And it was just Pakistanis, not Bangladeshis, who are just as poor.” He is loathe to draw a quick hypothesis from that, but points it out to show there are subtleties and nuances to race relations that are often not picked up by outsiders.(In Oldham, Shamim Miah wondered why the town had had such problems while Rochdale, just six miles away, and with the same socio-economic and demographic indicators, had had no trouble at all.)”There’s a tension,” says Huw, as a wonderfully spicey mutar paneer arrives. “Do you confront the negative and deal with it? Or do you sweep it under the carpet and concentrate on the positive – as Bradford has done with its bid to be City of Culture, which paints the place in a really rosy light?”"You have to be optimistic,” says Zulfiqar “People are always running the place down That’s not what we need to attract investment and jobs. The riots had a very negative impact on that; no one wants to come after all that bad media coverage. There’s been a massive decline in sales in all businesses, not just Asian ones.” That’s true in all the riot towns. In Oldham one bank manager estimates that turnover on the main street of Oldham is down 30 per cent on the previous 12 months.The quandary is that the problems are all immediate, but the solutions are all long term. Zulfiqar and Huw, and others from the course, have now set up a Bradford Intercultural Network. “We’re meeting on Monday night,” says Huw, “we’re working on how we can undertake awareness-raising initiatives to tackle myths and misconceptions.

It’s the only way, but it’s a long haul.”The urgency of the task is most evident when you go to Burnley, where last year’s riots lasted for three nights, in which hundreds of white and Asian youths threw petrol bombs and vandalised properties. A task force was, inevitably, set up to explain the phenomenon. It came up with the usual cocktail of inner-city-style deprivation, poor housing, drugs, crime and unemployment – into which crucible came the incendiary influence of the BNP.The borough’s youngest councillor, Paul Moore, who stood for office because of his disgust with the activities of the BNP, took me on a tour of the little town. First came Daneshouse, the solidly Asian area, where public money has been spent sandblasting the little stone terraces and putting on new roofs. The effort goes only some way to countering the fact that some streets have been bulldozed and stand like gappy teeth in the overall street plan, while other rows contain more boarded-up houses than occupied ones.

Some 4,000 homes stand empty in Burnley, considered unfit for human inhabitation.”It is the eighth poorest council ward in the country,” says Paul Moore,”which means that it does receive more public money than other wards in Burnley, because government rules direct cash to the most deprived wards. But it has been the foundation of urban myths that the Asians are given preferential treatment.”We drive past the Duke of York pub, which was closed for eight months after the riot, in which it stood on the front line between Daneshouse and marauding white gangs who, frustrated by the police presence there, sought out Asian shops in other parts of the town and firebombed them, in one case with the owner’s family trapped above. Most of the white men involved in the riot pleaded guilty – many were caught on camera – and so have already been taken to court. By contrast, most of the Asians arrested have pleaded not guilty, so their cases are still awaiting trial dates. “All of which has led to more urban myths,” says Paul Moore, “along the lines that the whites were prosecuted, but the Asians got off.”If football had been a pacifying and uniting influence in Oldham, the opposite is true in Burnley, where the list of those so far convicted after the riots reads like a Who’s Who of local football hooligans. Despite Burnley FC’s recent appointment of an ethnic liaison officer, white thugs scare most Asians off supporting the local club.