From behind the counter of his chippie, Tanner Ahmed is wrestling with the notion that the regular stop-off point for fans attending Luton Town’s nearby football ground could be in a “no-go zone” for white people.
“The whole point of setting up was to cater for thousands who were coming through here every week, especially in the first year when the club was in the Premier League,” said Ahmed, affectionately known as Mr T, in the Bury Park area, a predominantly Asian district of Luton.
Outside, on the day after a shadow Conservative Home Office minister had claimed there were “no-go zones” for white people in Luton, there was a hum of activity on Dunstable Road, a thoroughfare lined with restaurants, jewellery stores and shops selling pakoras and other snacks. Further along, shoppers of different races trundled trolleys through the car parks of Sainsbury’s and Lidl.
Blake Stephenson, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire, who lives in a village 15 minutes away from Luton, had claimed at the Tory party conference on Monday that the town was “a very dangerous place” where some communities “live in ghettoes”. “There are parts where white people won’t go,” he said. “They are like no-go zones.”
His comments have been roundly condemned in Luton, but they echo the longer-term far-right framing of the English town as a poster child for the supposed dangers of Islamism and multiculturalism.
As the home town of the far-right activist Tommy Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, it is also where the English Defence League (EDL), the street movement he used as a springboard to semi-celebrity status in likeminded circles, was launched. International far-right figures have eagerly seized on his depiction of the town. The Australian senator Pauline Hanson joined him there in July for a walkabout filmed by a major Australian TV network.
The 2021 census found that 54.8% of Luton’s population were non-white, making it one of four places outside London at that time where the majority of the population was from minority groups.
A day after Stephenson’s comments, there was little sign if any that Bury Park was a place where any group might fear to tread – even those giving out parking tickets.
Among a smattering of white faces on Dunstable Road was a traffic warden, who declined to give their name but said: “I’ve always felt perfectly safe, and if ever there has been a minor incident, generally a member of the public or a shopkeeper has come to my aid.”
Joshua Bozier, 36, a homeless man, said: “To be honest, I feel safer here in Bury Park than in the town centre. I know everybody here, whereas I’ve been spat at and urinated on in the centre. I’ve lived all over and Luton’s not what it’s made out to be.”
He said Robinson “spilled a lot of shit”, but he did point to the past conduct of some Islamist activists in the area, who in 2009 demonstrated against the Royal Anglian regiment’s homecoming parade from Afghanistan.
Only a tiny proportion of the town’s Muslim community were involved, but the incident became a useful symbol for the far right.
Dr William Allchorn, an associate professor at Richmond American University and an expert on the far right, said the relationship between the EDL and the Islamist activists “was mutually reinforcing and for people looking for a European example of the supposed consequences of multiculturalism, Luton came with an unusually ready-made set of images, personalities and stories.
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“A series of confrontations occurred at exactly the moment when a new anti-Muslim form of street politics was developing, and an unusually effective political entrepreneur in Tommy Robinson was able to turn those local events into a national and eventually international story.”
Sarah Owen, the Labour MP for Luton North, accused Stephenson of pushing the same “rightwing nonsense” as Robinson. The police and crime commissioner for Bedfordshire, Labour’s John Tizard, wrote to the Tory MP to say: “These statements are not supported by evidence and bear a troubling resemblance to far-right agitators seeking to divide communities.”
Luton’s independent mayor, Javed Hussain, said he was baffled by Stephenson’s claims as he strolled through Bury Park, pointing out Christian, Sikh and Muslim places of worship and emphasising local regeneration.
“I’m at a loss to know why he is saying this because Luton is a very multicultural, diverse town, as well as very vibrant one, so it’s disheartening,” he said.
“Yes, in this area there may be a large number of people from an Asian background, but people from all over do travel here for all sorts of reasons, whether to shop or eat.”
Research by the council has also found that cohesion was strong enough for the town to avoid the fractures that led to violence in other English towns in the past, though there were warnings that more needed to be done, such as broadening cultural experiences for school pupils.
Not unsurprisingly, community relations are never far from the lips of local policymakers. While proud of the aspirational ethos among second- and third-generation British Asians in Luton, including his own family, Hussain said: “Look, if there was something I wish we could do more of, it would be to support children from council estates that are predominantly white. There is always more to do.”
