Anthony Walker and Christopher Yates, concerned about female friends late at night, walked with them to bus stops in Liverpool and London respectively to make sure that the women got home safely. Both were set upon, not far from homes they shared with their mothers, by other young men from their own neighbourhoods who had been drinking heavily or taking drugs.

In Huyton, Liverpool, Mr Walker, 18, who was black, was attacked by Paul Taylor and Michael Barton and killed with a savage blow to the head with an ice axe. They were sentenced to at least 24 years and 18 years, respectively. In Barking, East London, Mr Yates, 30, a white man, was knocked to the ground and kicked and stamped on by Sajid Zulfiqar, Zahid Bashir and Imran Maqsood.

Every bone in his face was broken in a ferocious attack. Afterwards, Zulfiqar boasted in Urdu: “We killed the white boy. That will teach a white man to stick his nose in Paki business.”

But while a judge in Liverpool decided that Mr Walker’s murderers were racists — and therefore liable to more severe jail terms — an Old Bailey judge decided that Mr Yates’s murderers had not been motivated by racial hatred. Zulfiqar, Bashir and Maqsood were sentenced to 15 years in prison, the minimum tariff for murder.

The similarities between the two murder cases, and the differences in their outcomes, has left the Yates family feeling that it has been treated unequally. “I understand what Mrs Walker and her family are going through. We are going through exactly the same thing,” Rose Yates, Mr Yates’s mother, told The Times.

“But it appears to me that we have experienced a different measure of justice than they have experienced.”

Mrs Yates, a thoughtful woman who has taught children of many races and creeds, pondered long and hard before making this comment. Like Gee Walker, she sat through every day of her son’s killers’ trial. She heard how the three men who killed her son had also screamed racial abuse at a black man and carried out a violent assault on a second black man. In the end, Mrs Yates concluded “it seemed that they had something against everyone who was not of their own race”.

The judgments in the Walker and Yates cases reflect a reluctance by the authorities — police, prosecutors, judges and politicians — to recognise that ethnic minority groups can be perpetrators as well as victims of racism.

The question of anti-white racism makes the political class uncomfortable. But it is a very real phenomenon.

A Home Office report reveals that of the 22 homicides classified as racially motivated between 2001-04, the majority of victims (12 cases) were white.

There is growing anecdotal evidence of a more aggressive Asian youth culture which manifests itself in racist attacks against whites and blacks.

The increasing aggression is the result of the growing sense of victimisation and isolation felt by many in the Asian community. Young people from Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities feel victimised by police after the July 7 attacks; some are also fired by the rise of political Islam and anger over issues such as Iraq.

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