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First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers

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For Robert

Introduction

The fear of the ‘enemy within’, a constant of life in the West since the attacks of 9/11, was pushed to a new high in 2016 by the rise of Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS), coinciding, as it did, with an unprecedented wave of migrants and refugees into Europe from elsewhere, and to which the violence in the Middle East also greatly contributed. I didn’t want my country’s borders closed to Muslims, à la Donald Trump in America. I did not believe that the many could, or should, be held accountable for the actions of a few. But like Trump – and to use his election campaign phrase – I did want to figure out what the hell was going on.

By mid 2016, an estimated 850 Britons were said to have left the country to join ISIS, many of them following the fashion of adding the suffix ‘al-Britani’ to the jihadist’s traditional nom-de-guerre; and around half of them were reported to have returned from the warzone.¹ The threat of Islamist terrorist attack here is not imaginary. As the deaths and injuries wrought around the Palace of Westminster in March 2017 proved, Britain is not immune to the ISIS-inspired horrors visited on Brussels or Paris or Nice in 2015 and 2016. The government’s official terror-threat level has been fixed at ‘severe’ – the second highest category, meaning an attack is ‘highly likely’ – for almost three years.

The fact remains, though, that the number killed by Islamist terrorists on home soil is minute. In the decade preceding the Westminster attack, their victims numbered precisely one, the unfortunate Royal Fusilier Lee Rigby, beheaded in a Woolwich street in 2013. In those terms, Islamist terrorism presents no existential threat to our way of life, any more than the much worse bombing campaign mounted by the IRA in the 1970s and 1980s did.

Where, then, does our fear come from – and how frightened should we really be? Counter-terrorism has become big business since the rise of al-Qaida in the 1990s, a self-perpetuating industry whose effects on society, its cohesion and its happiness are demonstrably corrosive. Constant vigilance breeds suspicion and division. It may be a necessary evil, but could more be done to mitigate it, and if so, what?

Paradoxically, it doesn’t help that, for reasons of operational security, the government tells the public very little about how it assesses the terrorist threat. For instance, at the end of 2015, Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that in the previous year the security services had foiled seven ISIS-inspired terror plots in Britain, but gave no details of what the public was supposed to have been spared. Did he mean seven potential 9/11s? Or was he talking about some teenager caught sending a dangerous-sounding email or buying an oversized knife? Terrorism works in the mind. In the absence of real data, we tend to imagine the worst.

That is why, in 2016, I set out to try to make my own assessment of the Islamist threat, and the public and official responses to it, and to examine the cost to society, the impact that the demon of terrorism has on us all. I wanted to learn more about why so many young Muslims were abandoning their lives in the West for a warzone; to discover what could be missing from their lives that they thought ISIS could replace; and to investigate what, if anything, their local communities could do about it.

The scope of my inquiry soon grew wider than these security questions, however. It puzzled and troubled me that Islam, a religion practised by a quarter of the world’s population, should be so maligned in its British manifestation. In a speech in 2011, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, one of Britain’s most senior Muslim politicians, famously observed that hostility towards Muslims had become socially acceptable even among the educated classes. As she put it, Islamophobia – a neologism that has now passed into common usage – had ‘passed the dinner table test’. Discrimination against Muslims has since gone even more mainstream with the emergence of a new, rightwing populism in the West, above all in America.

In Britain, as across the Atlantic, Islam remains widely misunderstood by the non-Muslim majority. I did not start out as a stranger to the religion myself. As a foreign correspondent and author, I have been writing about troubled Muslim-majority countries for twenty-five years, including ones on President Trump’s controversial refugee ban list. But I was also aware that I didn’t know as much as I perhaps should about Islam in my own country, and I looked forward to filling that gap and to finding out what it really means to be a Muslim in modern Britain. What compromises must a devout Muslim make in order to succeed as a citizen in a society as increasingly secular as ours?

What I found was a community boiling with resentment at the way they are being treated, above all the way they are collectively blamed for the proportionally tiny number of violent extremists among them. The mood in too many places I visited, from Birmingham and Bradford to Luton and London, is tinged by fear, paranoia, anger and confusion. British Muslims feel under assault from multiple directions at once: from the tabloid (and not so tabloid) press, from Nigel Farage’s UKIP party, from a resurgent far right and, perhaps most worryingly of all, from the government itself.

Under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act of 2015, Britain’s public sector employees, all half million of them, are now obliged to refer to the authorities anyone undermining what the Home Office calls ‘fundamental British values’, on the grounds that they could be vulnerable to radicalization; and in the first year of the Act’s operation, some 7,500 people were indeed referred, most of them Muslims, and nearly half of them children. The government wants British Muslims to integrate better into wider society, a sensible enough ambition, given how prevalent their culture and religion have become. Its counter-terrorism policies, however, are in danger of producing the opposite effect, a deep new wedge between Muslims and the rest of us.

This is not something British society can afford, if only because Muslims are not the insignificant religious minority they once were in this country. Through a combination of migration and a higher birth rate, the number of Muslims has more than doubled since 2001 to over 3 million, accounting for 5 per cent of the population. In some cities and towns like Leicester or Blackburn where Muslims are most concentrated, the proportion is as high as 25 per cent. The rise of Islam is, arguably, the most dramatic change to the make-up of British society in modern times – and the process is not over yet. In 2015, for the first time, the most popular name for newborn boys in Britain was Mohammed, or one of its variant spellings. One in twelve British schoolchildren is now a Muslim; one in four British Muslims is under 10 years old. If the trend continues there will be 5.5 million of them by 2030, more than the entire population of Scotland. Whatever happens, there can be no doubt that Islam is a part of all our futures now.²

I spent hundreds of hours talking to Muslims in shops, mosques, schools, community centres, on the street and in their homes, in towns and cities from Cardiff to Inverness, and the more I heard and saw, the more convinced I became that it is not just counter-productive but profoundly unfair to go on viewing them through the distorting prism of national security. Far from being secret enemies of the state, the Muslims I interviewed repeatedly insisted, unprompted, that not only was Britain a great country in which to live, but also that they felt and were proud to be British. Opinion polls consistently find the same thing. One much-cited poll, conducted for the think tank Demos in 2011, found that 83 per cent of Muslims were ‘proud to be a British citizen’, which was actually 4 per cent more than for the population as a whole.³

With attitudes towards Muslims so ugly in the country, I anticipated that many might be reluctant to open up to a nosy, non-Muslim Anglo-Saxon like me, yet in the event only a very few were. Instead I was greeted almost everywhere with friendly curiosity, kindness and the traditional hospitality that I have come to associate with Islam abroad. I was constantly struck by the values that, for all the undoubted problems, still powerfully underpin British Muslim communities and how similar, ironically, these are to those of old-fashioned Toryism: the importance of family, respect for authority, probity, a strong sense of community, a belief in self-sacrifice and hard work. British Muslims are also more generous with their charity giving than any other sector of society and they do not restrict themselves to Muslim causes. In the month of Ramadan in 2016, according to the Charity Commission, they raised around £100 million, the equivalent of £38 a second.⁴

My eyes were not closed to the problems of British Islam. As I soon discovered, many nominally Muslim communities are blighted by crime, often drug-related, committed by youths far beyond the influence of the mosques. Public opinion remains rightly outraged by the sex-grooming gang phenomenon first exposed in Rotherham in 2014. More than 12,500 British Muslims are in jail: almost 15 per cent of all prisoners and three times the proportion of Muslims in the country as a whole. It is also true that some traditional Muslim values – disapproval of homosexuality, for example – are badly out of kilter with modern mores. The views of some conservative Muslims do sometimes make the political goal of social integration look harder to achieve.

But I had no wish to join the critics’ chorus. Islam’s drawbacks and incompatibilities have been repeated ad nauseam. I set out with the unapologetic intention of giving voice instead to the drowned-out counter-arguments, to hear what might be good and useful about the way it is practised in Britain. Our happiness as a nation does depend, finally, on the prospects for co-existence.

What I learned is that many of the most problematically conservative beliefs are cultural in origin, not Islamic – which usually means the culture of south Asia because, thanks to Britain’s imperial past, three-quarters of the country’s Muslims are of that heritage. For example, the practice of intermarriage, honour killings, perhaps even backward attitudes towards women in general, are all often exclusively ascribed to the religion rather than to old cultural traditions, and this has unfairly given British Islam a bad name. In any case, those traditions are most likely to be upheld by the first generation of Asian migrants, who mostly arrived here in the 1950s and 1960s. With every passing generation – and British Asian Muslims are now entering their fourth – the customs of home are perceptibly fading. Not as fast as the reformers would like, no doubt, but, lost in the maelstrom of criticism from within and without the community, and despite all the setbacks and challenges, I found plenty of evidence of adaptation and change.

British Muslims are not just capable of integrating. Sadiq Khan, a Pakistani bus driver’s son from Tooting and one of a record thirteen Muslim MPs, was elected Mayor of London in 2016. He wasn’t the first Muslim to reach high political office, nor even the first child of an immigrant bus driver to do so.

‘From one son of a Pakistani bus driver to another, congratulations,’ tweeted the Business Secretary, Sajid Javid.

‘From this daughter of a Pakistani bus driver to a son of a Pakistani bus driver, congratulations,’ echoed Baroness Warsi.

‘Bus drivers,’ observed The Times writer Tim Montgomerie, ‘are clearly the new Etonians.’

This book is all about the extraordinary societal change behind that joke, and which made Khan’s election not just possible but statistically probable, since one in eight Londoners is now Muslim. His rise to power is as symbolically potent, in its way, as Obama’s election as the first black US President in 2008. Khan is a Muslim Dick Whittington, a British version of the American Dream.

Public life is stuffed with other Muslim role models, from millionaire entrepreneurs like the Dragons’ Den star James Caan, to high-profile journalists like the Today programme’s Mishal Husain. There are Olympic champions like the runner Mo Farah or the boxer Amir Khan, as well as over two dozen Premier League footballers. There are singers like One Direction’s Zayn Malik, entertainers like Citizen Khan’s Adil Ray, even a celebrity chef, Nadiya Hussain, the 2015 victor of The Great British Bake Off. Just as suggestively, the Royal Navy has for the last eleven years had a Muslim Rear-Admiral, Amjad Hussain. What is not to like about a roll call as star-studded as this? In fact, who could possibly argue that Britain would be better off without such people, who so demonstrably enhance the life and culture of the country? As someone wittily suggested on Twitter, what Britain needs is Mo Farah and Less Farage – especially in these times when even Mo Farah, as a holder of dual British and Somali citizenship, briefly faced exclusion from the US by an executive order of Donald Trump.⁵

My encounter with British Islam was a revelation on several levels. It was, first, a voyage of geographical discovery. I consider myself well travelled in the country of my birth, but my year on the road took me to many towns and cities that I had never been to before. It was an experience as exotic, in its way, as any of my past journalistic forays into Yemen or Somalia or Afghanistan, and it was marvellous to find such a thing on my doorstep, accessible for the price of a few train tickets. It was like looking at a picture I thought I knew through new glasses and finding detail and nuance in it that I never suspected existed. I did not expect it, but my perception of physical Britain and, through that, the wider question of what it means to be British, were both drastically altered.

Another consequence that surprised me was how angry I became with the government. I used to think that critics of the Conservative government’s austerity programme were essentially whingers. In the middle-class Edinburgh enclave that I call home, the sorest effect of the cutbacks was the closure of a council-run swimming pool that my children liked, and if this was what it took to balance the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s books, I thought the country could live with that. Even the poorest people on benefits seem to have a telly. Poverty is relative, it isn’t the nineteenth century any more and nobody is dying of rickets. But my visits to some of the poorest urban environments in Britain shook me out of my complacency.

Cuts to public spending in these places, I learned, are often not dramatic or even, necessarily, immediately felt. The effects, rather, are insidious. I visited mosques that have taken over the running of food banks because the local council can no longer afford to. I met policemen whose forces lack the manpower to send community bobbies into schools to form the relationships that ensure that Muslim children stay out of trouble in the future. I met Muslim migrants struggling to learn English in part because the government has cut spending on English language classes, even as it publicly insists that proficiency in English should be a condition of British citizenship. In many urban Muslim communities, especially in the post-industrial north, cutbacks like these reinforce the old perception that London, down in the rich southeast, is not just out of touch but also that it doesn’t really care – and that is another serious obstacle to the social cohesion that the government calls a priority.

The third surprise was that it brought me closer to the religion itself. From my time in Afghanistan, particularly, I was predisposed to admire aspects of it, especially its spiritual qualities. A well-sung adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, still puts the hairs up on the back of my neck in a way I have seldom experienced in church. Like the Afghans’, the daily lives of a great many British Muslims seem governed by taqwa – the nearest translation is ‘God-consciousness’ – in a way that has almost entirely disappeared from my own Christian culture. And although I am not a very religious person, I also know that I am not alone in sometimes envying what the Muslims have. Even the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has worried in the past about the lack of spirituality in our national life.

This gentler side of Islam is seldom mentioned in the shrill debate over extremism, integration and immigration. I was not in any way looking for it at the outset of my project, but as the months went by and the more time I spent in the company of Muslims, the more attuned I found myself becoming to the Islamic way of thinking. I grew comfortable in mosques and soon looked forward to visiting them. I began to think that religious conservatives sometimes had a point when they railed against Western decadence and self-centredness. I even found myself agreeing with movements and campaign groups that were labelled ‘extremist’ by officialdom. I consciously allowed myself to be drawn in, eager to discover how close to Islam I could come without taking the plunge of actually converting. In the summer of 2016, much to the amusement of my young children, I fasted for the entire month of Ramadan, one of the five pillars of Islam.

I did all this partly out of private curiosity, but also out of a conviction that if Britain, as a society, wants Muslims to integrate, the rest of us will have to meet them half way – because the process cannot possibly succeed if it is treated as a one-way street. Governments have worried for years that mono-ethnic (and mono-religious) enclaves in our inner cities can become breeding grounds for extremist ideas, but as I discovered, these enclaves are only partly created by ethnic groups choosing to cluster together. The phenomenon of ‘white flight’, as Anglo-Saxon natives stereotypically get fed up with the smell of curry, sell up and move out, is a major factor too.

‘Politicians and policymakers need to encourage white British residents to remain in diverse areas; to choose, rather than avoid, diverse areas when they do relocate,’ said the noted expert on social cohesion Professor Ted Cantle. ‘We’ve never sold the idea that mixed communities are more exciting places to live, with more going on.’⁶ Professor Cantle’s words echo a famous verse in the Koran, which says that human diversity is a gift from God – and who is to say that it is not?

Mankind! We created you from a male and female,

and made you into peoples and tribes

so that you might come to know each other.⁷

Interaction with British Muslims was, for me, more than ‘exciting’. I found it culturally and spiritually enriching. The more I saw of Muslims, furthermore, the less alien they and their religion seemed to me and the more apparent our commonalities became – and I found this strangely reassuring, a calming antidote to the uncertainty and fear of our troubled times. At the same time I was also, as a writer, frankly overwhelmed by the breadth of British Islam. The year of research I gave myself turned out to be not nearly enough to explore it all, or even to move far beyond its Sunni south Asian iterations that form the centreground. Readers will therefore find almost nothing in this book about, for instance, the country’s half million-strong Shia community, or the small but influential Ahmadiyya. A comprehensive survey would probably require separate sections on the country’s communities of – to name just a few – Turks, Iraqis, Iranians, Syrians, Palestinians, Arabs, Afghans, Somalis, Moroccans, Nigerians and Indonesians.

But I make no apologies for these gaps. Britain’s ethnic and religious variety has confounded many better authors than me. Our cities are famous melting pots of the world: London, obviously, but what about Manchester, a city of 500,000 and another magnet for migrants, where as many as 200 languages are spoken and four in ten young people are bilingual? Some 300 languages can be heard in London but, in proportion to its size, Manchester claims to be the most culturally diverse city on the planet.

Of course such diversity does not thrill everybody. The speed of the rise of Islam, in particular, has convinced many Westerners that it is time for a pause. In January 2017, a poll conducted for the London-based think tank Chatham House found that on average 55 per cent of citizens of ten European countries agreed with the proposition that ‘all further migration from mainly Muslim countries should be stopped’, a finding gleefully re-tweeted by Donald Trump. The percentage of those agreeing in Britain was among the lowest of the countries polled but, at 47 per cent, the difference was still marginal.⁸ So it could be that Brexit Britain will yet choose a different path, closing its doors to more migrants and turning its back on the old national tradition of live-and-let-live.

But somehow I doubt it. There is a reason that the far right has never established itself in this country as it historically has elsewhere in Europe. Our tolerance of others, so often cited by politicians as a ‘fundamental British value’, is indeed a genuine and deep-seated characteristic naturally arising from our long history of cohabiting with different peoples and cultures. The British remain a mongrel race at heart, adaptable and phlegmatic, with a keen eye for cant and no patience for racists. Britons, moreover, have a happy knack for puncturing inter-racial tension with humour – as evidenced, perhaps, by the ‘Urban Clearway’ road-sign I once saw in Slough that some enterprising graffiti artist had prefixed with a ‘T’. This kind of casual, irreverent racism can easily be misunderstood but it is seldom malicious in intent. There is often a big difference between words and actions.

Some time ago, long before UKIP, the EU referendum and the rise of Trump, I found myself chatting to a fishmonger in east London, a proper gorblimey Cockney type whose father and grandfather had run the business before him and whose spectacular window display had drawn my eye. I complimented him on this and remarked that I had never seen some of the exotically coloured fish on sale.

He was a specialist in jellied eels – a local delicacy, he said, that ‘the bloomin’ towel-heads won’t touch. They won’t eat any fish without scales. Don’t ask me why.’

He said that the most popular fish among his Muslim customers were bream and carp – and he was stocking piles of them. He observed that, because of immigration, his neighbourhood had changed beyond all recognition since he was a boy. But I detected no sense of resentment, nor racism, despite his language. The newcomers were valued customers and indeed essential to the survival of the family business. They had different tastes and the fishmonger had simply adapted.

That is the side of the British character to which a government anxious for integration ought to be appealing. But is it? The authorities seem instead to be playing to baser instincts, pursuing policies based not on national traditions of compassion and tolerance but on vindictiveness, suspicion and fear. The authorities’ handling of Mohammed Ahmed and Yusuf Sarwar, two 21-year-old ISIS recruits who absconded from their parents’ homes in Birmingham in 2014, is a case in a point. The wannabe jihadis knew so little of the religion they intended to fight for that, before their departure to Syria, they packed a copy of a cheat notes book called Islam for Dummies. Once they got there they soon grew disillusioned with the war and signalled to their parents that they wanted to come home. The nearest ISIS permitted Yusuf Sarwar to get to the front line was as an ambulance driver, picking up dead bodies from the battlefield. He and Ahmed were not Islamist terrorist material but naive young men who had made a very stupid mistake.

Yusuf Sarwar’s mother, Majida, went to the police, who told her that her son – whose grandfather had fought in the British army – would be leniently treated if she encouraged him to return. Instead he was arrested, tried and sentenced to twelve years and eight months in prison.

‘This is not justice,’ a tearful Majida told reporters. ‘What kind of justice is this? They said I was doing the right thing, that when my son came back they would try to help, but this terrible sentence – all they have done is to set me against my son.’

Yusuf’s punishment was not just ethically uncomfortable, it was also tactically obtuse, because genuine terrorists will never be caught without the cooperation of the communities from which they spring.

‘The police say “mothers come forward”, you can trust us, we will help. But now they will see what happened to my son. What kind of person would go to the police if they think their son will get twelve years in prison?’⁹

With all the undoubted problems confronting our astonishingly multicultural society, living in an ever more crowded land, Britons face a stark choice: to insist that people think and behave alike, or to find new ways of living with our differences. Some of those differences may be unpalatable but, in the end, the diversity for which our cities are globally famed is surely something to celebrate and defend, not fear and destroy. Patience, understanding, humanity, humour: they are all qualities in short supply in Trumpland. But they need not be here – and I know which version of al-Britannia I prefer.

Britain First

Dewsbury, West Yorkshire

IT FEELS, THE photographer next to me agrees, like the barricade at Rorke’s Drift just before the first attack in Zulu. The waiting police have been joshing each other to ease the tension, stamping their feet against the cold, but they fall silent as the chanting begins up the hill and out of sight in the station car park, their helmets swivelling in unison towards the source, breath rising in the raw winter air.

A sergeant chivvies his men into a straighter line. There are hundreds of them in Dewsbury today, a glittering wall of hi-vis jackets lining both sides of the narrow road down into town. Some have been bussed in from as far away as Newcastle, a hundred miles to the northeast. There is a long history of street violence here and the council has taken no chances.

The chanting gets louder, a well-drilled call and response routine full of menace. At last a wobbling motorcycle crests the hill, its flashing blue light bouncing off another phalanx of day-glo policemen, who are forced to bunch up by the narrowness of the street until their shoulders are touching. With their black gloves clasped before them, they advance towards us as slowly and as poker-faced as undertakers. The little press pack fans out into a thin line across the bottom of the hill and opens up on this irresistible target with volleys of shutter clicks.

Behind and above them waves a mighty forest of flags. The red-and-white of St George predominates, although there is a Saltire in there too, and a red Welsh dragon. Britain First, the marchers call themselves. The flags are a good trick. There are only a couple of hundred marchers but they seem far more numerous, like the vanguard of some mediaeval crusade. They are, perhaps, Britain’s most active far-right organization, who like to boast of their 1.3 million Facebook ‘Likes’ – and they are regular visitors to this unfortunate West Yorkshire town. In the middle of the front row is their leader, Paul Golding, a heavy-set man from Swanley in Kent, who once threatened to defile the site of a new mosque in Dudley by burying a pig under it. His blond hair is closely cropped and he is dressed like a respectable businessman in a smart dark overcoat, a white shirt and blue tie.

His sidekick, the flame-haired Jayda Fransen, is easily recognizable from the movement’s many online videos. She is brash and opinionated with a talent for outrageous publicity stunts, a talisman for Britain First’s mostly male members who call her ‘our very own Boadicea’. Their agenda is not sophisticated. Britain, they say, is a Christian country for Christian people, and they are intent on reversing what they perceive to be the creeping Islamization of the country. The message is well reinforced today by Jayda, who is literally shouldering a large white wooden cross. She starred in one of their most viewed YouTube videos in which she led a ‘Christian patrol’, complete with an army Land Rover, down Brick Lane in the heart of east London’s Bangladeshi community, distributing ugly leaflets and confronting women in veils with veiled threats.

The photographers point and click, point and click, holding their ground as the cavalcade descends. A number of white working-class clichés are on show now – the unsubtle tattoos, the shaven heads, the beer bellies and bulldog necks. I zoom in with my camera on a pair of tall Doc Martens boots painted in the colours of the union flag. As the front line reaches us I race ahead to get another view, down into the pedestrian zone between shops all firmly shuttered for the morning. Knots of Asian men stand about, hunched in their hooded parkas against the cold, closely watched by yet more police. They are the reason for the march today – representatives of the community that Britain First says has taken over and ruined this ancient English town of 60,000.

It isn’t hard to see why Britain First might think that. Few communities in Britain have undergone such dramatic demographic change since the 1960s when the first Asian workers arrived to work in Dewsbury’s famous woollen mills. Today the town contains twenty-six mosques, and whole suburbs, notably Ravensthorpe to the west and Savile Town to the south, are almost entirely populated by Asians.

The uniforms of all the armies in the world were once made in this corner of Yorkshire, according to local lore. The town is thus literally a part of the fabric of the nation. Dewsbury was the centre of the ‘Shoddy and Mungo’ industry, an early nineteenth-century method of recycling old rags or rejected inferior cloth into new wool. The landmark Machell Brothers’ Shoddy and Mungo mill, although long since converted into flats, retains its sign in foot-high letters a hundred feet wide. The sign describes the raw materials: mungo was Yorkshire for ‘mustn’t go’, while shoddy has since entered the English language.

Dewsbury presents other impeccable English credentials, including very early Christian ones. A Saxon minster church stands on the banks of the River Calder on the spot where, according to legend, St Paulinus, the first Bishop of York, preached in the early seventh century. So the crosses brandished by Jayda Fransen and the others do have a kind of resonance here – as does their demonstration itself, in fact, because Dewsbury is no stranger to working-class protest. During the Industrial Revolution, the town was a noted centre of Luddite and then Chartist agitation.

Since the 1960s, however, once proud and prosperous Dewsbury has declined and become notorious not just for racial discord, poverty and drug-related crime, but terrorism. And it seems that everyone in Britain, not just the far right, blames the Muslims for that. The town is perhaps the classic symbol of all that has gone wrong with Muslim immigration. A Britain First march in such a place seemed an excellent starting point for my research, therefore. I hoped that an understanding of what has happened to Dewsbury, and how, would start to unlock for me many of the mysteries of al-Britannia.

The undisputed hotspot for terrorists is the suburb of Savile Town, the onetime home of Mohammad Sidique Khan who led the 7/7 suicide attacks on London Transport in July 2005. Two ISIS recruits also came from here, including Britain’s youngest suicide bomber, 17-year-old Talha Asmal, who blew himself up in northern Iraq in June 2015 under the nom-de-guerre Abu Yusuf al-Britani. Asmal was accompanied to Iraq by his best friend, Hassan Munshi, also 17; Hassan’s older brother, Hammad, became Britain’s youngest convicted terrorist following his arrest in 2006, aged 15, on his way home from school with a pocket full of ball bearings, and notes on martyrdom and explosives manuals hidden under his bed.¹

It is not from Asians that the trouble comes today, though, but from two white demonstrators, one of them a teenager with spiky blue hair, who try to push through the cordon as the march turns the street corner. They have broken away from today’s counter-demonstration by the leftwing organization Unite Against Fascism, whom the police have corralled in the town square. The pair are easily halted and bundled backwards into an empty doorway, the blue-haired boy squeaking, ‘Who protects the fascists? Police protect the fascists!’

The press photograph the police photographer who takes their mugshots. The marchers grin and whip out their smart phones to film the scene as they pass. It is an odd surveillance-society moment. About the only people not taking photographs are the two under arrest, who can’t because their arms are behind their backs.

It starts to rain as the rest of us eventually disgorge into the main square. The police fan out into a giant horseshoe shape and the demonstrators head for a stage set up by the front steps of an immense, ornate town hall, the most conspicuous symbol of Dewsbury’s wealthy past. I dodge out just in time and take up position under a colonnade by the post office.

The speeches are predictably aggressive. Paul Golding tells the crowd that he is ‘a realist, not a racist’, but then he says that the Koran exhorts Muslims to cut the heads off non-Muslims and reminds us that in Rotherham they have gang-raped 1,400 of ‘our girls’: reason enough, he insists, to ban Islamic culture from the UK.

‘No more mosques!’ he cries, and the audience echoes him: ‘No more mosques!’

Jayda Fransen goes further. She says that the whole of Islam is a violent jihad and that the Muslim god is actually Satan.

‘These Muslims will not integrate,’ she says. ‘They want to take over. But you know what? I’ve had enough of no-go zones, of being called a slapper because I wear the clothes I like, of halal food on the shelves of my supermarket. But we don’t eat halal in Great Britain. Enough! No more! No more mosques!’

There are several distorted references to Christian tradition. Jesus, she says, had the right idea when he drove the money-changers from the Temple of Jerusalem. His table-turning, indeed, was a kind of extremism. ‘And you know what? Great Britain is our temple – and if we have to defend it, so be it.’

Jayda is interrupted at one point by the clanging of a bell high above her. ‘Ah, you hear that?’ she says. ‘Ain’t it lovely? A Christian sound in our Christian country.’

The audience look briefly puzzled – the sound is from the town hall clock, not a church – but such details aren’t important; the crowd still adore their Boadicea, who finishes her speech, no less bizarrely, by leading them in the Lord’s Prayer. The Christian principle of loving thy neighbour as thyself is at no point mentioned.

The wind blasts the square and the rain, the policeman’s friend, turns to hail. All edges and surfaces, the town hall, the flags, the policemen’s caps and helmets, are suddenly softened by a granular white shroud. The crowd, underdressed and already cold, hunker further into their collars. I shelter beneath the colonnade next to an elderly Asian with a beard like a crescent moon, who introduces himself as a local councillor and the town’s postmaster. He clicks his tongue and rolls his eyes at the inconvenience of it all. Tomorrow, he frets, is the last day for self-assessment tax returns and the forced closure of his post office could cause some of his customers to miss the deadline and incur penalties, or even to lose their jobs.

‘These people won’t leave us alone,’ he says, pointing his chin at the bedraggled demonstrators. ‘Dewsbury has been struggling. Half the shops are empty. No one wants to invest here because of our reputation – because these people keep coming back.’

It is no weather for a riot and the sodden demonstrators are soon being shepherded back to the train station. I stand with a gaggle of Asians who watch them go with slow, exaggerated waves of the hand and ironic smiles.

‘Bye-bye,’ says one of them pleasantly. ‘I hope you find employment soon.’

Separated by policemen, the marchers can only scowl. I photograph a marcher in a tatty denim jacket who stares me down and gives me the finger, which makes all the Asians laugh. They are used to the far-right coming to their town and have learned how to scorn them. Unlike the postmaster, they prefer to shrug off the disruption, and having listened to the speeches I can see why, to them, Britain First seems more absurd than threatening. The counter-demonstration at the far end of the square, although much thinned out by the weather, is still going: a faint chant from a small marquee decorated with balloons saying We are Dewsbury. The atmosphere perceptibly lightens as the marchers go. Britain First’s retreat feels like a battle won.

My first impression of Dewsbury, formed on an earlier visit in the winter of 2015, was not a happy one. I see now that I arrived with a set of prejudices that the journalist in me secretly wanted confirmed. The stories I had heard were just so good. Dewsbury was one of a handful of British towns that the banned extremist organization Muslims Against Crusades once proposed turning into an autonomous Islamic Emirate, entirely governed by sharia law. Savile Town, enclosed on three sides by the River Calder, sounded like it was already close to fulfilling that ideal. At the 2011 census, just fourteen of the suburb’s 4,500 residents declared themselves white. My favourite story, although I was never able to stand up, concerned a local primary school that had arranged a fun day out for its pupils in the nearby Yorkshire Dales. The organizers were baffled when, one by one, the parents refused permission for their children to take part. It eventually emerged that they were worried that if their young offspring left town they would realize they were not, after all, living in a Muslim-majority nation.

My guide that sunny winter morning was Danny Lockwood, the founder of a local newspaper, The Press. As the author of an excoriating social history called The Islamic Republic of Dewsbury, he had played the tour guide many times before. He led me on a stroll around the famous town centre street market, with its photogenic sweetie stalls and butchers’ shops selling ‘mucky fat’, the local term for lard. Originally for clothiers, the market has remained in operation for almost seven hundred years, apart from the seventeenth century when it was closed due to plague – and it still draws tourists. Dewsbury was even mentioned by the Beatles in their 1967 film, Magical Mystery Tour, in which one of the magicians announces: ‘The bus is ten miles north on the Dewsbury road and they’re having a lovely time!’

Danny was a big, bluff man, a former semi-professional rugby player in his late fifties who seemed to know everyone, and we made slow progress as he stopped to gossip with the stall-keepers. It all seemed very homely, very Yorkshire. But then he pointed out the many empty shops and the untenanted Victorian glass and iron arcade. The big retailers like Marks & Spencer pulled out years ago, leaving behind clusters of charity shops and cash converters. The town’s five cinemas had all closed. Even McDonald’s had given up and was now a cheap discount store whose proprietors were once caught selling amyl nitrate over the counter. A prominent high street pub lay derelict: ‘Not enough drinkers these days,’ said Danny. ‘We used to have twenty-five pubs. There are only three left.’ In a back street 200 yards from the market we passed a bleached blonde prostitute in skin-tight jeans and a fake fur jacket, then an ancient man creeping along on a zimmer frame.

‘That’s Fred the soldier, that is. He still likes to wear his medals. He’s getting on now, is Fred.’

You could see why Danny, who was born and raised in Dewsbury, might have a gripe. The town centre was hollowed out and had gone to seed. A white population was still clinging on, but it was ageing and would soon be dead and gone. Dewsbury’s future, he acknowledged, was Muslim. Forty per cent of all residents under eighteen, he said, were Asian. It wasn’t just about the pubs. Everywhere we went he pointed out once proud local institutions that had either closed or been converted to new, Muslim uses. A big Victorian church in the town centre had become a mosque, as had the old Liberal Club. Even the former pork abattoir had been turned into an Islamic Centre. (‘We had a good laugh about that one,’ Danny said.) Meanwhile, developers had converted one or two abandoned mills into blocks of des-res flats, but they were mostly still empty, because who would want to move to Dewsbury? In an estate agent’s window there were houses for sale for under £30,000.

It didn’t help that the town’s civic pride had been stripped away in the 1970s by a reorganization of local government, when the police station was closed and the magistrate’s court was moved to Huddersfield. Old-timers like Danny were still bitter about that, but there was no doubting who and what he mostly blamed for the town’s decline. This was a man who had just ghostwritten the autobiography of Tommy Robinson, the Luton-born founder of the English Defence League, of which Britain First is a spin-off.

Dewsbury’s story, I knew, was not unique but followed a kind of template replicated in towns and cities across England’s post-industrial northwest. The fortunes of these places over the last half century were mixed. All have had problems learning to live with their burgeoning Muslim communities, but perhaps none have got it so spectacularly wrong as Dewsbury, the national epitome of a race-relations disaster.

Danny explained how it happened as he drove me towards Savile Town. The first generation of Asians who arrived in the late 1950s were welcome. The heavy woollen industry was enjoying a post-war boom and mill workers were in short supply. But when the mills closed down in the slump of the 1970s, thousands were thrown out of work. The white middle classes began to move out, leaving behind an unemployed underclass dependent on benefits, furious at the Asians who were perceived to have taken their jobs. The National Front demonstrated in Dewsbury beneath banners reading ‘Send them back’ as long ago as 1975.

But the Asian incomers didn’t or couldn’t go home. They brought their wives over and started families – often big families – and began to find work elsewhere. ‘White flight’ led to a glut of houses for sale, which depressed property prices, allowing the new residents to snap up the empty terraced homes. Savile Town became an enclave of Indians from Gujarat, and Ravensthorpe a slice of Pakistan. Many of the former mill workers found legitimate employment – the town is still a major centre of bed and mattress manufacture – but from the 1980s a significant number of their young turned to petty crime, car theft and then to drug-dealing, exploiting links with the subcontinent’s heroin trade. They found a willing market in the region’s impoverished white underclass. Dewsbury was plunged into a spiral of related crime and violence from which it had yet to recover.

‘You see this?’ said Danny, as we drove down a long road crowded with small Asian restaurants and fast-food joints. ‘I’ve counted and there are twenty of them. The funny thing is, there are never any customers. That’s because they’re front businesses. The restaurant trade is great for money laundering.’

The town’s drug problem naturally did nothing to improve race relations. The whites and the Asians blamed each other for the social collapse and retreated further into their respective ghettos. We went through the suburb of Thornhill, which Danny said was 95 per cent white.

Matters worsened in 1989 when, in protest at the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Asian youths from Savile Town sacked the Scarborough pub. The landlord and his regulars, most of whom had been enjoying a quiet game of cards when the mob arrived, were forced to barricade themselves upstairs as the bar was destroyed in an orgy of broken glass and the cars parked outside were torched. A police helicopter watched it all from overhead yet there were never any arrests, which further infuriated the indigenous whites.

‘Savile Town has become a place where policemen tread very lightly – and rarely – where elected white councillors can be attacked by Muslim rivals in broad daylight, and where the kingpins of the drugs trade thrive largely without fear of sanction,’ he wrote in The Islamic Republic of Dewsbury.

There was, he insisted, ‘one law for us and another for them’. The authorities, he explained, preferred to let the Muslim communities police themselves, not, as they often claimed, in a spirit of mutual tolerance and respect for a different culture – the principle underpinning the whole idea of ‘multiculturalism’ – but because to arrest an Asian miscreant was often too much hassle. This was the unintended consequence of the Race Relations Act of 1976. If an Asian youth was stopped by a white policeman for, say, speeding, and the youth turned around and accused him of racism – which the youths almost routinely did – then the officer would automatically be suspended while the counter-charge was investigated, a process that could take weeks.

I later interviewed a retired local police inspector, Phil Tolson, who confirmed what Danny had said.

‘He’s quite right,’ he told me. ‘It’s no good having two sets of standards. But the complaints were so voluble. I think we were scared.’

Born just after the war in the Flatts, a long-demolished slum of tiny, unplumbed back-to-backs, Phil was the embodiment of old Dewsbury, who spoke in a mellow Yorkshire burr redolent of a gentler and more courteous time. I met him in the café of the Sainsbury’s superstore on the edge of the town centre, a new magnet for the town’s white old-timers. An elderly gent greeted him cheerily as he tottered past to another table.

‘He used to be a demon fast bowler,’ Phil observed dryly when he was out of earshot.

A lady customer asked us to watch her handbag while she went to buy a newspaper.

When he joined the force in 1973, he conceded, policing in Dewsbury was rough around the edges.

‘Domestic-violence cases were dealt with by fists, not paperwork. There were a lot of ex-military on the force and they were tough – strict. It was common for people to appear before the magistrate with a bloody nose. It was a bit sharia, actually.’

The Asian community, he said, gave them little trouble in those days. Racism, he acknowledged, was an issue for West Yorkshire police, but he insisted that it was never the Asians but the black communities up in Leeds and Huddersfield who were the worst victims of it.

Also by James Fergusson

AL-BRITANNIA,
MY COUNTRY

A Journey through Muslim Britain

JAMES FERGUSSON

Introduction

1

Britain First

Dewsbury, West Yorkshire