The fear of racist attack was so real you could smell it. Black kids were battered by whites until the early 70s when our numbers began to grow and, emboldened by Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Rastafari and the Jackson 5 who were kicking the Osmonds' candy asses all over the charts, we decided to fight back. It made virtually no concessions to the great campaigns against racism of the 70s and 80s. Education, employment and policing policies were imbued with a crude racism that would have been considered intolerable elsewhere. The experience of my friends who still live in Oldham provides proof.
Mental illness is rife.
Friends who left school with me in 1976 have never worked. Over half will have become career criminals and those left will be strung out on crack or heroin. A community was devastated by racism, destroyed by lack of opportunity and left to rot in the twilight zone of the urban underclass. The Bangladeshi community in Oldham is following the path trod by the Caribbean community 20 years earlier. I see lots of echoes of our own experience.