An Open Letter to Rochdale Councillors

Dear Councillor,

I am writing to you not as a representative of a political party, or of a particular ward, or because you happen to have been born with skin of a particular colour, but as someone who was elected to represent the people of Rochdale.

Two weeks ago the Rochdale Observer reported that a thug who had been ‘disrespected’ in ‘his country’ organised a gang of about twenty males who were armed with weapons such as knuckledusters, claw hammers and an axe to attack four men working as tree surgeons.  One of the men had his hand hacked off in the attack.  Before the attack the four men had been called ‘white bastards’.

Since at least the late 1980s Rochdale Council has operated an ‘anti-racism’ policy in its schools, has fair employment practices to combat discrimination and has a public stance which gives voice to these.   Why then has there been no words of condemnation of this horrific attack and the term used by the attackers?

It suggests to voters that our councillors are among the few people in Rochdale who do not believe that if a gang of twenty white men had attacked four men of asian origin and had preceded the attack with the term ‘black bastards’, it would have been roundly condemned by all our councillors and received massive publicity both in our local Rochdale Observer and in the national press.

If the complete silence from councillors and the Council as a body, and the evident reluctance of the local press to give adequate prominence to the underlying nature of the attack, is an attempt to promote community harmony it is the most ‘cackhanded’ move I can imagine, because its effect will be to do precisely the opposite.  Silence may seem an effective strategy in the short term, but what will your response be the next time our town has a group marching through it whose raison d’être is the promotion of disharmony between communities?

What is remarkable is that this attack has been condemned and aroused more interest in the surrounding towns of east Lancashire, than it has in the town in which it happened.

In the name of common decency I call upon all councillors, both individually and collectively, to condemn this attack and the language which preceded it, by bringing a motion to this effect before the full Council at its next meeting.

Les May

Rochdale