a bright, popular 20-year-old Prestonian of Asian heritage. Three local white teenagers have since been charged with his murder. Shezan was attacked in an area where tension between Asians and whites had surfaced before, and racial insults were allegedly heard at the time. So, inevitably, his death was seen to confirm the statistics.
The facts seemed incontrovertible. Preston, the headlines blared, was now 'The Race Hate Capital of Britain'.
But could it really be true that race relations in the town where I first experienced the joys of living in a multi-cultural society had sunk so low — beneath even those in recently riot-torn Pennine towns such as Burnley and Oldham? Was Preston more bitterly divided than Beeston, the Leeds suburb that spawned one of the London bombers, and where I found such resentment among young Muslims when I visited last summer? Or Batley, where I saw BNP leader Nick Griffin playing on the discontentment of white Yorkshire folk before the May local council elections? And if so, how had this social disaster in a decent Lancashire community unfolded?
Last week, with emotions still running high on Preston's sunbaked, grid-iron streets, I headed back up the M6 in search of some answers. Preston today is barely recognisable as the place I left behind 25 years ago. Then, it was a fading Victorian textile town. Now it is a fast-growing new city, with American-style malls, service industries to replace the dark satanic mills, and a very modern local hero in England cricket colossus Freddie Flintoff.
If, as the figures suggest, Preston really is the potential epicentre of the next racial tremor, the fault-line runs along Fishwick Parade. This long, narrow street, a little over a mile from the city centre, links two very different communities.
To the east, on an estate called the Callon, the frequently shabby houses are largely owned by a housing association. Here, almost exclusively, one finds the white residents. Once, they would have been termed working-class, but today they are not so easily defined. Some, quite clearly, have decent jobs; many others subsist on their wits and benefits. As is the way these days, the hair-gelled and tattooed young men somehow afford designer clothes and heavy gold jewellery. But many loiter aimlessly on street corners, unable to afford a pint.
They drive around the estate in bangers or ride BMX bikes. Clearly, they are not flush with cash. To the west, beyond Samuel Street — the symbolic Great Divide in Fishwick ward — the ambience changes abruptly. Outside their neatly painted, double-glazed terrace houses (almost all self-owned), sleek BMWs and Audis are parked: the highly visible fruits of their owners' hard graft. Here, the people are predominantly Asian. It was close to his family home, a few dozen yards to the smarter 'Asian side' of Fishwick Parade, that Shezan Umarji, a retired taxi-driver's son, was fatally stabbed.
Caught up in street-fight
In the initial confusion surrounding the incident — in the early hours of last Saturday morning — it was said that Shezan had been caught up in a mass street-fight involving anywhere between 40 and 70 rival white and Asian gang members. This now appears to be very far from the truth.
Though police are still unravelling the facts, it now seems likely that the high-achieving former grammar school pupil and law student — by all accounts a popular, peaceable young man — lost his life as a result of an altogether more small-scale local dispute.
Indeed, by Tuesday, when Detective Superintendent Graham Gardner, who is leading the investigation, addressed a special meeting of community leaders (to which the Daily Mail was invited), he was at pains to stress that Shezan's colour may have had nothing whatever to do with the fatal skirmish. Whether or not this proves to be so, the murder of this personable young Asian man — barely a week after his sister had ridden to her wedding in a horse-drawn carriage — has undeniably stoked the flames of resentment, and not only between Callon and Fishwick.
'They've been driving up here, threatening to shoot us in the past couple of days,' one white teenager, lolling with his mates on the Callon estate, told me.
Melodramatic, quite possibly, but indicative of the sparks that ignite after a tragic episode such as this.
Hearing this kind of depressing comment being bandied about, one feared the 'Race Hate Capital' slur might, indeed, be accurate. And yet, in Preston, as elsewhere, we must be wary of allowing flashpoint incidents and resultant hysteria to cloud the picture.
For here, as with so many British communities where people of vastly differing backgrounds, traditions, values and expectations have been thrown together by force of circumstance, one discovers that perceptions are easily — and dangerously — misconstrued.
In a city riven by racial disharmony, one might reasonably expect to find tell-tale clues. A gaggle of BNP councillors, for example (at the last count, Burnley had eight); messages of hatred preached in skinhead-filled pubs and extremist mosques; regular running street battles; racist graffiti; segregated sports teams and schools.
When I visited Beeston in Leeds last year, the signs were all too obvious. I met alienated Muslim youths who despised Leeds United football team because of the infamous Bowyer and Woodgate affair [the two players went on trial for attacking an Asian student outside a nightclub in 2000].
Some said they did not feel 'English', but belonged to the nation of Islam. Their cricket team of choice was Pakistan, and they were angry that Urdu had been dropped from the curriculum.
Preston may not (yet) be the integrated community the police and locals are at pains to present — and yet, for all its invisible boundaries, by comparison with Beeston, it appears to be far more integrated.
Last Wednesday night, on the Callon estate, one group of immature, ill-educated teenagers began our encounter by mouthing familiar platitudes about 'that lot down there'. 'They wear skirts and speak funny', and they 'stink of curry', the boys chortled, trying to outdo one another with their insults.
Oh, yes, and during the World Cup, 'they' hadn't flown the St George's flag. 'They didn't even support England, that lot. They supported Brazil or Portugal.
'At our school, us whites all sit one side of the class, and the Pakis [a word I hadn't heard used so casually for quite some time] all sit on the other.'
Their three female mates, all dolled up with nowhere to go, thought most Muslim girls aloof. 'They think they're better than us,' a 15-year-old named Hannah said. Her friend, Sophie, thought it iniquitous that Muslims could wear veils at school, while hoodies were banned.
As the bravado subsided, however, some of the group became more reflective. Then, they began to modify their views about 'that lot down there'.
One of the girls confessed she'd dated an Asian boy. The lads were wearing £110 Nike trainers, sold to them at a third of the price, they said, by local Asians.
'The ones who speak English and don't wear skirts are dead sound,' a 16-year-old boy said. 'We get along with, say, 40 per cent of them. The rest are ******* s.'
This may not amount to total detente, but here, one felt, there was hope.
Later, on the other side of Samuel Street, I found more cause for cautious optimism. At the place where Shezan fell, a tree was covered with bouquets and cards of remembrance. From the messages, it was clear that many were from white sympathisers.
'You're in paradise now'
'To our mate, we're gonna miss ya — you're in paradise now, Shiz Kid,' read one card, signed Jenna and Danielle.
'Nowadays, you still hear very young kids shouting "Paki" at you because their parents are young themselves and don't teach them better,' said Shezan's friend, Wakas Ashraf, 21, as he paid his respects beside the makeshift shrine.
'But there's honestly no gang fights between Asians and whites here. This [the fatal incident] just started over nothing. We all used to chill out together.'
On the street behind him, the scene supported this view. Belying the myth that they had 'cheered for Portugal', Asian and white children, of junior school age, played football together. Most wore England shirts.
And when I asked one Pakistani-Prestonian boy, playing cricket in a nearby park, whom he most admired, the answer was unequivocal. 'Freddie Flintoff!' he exclaimed, as if the answer was obvious.
In my quest to discover what really became of Preston, a story began to emerge.
Confirmed by informed parties on both sides of the 'divide', it is not only more uplifting than those 'Race Hate Capital' headlines, but greatly more intriguing.
By the late Nineties, it transpires, the young people in some pockets of Preston were, indeed, embattled along racial lines and the stand-off was nowhere more uneasy and pronounced than in the Fishwick area.
Perhaps, as Shezan's Glaswegian neighbour Jamie Mulvanny, 42, now surmises, the root cause of the bitterness was not colour, but envy.
'The Asians save hard and drive around in nice cars, and the whites spend all their money down the pub and ride bikes, so they're jealous,' he says.
Then again, perhaps, as some suggest, the resentment arose from other familiar grouses: the perception by whites that Asians jumped housing queues, received more handouts and were taking 'their' jobs.
Most probably, all these factors played their part. In any event, according to Fayyaz Ahmed — once a streetwise, second-generation Asian who refused to be victimised, and now a respected 32-year-old community worker — by the late Nineties, Fishwick had 'serious issues'.
'There was a lot of friction between young people then,' he says. 'Samuel Street was like the front-line. Believe it or not, I didn't even set foot on Callon estate until I was 23 or 24. You would be taking your life in your hands even to go there.'
The insults, threats and periodic skirmishes continued until 2002, he says. Then came a watershed episode which, Mr Ahmed believes, pulled Preston — or at least this sensitive part of it — back from the brink.
That year, in an effort to bring Callon and Fishwick closer together, he and like-minded white community workers organised the first mixed local football tournament, previously an unthinkable venture.
These 'peace games' seemed to be a success — until, that is, the all-Asian Fishwick Rangers XI won the final, whereupon their players and supporters were 'ambushed', as Mr Ahmed puts it, by a Callon gang, and a huge brawl broke out.
Mercifully, no one was seriously hurt, and when ill-feeling subsided it was roundly agreed that the feud must end, once and for all.
Today, working closely with his Callon counterpart, Colin Makinson, Mr Ahmed helps to stage a programme of joint community events which are steadily helping to build bridges.
Others are also working to bring people together. Yet it is thanks, in no small measure, to these two local men, whose projects have earned national recognition, that crossing Samuel Street is now a less daunting prospect.
What, though, of those damning statistics?
Listening to the police, race relations officers and community leaders describe them in positive terms this week, one wondered whether they were simply trying to soothe feelings following Shezan Umarji's murder. This would have been entirely understandable.
For their part, grassroots campaigners universally agree that the increase in reported racial incidents proves that Preston's ethnic minorities are placing their trust in the police as never before.
For our part, perhaps we should put cynicism aside and accept this explanation.
For the diverse people of this evolving and very modern new city, though, there is one sure way to banish their wretched — and in my view undeserved — reputation as Britain's race-hate capital.
That is by ensuring that the city becomes a beacon of tolerance in the racially troubled North. If Proud Preston can pull that one off, it will truly be worthy of its motto.
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