Race special: Divided we stand

What are you called? "Idi Amin." The answer is shot straight back at me and the gang of Asian teenagers shake with laughter at their mate's quick-fire wit.

Admittedly it isn't my best ever question, but it's six o'clock on a cold, wintery Monday evening in central Burnley. Inspiration is deep-frozen and tongues need thawing. I smile and make a show of writing it down in my notebook.

"What about you?" I ask, doggedly working my way along the line of 16-year-olds, all in hoodies, with carefully gelled hair and plenty of bling peeping out. They are loitering in a bricked-up doorway, next to the convenience store at the junction of Brougham Street and Burns Street in the Stoneyholme area of the Lancashire town. This one doesn't answer at all, but instead pulls his neck scarf up over his mouth, like a cowboy in the Wild West, and stares back at me defiantly. This is definitely not going well.

Number three is the most co-operative. He's called Rashid, he volunteers, and is the only one of the gang still at school. The others have all been excluded. They don't tell me this, of course. But standing with me (omega) on the windswept corner is the local neighbourhood bobby, Susan Sanderson, and her colleague, Police Community Support Officer, Zahid Ahmed. They fill in the silences. And the details. While their presence doesn't exactly instil old-fashioned Dixon of Dock Green-like respect in the youngsters, it does at least enable us to have a conversation of sorts.

A slight, dark-haired mother of two in her early forties, PC Sanderson manages to mix qualities that in many others simply wouldn't go together. So she can be firm and stern when the youngsters' repartee demands it. But then in the next breath she is encouraging and engaging with them. There's a warmth in her broad smile that even a group of difficult, self-absorbed, hormonal teenagers can't fail to miss.

"Sometimes they call me 'mum'," she later admits, "but at least that means they know I'm with them, not against them." It is an approach that has won her Lancashire Constabulary's Community Beat Manager of the Year award, quite an achievement when you bear in mind that her predecessor in Stoneyholme ended up being attacked with an iron bar.

This area and neighbouring Daneshouse are almost exclusively Asian, home to families whose roots are in Bangladesh and Pakistan. The teenagers I'm struggling to talk to are all Muslims. Their track record so far of failure at school and involvement in anti-social behaviour reveals a high degree of alienation from the mainstream of society and makes them prime candidates, if recent reports are to be believed, for the pull of radical Islamic alternatives that stretch as far as terrorism, the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.

Last month, the Policy Exchange think tank presented a bleak view of teenagers such as Rashid, "Idi Amin" and their nameless cohorts who are now gathering round and striking rapper-like poses for the photographer. Some 37 per cent of those questioned in their age group were in favour of the introduction of sharia law in the UK, and 13 per cent expressed admiration for al-Qa'ida - both higher proportions than those reported for their parents' generation.

Such radical views, though, are not part of any picture either Sanderson or Ahmed recognise. "There was a visit a few years back to one of the local mosques by Abu Hamza," Sanderson recalls. But the controversial preacher from London's Finsbury Park Mosque, now jailed, made little discernible impact. "I think there was one local youth who is thought to have gone off to Afghanistan to train with the Taliban [there is also a significant minority in Stoneyholme of Pathans, who come originally from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border], but my impression is that, if anything, the attraction of that has grown weaker recently. The concerns of youngsters round here are more practical - getting on with their parents and at school, getting a job, staying out of trouble."

In which context, part of Sanderson's role is to provide more constructive channels for teenage energy than standing on a street corner taking the piss - or worse. There's been a gang workshop project, trips out of Burnley (a first for some of the youngsters), and even - mixing stick with carrot - a visit to hear about the grim realities of life inside the local Youth Offenders' Institution at Lancaster Farms.

That morning, Sanderson had been to the home of this gang's leader, Rumel. Her wake-up call was to ensure he attended a coaching course she's managed to talk him on to, up at Turf Moor, home of the local football team (like much else in Burnley, a shadow of its former glories). After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing between his family home and his grandmother's in the next street of this tightly packed block of terraced houses, Rumel was found and delivered in the police van to the "Strike for Life" scheme, run by Burnley town council in conjunction with the Prince's Trust and other agencies.

"How was it?" I ask Rumel. He pulls a face for the gallery but eventually admits he's going back to the course tomorrow. Under his own steam, even. His ambition, he reveals, his show of bravado slipping, is to be a pilot. His mates all laugh out loud. As well they might. The reality of his exclusion from school and its aftermath is that there are currently few mundane career avenues open to him, let alone reaching for the skies. The local further education college won't have him because of his reputation for being unmanageable. There is mounting pressure for an Asbo to be taken out against him, too often the first step for such disruptive teenagers on the road to prison.

In the middle of the afternoon, Sanderson had taken me with her when she popped back to Turf Moor to see how Rumel was getting on. On the coaching course, he and half a dozen other Muslim teenagers were rubbing along pretty happily with a group of white kids. It should be an everyday scene in multicultural Britain, hardly worthy of mention. But not here. It is probably the first time in his life Rumel has been in such "mixed company" without it ending in a confrontation.

Burnley, you see, is a racially segregated town. Or at least it is in its central areas. The further out you go, on to the Moors where there are spectacular views and handsome houses to be had in villages like Worsthorne, the distinctions of race, religion and colour become less important. But here in Stoneyholme, they are all.

And in the Burnley Wood and Trinity districts, home to the white youngsters on the course. Superficially both are identical to Stoneyholme. All consist of grids of dilapidated, honey-coloured stone, two-up, two-down terraced houses, built on the lower reaches of the Pennine slopes by mill owners for their employees 100 years ago when the town had a booming textiles industry, but today, with the collapse of its major source of jobs, among the deepest pockets of deprivation in Britain. But in Burnley Wood and Trinity, the population is almost exclusively white. Despite all that they have in common, residents of these different ghettos simply don't overlap. Except when they fight.

In June 2001, riots here made national headlines. A group of white youths marched on Stoneyholme and set fire to cars. Asian youths retaliated by attacking a pub suspected of being a meeting place for white racists. Two years later, the British National Party cashed in on the troubles in local elections to become the official opposition on Burnley Council, taking eight seats on a ticket of keeping white areas for whites and preventing what they alleged was preferential investment in Asian areas.

The result set alarm bells ringing. Money from the Government, voluntary sector and European Union has been poured into the town in an effort to change Burnley's image as one of Britain's racist hot spots. There are plans for a £50m urban renewal project, known as Elevate, to replace the urban terraces with homes fit for the 21st century. Many complain, though, that after three years of consultations, glossy brochures and the bulldozing of some areas, they are still waiting to see anything rise from the ashes. And Burnley has just been named one of 40 "Respect" zones by the Government, areas where extra resources will be targeted to tackle anti-social behaviour.

"Do you feel that Burnley is changing for the better?" I ask my by-now slightly less chilly teenage audience. This time their blank looks aren't done for effect.

Everyone else in the police van is wearing a helmet and riot gear. We're off to serve a drugs warrant on a known dealer in Cog Lane in the Trinity area of town. It is, you quickly gather, a regular occurrence. "Are you nervous?" I ask one old hand as he picks up the battering ram that will be used to open the door. "Not really. It's the monotony of it that gets to me."

By one measure, Burnley has the second-highest ratio of drug users per head of the population in the country. A particular favourite is GHB, a home-made concoction, based on nail varnish remover.

The element of surprise is vital if the suspect isn't going to flush his stash away down the toilet. So we pull up smartly, doors fly open, officers leap out and bash their way in. While the house is being searched, a lanky, spotty, badly dressed white teenager with an even more forlorn dog on the end of the piece of string is questioned. Either he's too out of it to know what's happening, or he doesn't give a damn.

Outside, Ahmed and other Police Community Support Officers visit neighbouring houses to let them know what is happening. The raid has come about as a result of local tip-offs. Burnley is a national pioneer in a new style of neighbourhood policing. Residents and officers get together regularly for formal meetings. Priorities that the community highlight are then acted upon by the police, even if, as in the case of today's raid, they know the best they can hope for is to inconvenience the dealers rather than frighten them away.

Mary Boyle, 82, is the only local resident out on her doorstep to watch. She spent 40 years as a weaver in a local mill, she recalls, before it closed down. She sank all her savings into buying her own home, but has (omega) seen her neighbourhood go down and down. "I hardly recognise it any more. It used to be lovely. There was such a community here. I'd move but these houses aren't worth anything now. I've known three ladies who were friends who did move and it killed them all."

She blames absentee landlords for introducing the blight of drugs. "They don't care who's in their houses, as long as they get the money from the social. No one cares anymore." What about the local council, especially the BNP members who have been attracting a ready audience in white areas like Trinity? "Oh they're useless," says Mrs Boyle, talking as if they are naughty schoolboys. "They've done nothing for us either."

But why did people vote for them, I wonder aloud. "I don't have much to do with the Asians," she replies mildly. "Some of them did open a shop at the end of the lane and I used to go to get a few little things there. There were always cars outside and I thought they must be doing well. But then there was a police raid and they found £30,000 of drugs."

That's her image of Asians, then. Mixed up with drugs. It takes less than five minutes in a car to get from Trinity to Stoneyholme, yet it might as well be on the other side of the moon.

Multiculturalism preaches that people should be able to live as they want, where they want, and with whom they want. It is clear from talking to community leaders on both sides in Burnley that, if the promised rebuild ever comes, they will want to maintain their ghettos. You cannot, according to the mantras of multiculturalism, force integration. You can only hope that it will start to occur naturally.

Again in theory, it shouldn't be that hard. Less than 10 per cent of Burnley's 70,000-plus population comes from ethnic minorities. There are plenty of imaginative schemes to accelerate change and promote understanding. But still, integration remains a big ask. When Sanderson drops in on the local nursery school in Stoneyholme (just one of the 80 pupils is white), a teaching assistant, an articulate, friendly, young Asian woman who doesn't want to give her name, describes the ghetto mentality that persists and may even be deepening. "I'd been thinking of moving out of Stoneyholme into a more mixed area. Integrating, I suppose you'd call it. But with first the riots and then the BNP on the council, I've begun to feel unsafe when I'm away from my own. I have even started, for the first time in my adult life, wearing a headscarf."

Again, it all comes down to perception. The police report today there are very few racial incidents indeed. But how do you dispel perceptions created by recent history and the climate of distrust it is still generating?

An obvious first place is in schools. Burnley Council has launched a major programme called "Building Schools for the Future". Rumel's alma mater, Barden High, was 100 per cent Asian. It has now been closed and its pupils transferred to the newly integrated Sir John Thursby Community College, set up on the site of what had previously been an all-white, all-girls secondary in the Bank Hall area of town.

I stand with Sanderson and Ahmed next to an old park where the railings have been removed, watching as the kids from John Thursby walk home. They divide out almost exclusively along ethnic lines which in turn has caused some of the local, predominately white, residents on the route back to Stoneyholme to ring the police to complain about Asian teenagers on "their" streets. Couldn't the police take out an Asbo or something to stop them, one caller suggested.

Such a knee-jerk reaction will only be encouraged by some aspects of the latest Respect initiative when it is implemented in Burnley. One of its key slogans is "Report It, Don't Tolerate It". You could argue that Burnley needs less reporting and more tolerance.

Sanderson and Ahmed, though, are defiantly optimistic. While she pulls over a car full of Asian teenagers and crouches by the door chatting to them, collecting information, building bridges, Ahmed points out a young Asian lad as he walks past us. "He's my future policeman," he tells me. "He'll have to lose a bit of weight, though." With a degree in criminology, Ahmed - known as Zed to his colleagues - hopes to step up from Community Support Officer to join Sanderson in the police ranks soon.

"When I started," he recalls, "it never occurred to me that young Muslims like me shouldn't have anything to do with the police. But on a drugs raid, early on, someone called me 'coconut'. I didn't know what he meant. I thought he was saying I needed a haircut. Then it was explained. He meant that I was brown on the outside, white on the inside. That just isn't how it feels."

The irony of Burnley is that, if you put the race issue to one side, the problems facing Stoneyholme are precisely the same ones facing Trinity. The drugs raid turns up evidence of use of class-A drugs as well as a crude attempt to by-pass the electric meter. Drugs, poverty, poor education and the consequences of industrial decline hang like a blight over the whole centre of the town with its derelict mill buildings. In their place has grown up a low-wage, low-skill economy.

Where there is very little to have, even less to look forward to, it is easy for prejudices to breed as a form of release. But militancy - whether it be from the BNP or radical Muslim preachers - only comes at the end of a line of deprivations and degradations.

The best Rumel and his mates can realistically hope for is a job in a local restaurant, supermarket or mini-cab firm. It is hardly an enticing prospect, and so their horizons right now don't stretch much further than whether or not to go to the local youth club. While they decide, Sanderson takes me off, up Brougham Street to the centre, next to the canal.

Riaz Mohammed is the youth worker there. With a gentle face but an insistent tone, he describes his challenge as being, with youngsters like Rumel, to reverse a cycle of neglect that often starts at birth. "There is a huge issue today for parents here as to how to build a relationship with a child who speaks a different language. It can lead to a complete failure to build emotional relationships, between fathers and sons in particular. The fathers are, because of their own upbringing and traditions, cold and distant. It leaves their sons with massive identity problems."

These can, he believes, ultimately lead young Muslims into "undesirable alliances" with what he calls "outside agitators". "Often these are temporary - and we have been lucky that there have been people in this community keeping a sharp eye out for these agitators and seeing them off." But the threat, he warns, is real.

Once you have spent some time at the sharp end of Burnley, it quickly becomes apparent that there are few quick fixes for the sort of deep-rooted economic, political and social alienation that has been several generations in the making. The riots and the BNP triumph were not, seen in such a light, about race, but about long-term despair and desperation. Even with abundant goodwill and investment, such problems may well take as long to solve as they did to develop.

Not that Susan Sanderson is deterred. "Yes, there are problems, but there is also a sense of community here," she says looking out of the youth club windows. "And good people. In three years we have been able to build trust here. That has to be the starting point."

In the car park, she spots a group of youngsters gathering round a red Vauxhall Corsa. She and Ahmed go down to investigate. As they approach, the 17- and 18-year-olds hardly glance up, much less scarper. The reason is soon clear as Sanderson is ushered to the front and given pride of place on the passenger seat. This is no subversive meeting or drugs drop. One of them has a new postage stamp-sized car DVD player attached to his sound system and has it on at full blast, showing off to his mates. The way teenagers do.

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