THE ghost of Christmas Past haunts Mahmoud Mustafa. An Iraqi Kurd asylum-seeker who has lived in Cambridgeshire for the past three years, he was with friends last Boxing Day when they were set upon by a gang of young racist thugs.

He and his friends were strolling through the city centre when a car carrying a group of youths sped up, forcing them off the pavement and into a pool of water.

“When my friend shouted at them, the boys got out and started beating us,” Mr Mustafa, 49, said. “They were punching and kicking. One friend was badly hurt (and) has since left Peterborough. Some locals here are very angry with us. They are not always friendly.”

Mr Mustafa’s bloody lesson in local community relations was an early indication of rising tensions and simmering racial feuds that climaxed with a series of pitched street battles during the summer.

Rival gangs fought with sticks and knives, windows were smashed and houses and cars set alight before police restored order. On one side were groups of young, male and predominantly Kurdish asylum-seekers. What made the wider world sit up and take notice was that their antagonists were not the stereotypical white yobs of the far-right fringes. They were young Asians.

The city’s May riots were initially dismissed as a localised problem, but Peterborough’s experience of a violent antagonism developing between rival ethnic minority communities is increasingly finding echoes in towns and cities across England.

The new racial tensions pit Pakistani against Kurd, or West Indian against African, while the white majority focuses on the cleaning of its own Augean stable. In Woolwich and Plumstead, southeast London, where young West Indians have been at war with their Somali neighbours, a black youth speaks of the African newcomers as being “a different kind of black, like dirt”, and a West Indian grandmother wishes the Somalis would “go back where they came from”.

In Harringay, North London, a man was killed during a street fight between Turkish and Kurdish groups. In the West Midlands, successful Asian businessmen casually dismiss local blacks as lazy and drug-ridden. And in Peterborough, designated as a cluster area for the dispersal of asylum-seekers, the greatest resentment of the newcomers — who include an estimated 3,000 Kurds — is to be found among the city’s 10,000-strong Kashmiri population.

Across England, ethnic minority communities formed at the tail-end of the British Empire — West Indians, Pakistanis, Indians and Sikhs — seem to have discarded the immigrant solidarity that once united them against white oppression. To some extent, the long-term victims of racism have become the new model racists.

The growth of inter-ethnic hostility has outraged veteran race campaigners, including the broadcaster and writer Darcus Howe. He argues that ethnic minority groups who arrived in Britain in the 1950s have forgotten the persecution that they initially suffered.

“They have become too middle-class,” he says. “Remember that West Indians and Asians were loathed when they first arrived here. How can they then dish out the same treatment to newcomers? There is a collective memory loss in some parts of elderly Asian populations in this country. They forget what it is like to arrive here with nothing. Integration has that effect on some people.”

Peterborough is a curious mix of old and new. An ancient city with a 12th-century cathedral, it was designated a new town in 1968 and saw its population double from 75,000 to 150,000 in 20 years. It has low unemployment and the region’s highest per-capita GDP, but also features pockets of severe deprivation. Drugs are a major problem and violent crime has doubled since 2000.

The first Asians, Kashmiris who came to the city in the 1960s, were hard working and put down roots to form a cohesive and settled community. In recent years they have found themselves living alongside fellow Muslims, asylum-seekers and migrant workers from Iraq and Afghanistan with whom they have little in common.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Forces chief faces new battle - the economy
• Seven days that shook the world
• Icelanders wake up and smell ... the fish