I went home to Middlesbrough to find out why the riots happened

The march was predicated upon a falsehood which everyone taking part knew was a falsehood.

But that didn’t seem to matter, so long as they got a dust-up with the Old Bill and the chance to put through the windows of a few “ Muslim ” houses.

In the end 400 or so inchoate yobbos, or yobbo fellow travellers, caused mayhem in my home town for reasons which, before the march, were never openly articulated.

The reaction of most Middlesbrough folk was one of revulsion at the mayhem, but also a certain realisation that this sort of confrontation had been brewing for an awfully long time.

In 2001 , after the riots in Oldham and Bradford , a government inquiry suggested that Middlesborough was named as a future tension point’.

Middlesbrough is the only town in the country where the number of resettled asylum seekers make up more than one in 200 of the population.

Pakistani and Bangladeshi population has grown enormously and within many wards easily outnumber the indigenous inhabitants.

Whites have dispersed to pleasant suburbs such as Nunthorpe and Marton , the impoverished to the often rank, often drug-ridden estates such as Pallister Park .