Social media really showed its ugly side during the Harehills riots last week - Jayne Dowle

She was a quiet, shy girl at school, often bullied. Why so much vitriol, when she has been fortunate enough to be able to give up work in her 50s and emigrate to a new life in the sun? This irony is never lost on me when I see her nasty comments about refugees and asylum seekers.

Like Reform UK leader and MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage, who claimed “the politics of the subcontinent are currently being played out on the streets of Leeds”, either purposefully or ignorantly ignoring the fact that it was largely the Roma community involved, those who seek to make political capital out of other people’s deprivation, frustration and alienation can take no moral high ground.

Social media really showed its ugly side last week, dangerously fomenting dissent, stirring already troubled waters with kryptonite. How to tackle such ‘free speech’ in a democracy should already be taxing the new government.

As West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin, said, “dog-whistle politics from people outside of our region who do not know our community or the facts are offensive and unwelcome”.

I really should follow the example of another old mate, who has culled her Facebook friends in these recent difficult months, blocking anyone who posts offensive political and cultural content.

But I guess the journalist in me will always be curious about the way other people think. And the way some people are thinking about what happened in Harehills last week delivers some very shocking truths about social division, poverty and overt racism in Britain today.

Harehills is one of the most deprived areas of the country, in the top 10 per cent on the Index Of Multiple Deprivation, with two neighbourhoods in the most deprived one per cent. Thanks to 15 years of cuts by the Tory government, central funding for Leeds has dropped to less than half the level of 2010-2011. This means, according to council leader James Lewis, that £2.5bn cumulatively has been taken away from frontline local services. This hurts.

This spark could have ignited in any city or larger town in the land. It’s not only communities relatively new to the UK suffering from years and years of neglect, of central government turning an absolute blind eye and of sparse financial resources available to local councils to help.

Promises of ‘levelling up’ mean absolutely nothing if you’re so poor you never even leave the grid of streets you call home.

I remember, more than a decade ago, Sir Stephen Houghton, Labour leader of Barnsley Council, talking with me about a dilapidated former council estate on the outskirts of our town. Built in the 1920s and 1930s, life there had been decimated by the closure of local pits. You couldn’t get a place more white and working class, yet it already shared many of the characteristics you might find in Harehills.

“There are kids living there who have never even been on the bus to Barnsley town centre,” he said. “How do we even begin to tackle this?”

Those, such as Reform UK’s Lee Anderson, MP for Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, joining his mate Farage sharing pearls of online wisdom last week – “Import a third world culture and you get third world behaviour…I want my country back” – who assume that the problems that came to a head in Leeds last week are someone else’s fault, should perhaps look wider and deeper.

Harehills is a diverse community; it’s reported that 43 per cent of residents were born outside the UK, encompassing over 80 nationalities and ethnicities.

But it is certainly not the only community hermetically sealed off from ‘other’ society, with the outside world glimpsed only through clouded glass. Our country is dotted with such communities; culture and ethnicity is not always the defining factor but poverty, isolation and lack of hope are.

The worrying xenophobia displayed by the likes of Farage and Anderson is only going to get worse. This will require a robust response from other parties in Parliament.

However, the twin challenge for the government is to start dealing with the problems – few jobs, terrible housing, poor health and education outcomes, criminal activity – that plague all our beleaguered communities. In this endeavour, ministers and local leaders alike deserve our support, not snide and inflammatory comments from the sidelines.