Racial Strife More Likely In Country Villages Than Big Towns, Says Report

Community and racial tensions are now more likely to overheat in the rural towns and villages of the east of England than in the previously riot-hit northern mill towns of Burnley or Oldham, a government report will warn today.

The Commission on Integration and Cohesion is to tell councils in areas with new east European migrant populations that they need to draw up integration plans of “an altogether different kind” if they are to ward off the threat of escalating tension.

The report, commissioned a year ago by the communities secretary, Ruth Kelly, will warn local government that too often community cohesion is viewed through the prism of relations between established white communities and longstanding minority-ethnic communities.

The Local Government Chronicle says the commission report identifies five types of area at risk of tensions between segments of the local population. They include London boroughs whose diversity and past immigration history mean they have been deemed largely immune to inter-community tensions but which could now face breakdowns.

The riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in 2001 led many in government to focus on repairing the troubled relations with Britain’s settled Pakistani and Indian communities.

But a leading member of the integration commission, Ed Cox, head of policy at the Local Government Information Unit, says that the official focus now needs to switch to rural towns and villages which are not used to dealing with diversity but have experienced the new patterns of migration from eastern Europe. “I am not saying that there is inevitably going to be rioting in the villages. I am saying there are very few areas now where there are not important considerations to be made about integration and cohesion,” Mr Cox told the Guardian yesterday.

“These are matters for all local authorities to be concerned about.

“The [commission’s] analysis would suggest cohesion tensions in the future are more likely to be experienced in unexpected places where ‘diversity’ is new,” said Mr Cox.

“Councils in these areas need to be ahead of the game and have in place cohesion and integration plans of a different kind from those in the northern mill towns.”

He added that it was time to move beyond the approach of managing levels of ethnic tension that had been adopted in the aftermath of the Oldham and Bradford disturbances and adopt a wider approach which could include multicultural arts festivals and “communities weeks” as well as the ideas of a Britain day floated last week by Ms Kelly.

Ted Cantle, the author of the government’s official inquiry report into the 2001 riots in Oldham and Burnley, has told the Local Government Chronicle that the arrival of new ethnic groups in communities already grappling with changes to local economies or facing housing shortages could trigger racial tension.

“There are deeper social and psychological impacts of people feeling loss for some kind of past way of life,” said Professor Cantle.

“Where you have new inward migration, people can latch on to that. But it is important to distinguish between the trigger and the underlying reason.”

The east of England has been the prime destination for Poles and other new citizens of the European Union since their accession in 2004. Peterborough in Cambridgeshire and Boston in Lincolnshire have seen a sharp growth in their migrant populations.