Liz Walker: Midsomer race row shows that we need to talk

Twenty-five years ago, long before anyone felt threatened by Islam, a group of workmen knocking out walls in my house sat down for their snap and started saying how much they resented all the Asians in Bradford.

I took them on. I knew something of Bradford, had seen exhausted men working double shifts in the mills, sending their money home. I’d met the pidgin English speakers who’d been born here. I’d shopped – and still do – in the Aladdin’s cave that’s a Bradford cloth house. There was nothing to worry about, I said. They were no threat, either to our jobs or our way of life. In time, they would be an interesting addition to our society.

They are certainly interesting. My visitor was doing market research and drove up to our farm full of energy and goodwill.

He was lovely, bearded, good English, the father of two small children. I was working in the barn and there we stood, by my fattening pigs, discussing my use of the internet and how often I shopped at Mothercare. Then we drifted.

He comes from a family of farmers in Pakistan, but has long since been urbanised. He’d last been back some four years ago, but found the place “very backward. And so corrupt.

“When you get there, they see the hire car and you get stopped,” he said.

“You have to pay them or you don’t get away. It’s like that all the time. It’s not like here at all.”

British standards, then. But I have a thing about slaughter methods, constantly fussing about how our own animals meet their end and when he mentioned his liking for meat “killed in the right way” I pounced.

Halal is cruel, I declared. He said scientists had put electrodes in the brains of animals and proved they felt nothing after the first cut.

“Have you seen it?” I demanded. “I have, and that is just not true.”

“It’s been ordained by God,” he countered. “Not God,” I came back, rashly. “By his prophet!” Wisely, he changed the subject.

Then it was 9/11. “A put-up job,” he said. I boggled. I’d seen this rubbish on the internet, but didn’t think anyone believed it. “What about the 7/7 Tube bombings, then?”

“Those too. MI5 knew all about them. The authorities just wanted to discredit Islam. The Americans could have stopped the planes. They’ve got radar and fighters. They had them on their screens, they had missiles. It was all a Western plot.”

And light began to dawn. This is a community almost without contact with the rest of us. They get their information from films and American boasting. They really believe that America is the land of brilliant technology, full of James Bond stuff, when anyone who’s been there knows full well they haven’t even got proper mobile phones.

Step out of New York and the cash machines don’t work. Could this sci-fi nation really be taken unawares? To him it was like watching the Starship Enterprise failing to parallel park.

I asked about his children, saying how much I enjoy taking my own grandchildren to baby music.

“We sing to them at home,” he said firmly. I didn’t think they were getting out much. Oh dear.

So, do I think we should panic and have these people watched? Not at all. This man is kind, gentle, hard-working, family-orientated and imbued with many British values.

But in most of his life he never exchanges an opinion with anyone from the host community. They are scared of us and we are scared of them.

In Yorkshire, home to huge Islamic groups, we are on the front line. We have to talk to these people. We have to get to know them, and they us. They watch people like Jordan cutting their wayward path through marriage and morals and think we’re all like that.

They watch MTV and think all Americans are into wild dancing and group sex. How are they to know different?

Some young Asian men have attitudes to white girls that we don’t like. But can we blame them? In the areas where many Asians live there are few from the middle classes. Anyone who could move out has. Left behind are broken homes and children uncared for by anyone apparently.

We are expecting cultural sensitivity from people who don’t know we have a culture. They’ve never seen it.

This isn’t a time for blame. We are where we are. But it is time to build bridges, and at the very least, to start talking.

Liz Walker is a farmer, novelist and publications officer of Penistone Show.