Special video report: Exactly ten years after the riot, Bradford is still a racial tinderbox

Lord Ouseley, the former chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, led the 2001 Bradford race relations review in the months building up to the riots. He described at the time a city gripped by fear and intolerance, its young population frustrated and hindered by a lack of opportunity.

A decade on from the shocking violence – the worst rioting in mainland Britain for 20 years – Lord Ouseley has warned mere “lip service” has been paid to the chronic problems highlighted in the report.

Now as unemployment soars and extremist groups seek to exploit the segregation and mistrust still embedded in Bradford, civic leaders have expressed real fears the deep wounds caused by the riots could reopen in the coming years.

Lord Ouseley told the Yorkshire Post: “The dangers of last time are there. Not just in Bradford but other parts of Yorkshire and the country as well.

“There should have been a much more robust response to the issues that had been outlined for the area. The publicity was focused very much on the disturbances and the court sentences.

“It was almost a diversion away from what are the causes. It was almost as if the cavalry arrived after the battle had been fought.

“These problems have been addressed only peripherally.

“All sorts of programmes were created by the government to tackle issues of violence and segregation.

“There is still a lot of simmering tension. There is a lot of lip service paid over what has not been done. There are deep social issues that I don’t think have been properly addressed.

“I don’t think enough of the positive things have been done.”

Political leaders say real progress has been made in Bradford over the past 10 years, as shown by the combined efforts of Bradford Council, community groups and West Yorkshire Police to maintain peace during an English Defence League rally in the city centre last August.

But many vital regeneration projects have stalled and unemployment in the city has now spiralled to more than 11 per cent, significantly higher than the 8.2 per cent in 2001. The city’s claimant rates area now higher than anywhere else in the Leeds city region.

Bradford’s increasingly young population has borne the brunt of the surge in joblessness, with claimant rates rocketing among 18 to 24-year-olds and the number of youth claimants up nearly five per cent on last year.

A number of the youth services commended in the Ouseley report are now also struggling in the face of deep public sector cuts which council chiefs claim have hit the city disproportionately hard.

The continued segregation of the city’s schools, also highlighted in the Bradford race relations review, is now adding to the growing concern that the generation growing up in the footsteps of the rioters is becoming increasingly disenfranchised.

The assistant secretary of the Bradford National Union of Teachers, Ian Murch, a member of the union’s national executive, who has worked in the city for the past 37 years, said: “As these communities have grown there has been a small amount of outward movement but not much, and now minority communities, especially in Bradford, are still quite divided.

“The real problem is when children come out of school and they don’t understand or value and respect children from different backgrounds to themselves.

“There has been some improvement, the teaching force is starting to be broader with people from different backgrounds, but there is certainly room for a lot more.”

Bradford Council’s Labour leader Ian Greenwood, said: “We have moved on considerably since 10 years ago. We believe this place is radically different.There was a distrust of the community leadership, council, other agencies and the police from young people.

“Bradford is a different community now, in many ways it is ahead of other communities in the country. There are problems, but we as Bradfordians want to resolve these with each other.”

The Bishop of Bradford, Nick Baines, said: “Bradford is a city of great potential. It seems to me that great steps have been taken from the riot of 10 years ago.

“There are signs to show that enormous progress has been made, that doesn’t mean we have got there.”

• More in Thursday’s Yorkshire Post with a second report on Friday