I AM standing on a street corner in Leeds with the young Muslim owner of the Raja Brothers newsagent, and Beverley Morris, a white woman.
We are staring at the terraced house, now shrouded in plastic, cordoned off by plastic tape and surrounded by armed police, inside which terrorists are believed to have built their bombs. One of the bombers, Shehzad Tanweer, lived less than 100 yards away.
“It’s really sad,” says Ms Morris, a social worker. “You keep looking at people and wondering if they’re a bomber and a terrorist as well.”
The remark is offered gently, and without a hint of racial animus, yet it encapsulates the immense damage that Britain’s home-grown bombers could do to race relations in Britain. By “people” she means “Muslims”; people, in short, like Mr Raja, who wears the traditional Muslim beard without moustache and shalwar kameez tunic. He nods sadly, because he knows it is true: many white people like Ms Morris will now look at him differently.
The winning of the Olympic Games and the bombings that followed both demonstrated London’s genuine multiculturalism, though in wildly contrasting ways. The tragic photographs of the victims alone show the extraordinary range of human ingredients in the capital’s melting pot.
Northern communities such as Dewsbury, Oldham and Blackburn are also home to multiple cultures, but here multiculturalism means something else; in some areas integration means little, and when the elements in the melting pot are wrongly mixed, they can explode.
Even where there is little outright hostility, the different ethnic communities are often living separate, almost parallel lives. As the Whitehall report after the 2001 race riots noted, the lives of people living in the different ethnic communities “often do not seem to touch at any point, let alone overlap and promote meaningful interchange”.
In Beeston, the suburb of Leeds that was home to 22-year-old Tanweer, the white and Asian populations live together, but for the most part separately. In the down-at-heel terraces, white Christian families live alongside Pakistani Muslims, but often share little more than a partition wall. Beeston is reeling, barely able to comprehend how a young man in their midst could emerge as a mass murderer. Many talk of “brainwashing”, as if only by the powers of mental manipulation could a youth recalled as polite, decent and ordinary have become a suicidal killer.
“I used to play cricket with him,” says Naveed Omar, 20. “I haven’t seen him for a couple of years, but I can’t believe he would do something like this.”
As we speak, a bald man in a cross of St George T-shirt accelerates past in his van and shouts: “Bastards!” I hope this is aimed at the throng of journalists rather than the Asians; the pained expressions on the Asian faces suggest they believe otherwise.
All day, small knots of young people would wander over to the police cordons, to observe the massed journalists and television cameras and express wonderment, even awe, that a neighbour could become a terrorist under their noses.
They came in two types of group: Asian and white. In the course of three hours I saw not a single mixed group.
Beeston is by no means as racially divided as some former mill towns in East Lancashire and West Yorkshire, yet the Asian and white populations are far from integrated. The two communities seldom socialise together, according to residents.
Even the schools tend to be predominantly one race or the other. Tanweer, intriguingly, attended a school where whites outnumbered pupils of Pakistani origin by 38 to one. Community leaders have gone out of their way to condemn the bombings.
In a letter to The Times today, the Muslim leadership in Leeds collectively states: “We hope that the perpetrators are quickly caught and brought to justice to show that there is no place for such callous acts and that good will always prevail over evil like terrorism.”
The same sentiment is voiced, time and again, on the streets of Beeston, but it is coloured by wishful thinking, and tinged with fear.
Mr Raja is forthright. “I am afraid for my shop. Race relations are not too good here. The older generation may get along OK, but it’s the teenage gangs. There is this tit-for-tat going on between the whites and the Asians. When they bump into each other: boom.” As he says it, he glances over to the reputed bomb-making factory on the other side of the road.
The Raja Brothers newsagent’s shop marks a sort of racial crossroads. “This way is mostly Muslim,” Mr Raja gestures to the north. “Down that side it’s all white. If you walk down there, as an Asian, you’re asking for it.”
Last year friction between rival groups of youths reached boiling point. One afternoon in April a group of Asians armed with cricket bats, pieces of wood and other weapons assaulted two youths; Tyrone Clark, a 16-year-old of mixed race, was killed.
Later, apparently in racially motivated retaliation, friends of the dead boy attacked an Asian-owned shop. The uncle of Shehzad Tanweer anxiously insists that his nephew must have fallen under the influence of radical Muslims when he went to Pakistan last year.
Bashir Ahmad, 65, who owns the King Kebab shop in Tempest Road, describes his relative as “just a good British boy”.
He adds: “He was a sports fan who used to like soccer and playing cricket with his friends in Headingley. He was a young man from a good family who just loved his cricket. It is hard to accept what must have happened to him.” Mr Ahmad’s references to cricket, Britishness and respectability are all telling, for British Asians are acutely aware that the emergence of British-born Muslim terrorists is manna to racists and a fillip to the extreme Right.
David Exley ran as the BNP parliamentary candidate for Dewsbury and won more than 5,000 votes, or 17 per cent. He doesn’t want to say, “I told you so”, he says, but then he says it anyway.
“I saw this coming a long time ago,” declares the self-employed electrician. “We have got some very evil people within this community and they need to be got rid of. People can see that what we have been saying is true.”
Mr Exley, 41, does not want to be interviewed in Dewsbury, home of Mohammed Sadique Khan, another of the suicide bombers. “Things are too tense, just now.” But he is delighted to air his views at a roadside cafe near Huddersfield. Those views are the usual bigoted menu: Asians are getting preferential treatment, taking white jobs, beating up white kids and sleeping with white girls but declining to marry them. And so on. “They refer to the lasses as ‘white meat’,” Mr Exley insists.
“They are guests in our country. Are they British or are they Muslim? Which takes precedence? They have to decide.”
None of this is remotely new. What is novel is the evident belief of Mr Exley and his like that the events of the past few days have somehow vindicated the BNP. “I think we will get more support because of this,” he grins.As of yesterday the police and community leaders across Britain faced a new and urgent task: to prevent a bomb in London from igniting a different sort of conflagration in British society.
The elation of the BNP, Mr Raja’s fears for his shop, the anxiety written on every face in Beeston: these are all symptoms of the dangerous and explosive legacy left by the cricket-playing killer.
