ODD THAT SO FEW people have anything to say about the rioting in Birmingham at the weekend. So far removed is Lozells Road from Westminster and Fleet Street that the political classes have fallen silent. Imagine if rival gangs of white youths rioted, leaving one of them dead: you wouldn’t be able to move for posing, pontification and woe. I can see the creakier pens of Fleet Street reaching for the old Montague and Capulet references now.

We have no cultural references with which to shape pat conclusions from what happened (is still happening) in Birmingham. The very way in which the rioting began — because of a rumour spread by pirate radio stations Sting FM and Hot FM, and the Blacknet UK internet site — is a challenge to the conventional media.

The rumour has it that a 14-year-old African-Caribbean girl was raped by between three and 25 Pakistani men after she begged them not to call the police when she was caught shoplifting in a beauty store. A demonstration organised outside the shop quickly swelled. According to reports on The Voice website, BBC Radio West Midlands said that there were 50 protesters. This angered an African-Caribbean community that estimated that there had been nearer 1,200, is massively outnumbered by Asians on Birmingham city council, and was already feeling further marginalised by the BBC’s decision to relegate African-Caribbean programming to Saturday night radio while establishing the Asian Network as a 24-hour-a-day station.

Probably, like me, this is all news to you. Probably, like me, you hadn’t even heard of Lozells Road, or Hot FM, or Blacknet UK, until this week. Which is presumably why it took five days of demonstrations after the rape allegation was broadcast, and then Saturday night’s riot, before the mainstream media sat up and took notice. Or at least, stared a little, shrugged its shoulders and walked away, leaving anonymous leader writers to argue the merits of multiculturalism while Bob Lewis, of Hayes, Middlesex, had a clear run at the letters pages. Mr Lewis wrote to The Daily Telegraph: “SIR — In your report on the disturbances in Birmingham (October 24), Derek Bishton is quoted as saying ‘Saturday’s rioting was about respect which one community (black) believes it has earned’. Well, if a culture that lives off benefits believes it deserves respect for improving its lot by drug dealing, then it is sick and needs a cure of education and hard work.”

Actually those communities do need education and work. The poverty and unemployment that unites this and other tinderbox areas where rival communities scrap over thin pickings, is far greater than what divides them from the rest of Britain. Whites as well as browns and blacks live in some of the most deprived inner-city wards in the country in parts of Birmingham. Yet local segregation ensures that the very things they have in common threaten rather than unite them.

Formal segregation in Britain’s ghettoised areas often begins at primary school (informally it begins in the very street in which the child is born), so that children reach secondary level in ready-made racial groups, even if they do not attend the faith schools Tony Blair is so keen to encourage. By the time the boys reach their teens and early 20s and begin fighting over women they are fighting as racial gangs and not as individuals.

And they do fight over women. I remember being told in Oldham after the riots there four years ago that trouble frequently sparks at the secondary schools, because a white boy has kissed an Asian girl or vice versa. Look at Lozells, and the black men springing to the defence of a young black girl. Listen to one of the protesters, Carmen Marshall: “What has happened to this poor girl isn’t right, this is out of order. If she stole something, don’t rape her. What if a black man was to attack an Asian girl?”

What if a black man was to attack an Asian girl? What if any man was to attack any girl? Beneath the fury lies a set of misguided assumptions about who women belong to. This is woman as property. They have taken our streets, our houses, our jobs — now they think they can take our women.

And of course it is about money, too. The relationship between blacks and Asians in northwest Birmingham has deteriorated because of the relative success and prosperity of the Pakistanis. Shops run by Asians threaten those managed by blacks by selling “black” products to the African-Caribbeans while, according to some blacks, continuing to look down upon them and protect jobs for fellow Asians. African-Caribbeans also believe wrongly that Asians receive more public funding than they do. And there have been tensions around the relocation of the mainly African-Caribbean carnival away from its home in Handsworth to the more affluent Perry Barr area, and its apparent replacement with traditional Asian celebrations.

You can see why the Home Office Minister Paul Goggins and the Prime Minister’s official spokesman essentially dismissed the trouble in Birmingham as a local problem. But I don’t imagine that northwest Birmingham is terribly different to Oldham or Bradford or Toxteth. The details may be local, but the blueprint applies in many areas of poverty, poor health, high unemployment and failing schools.

We have heard a lot from ministers (and commentators) about yesterday’s education White Paper; barely a word about Lozells. We have heard a lot about expanding choice in secondary schools; barely a word about the plan to bring faith schools into the state sector, which may improve the poorer ones, or may encourage further divisive segregation in places such as Lozells.

Break it down into pieces and we are so good at talking about it: Poverty. Unemployment. Race. Sexual politics. Segregation. Murder. Put it all together and we become a little tongue-tied, because it is such a different world to us.

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