Fury at MP's remarks on race and crime

It takes a brave individual to raise the sensitive issue of anti-white racist crime in Oldham. The last time it was brought up, in April 2001 after an attack on a 75-year-old D-Day veteran, the town suffered Britain's worst riots in 15 years .

But the local MP Phil Woolas was yesterday driven to warn that "racist" attacks by blacks and Asians on white people were being ignored after two weeks of anti-white crime. The weekend before last, a man aged 30 was racially abused by Asians who beat him with a paving stone and broke his arm, one of three reported attacks on whites by Asians on that day. Last Wednesday, two Asians fired air-gun pellets from a car at a 28-year-old white woman.

The attacks prompted a local detective inspector to say the number of racially aggravated incidents had been "creeping up during the past few weeks". Greater Manchester Police say new figures are not available but in the eight years to 2001, white victims of crime consistently outnumbered blacks and Asians; 71 per cent of violent racial attack victims were white in 1993, 72 per cent in 1997 and 69 per cent in 1998.

Shahid Malik, the only ethnic-minority member of Labour's national executive committee and a former Campaign for Racial Equality commissioner, said Mr Woolas's comments on the issue were "absolute nonsense" and would be hijacked by the BNP.

But Mr Woolas believes it is better to risk drawing attention to crimes than to incur the risks of ignoring them, and allowing the BNP to exploit it.

The view from Oldham seemed to bear out his decision, but not in his language. Tommy Lawrence, 55, a lorry driver, said: "There's one rule for them and another for us whites. There have been at least two incidents against whites I'm aware of and none of the mainstream politicians dare mention it."