Fighting fear with friendship has sent a powerful message as online lies are rejected: Dr Mohammed Ali

On the contrary, a wave of anti-racism protests has swept the country with people coming together to show solidarity with friends and neighbours in the capitals of all four home countries and from Dundee to Penzance and Norwich to Carlisle.

How different from 2001, when Asian families feared for their lives as Far Right extremists and Anti-Nazi League supporters clashed violently on the streets of Manningham.

It was a particularly difficult time for QED Foundation, the charity that I had set up in the neighbourhood just over 10 years earlier with the aim of creating a peaceful, more cohesive society by creating opportunities for people from all ethnic backgrounds.

But this year, despite violent anti-immigration protests in nearby Leeds and Hull, Bradford has been untouched by the unrest that has swept the country.

Maybe, with diversity at the heart of the UK City of Culture 2025 celebrations, the English Defence League didn’t think it would be an easy target. Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, Christian and Jewish faith leaders were quick to issue a statement of solidarity.

So, in a way, Elon Musk may be right. The EDL is already losing a civil war because people are rejecting the tidal wave of lies and misinformation spread on social media channels such as his own X network, which have enabled Far Right extremists to incite so many disaffected individuals to express their frustration in mindless acts of violence.

But the shadow of 2001 still hangs over Bradford – and many more of Yorkshire’s towns and cities. The dust had hardly settled following the Manningham riots when the World Trade Centre collapsed after being struck by al-Qaeda terrorists, and so too did the hopes and dreams of many British Muslims.

The ensuing backlash means that they still feel aliens in their own communities, so much so that many of them are considering whether they have a future in the UK. My own son is among those who, despite being born in Yorkshire and living here all their lives, have decided that their prospects are much better overseas.

If they go, we are all worse off. In June 2022 15.9 per cent of professionally qualified NHS staff outside general practice were Asian, many of them Pakistani Muslims. These are the people whose unswerving commitment to duty helped to bring us through the pandemic, and who often paid for that dedication with their lives.

We will also lose hard-working individuals like the 40,000 men and women that QED Foundation has helped to find jobs, set up businesses and access further training since 1990. Most of our students are new arrivals in this country, sometimes refugees and asylum seekers and often from professional backgrounds, but always keen to make the most of their skills to make a positive contribution to UK society.

Gone too could be many rising stars of the future like the talented winners of the Yorkshire Asian Young Achievers Awards, which QED Foundation set up in 2020 to celebrate inspirational role models who have overcome adversity or broken through traditional barriers to progress.

British universities will struggle to balance their books as the current political climate deters international students from enrolling. And UK businesses will have to recruit from a restricted talent pool that does not reflect the communities they serve.

But it’s no wonder so many people from ethnic minority backgrounds don’t feel welcome here. Muslim communities are among those to feel the backlash of disproportionately negative, inaccurate, misleading and inflammatory media coverage, particularly since the 9/11 attack and the London bombings of 7 July 2005.

Similar extrapolations have been made from the actions of a criminal minority to the supposed behaviour of entire communities in other contexts such as child sexual exploitation. With some exceptions, including Ukrainians and Afghans, media outlets and politicians alike are more likely to portray refugees and asylum seekers as potentially dangerous criminals or scroungers than as fellow human beings fleeing from life-threatening situations.

So the first part of the fight back against mindless terrorism on British streets – for that is what the singling out of whole communities for persecution by violent mobs really is – must be to question the validity of everything we read about people from different ethnic backgrounds, particularly on the echo chamber of social media.

The second is to get to know our neighbours, no matter where they, their parents or their grandparents originally came from. And the third is to remember that, regardless of the cultural differences between us, we are all Yorkshiremen and women now.

Dr Mohammed Ali OBE is the founder and CEO of QED Foundation,