In making my most recent series for Channel 4, White Tribe, I visited Oldham. I later wrote my New Statesman column (28 June 1999) on the town, expressing how it was very divided along racial lines, "and dangerously so". The headline was: "Why I left Oldham with a feeling of dread."

I had interviewed working-class whites who painted a picture of social neglect and, if I may dip into the lexicon of political modernity, social exclusion. They heaped their hostility on young Pakistanis. Their language and their attitudes were openly racist but, they insisted, their feelings did not extend to Indians or West Indians.

Pakistanis, they said, were beating them up. The Asians issued forth from their communities in bands, armed with knives and baseball bats at the slightest racial taunt and let fly against their persecutors.

It used to be the other way round. In relatively prosperous days, when the textile mills provided almost full employment, Paki-bashing competed with football as a sport. The booze flowed at the weekend - laced, no doubt, with chicken tikka masala - and the whites liberally dished out a good kicking to their fellow Asian workers in the mills. Whites had the best jobs; Asians slaved on the night shift. The wage differential underpinned social superiority. I got the impression that Pakistanis were saying: "It's our time now."

Areas had become exclusively Pakistani, and apartheid was reinforced by those who managed huge government regeneration funds. Every current in the right-wing fascist movement found a home in this mess, the most dangerous being the political psychopaths in Combat 18.

I predicted racial violence. I saw no sign that local leaders appreciated the dangers. Sure enough, those leaders replied the next week, in terms bordering on abuse. A letter signed by five of them - the leader of the council, the chief executive of the NHS trust, the chief executive of the chamber of commerce and the principals of two colleges - accused me of "meaningless, judgemental assertions". Oldham's people, it said, integrated well; there were no tensions, no violence, no racial conflict.

The letter included the kind of paternalistic nonsense that could come only from those still steeped in the colonial era. "Our communities," its authors wrote, "are very complex, with almost one-fifth emanating from the Asian subcontinent, and it's true that many are young and some get excited."

Excited, indeed! The previous week I had written: "Now a new generation of Pakistanis has grown up. Those who saw them at cricket's World Cup will know what I am talking about. They are extremely solid as a social group and aggressively so." Aggressive, not excited. To describe them as "excited" is to dismiss a serious social phenomenon with frivolity and contempt.

And what happened in that God-forsaken town 22 months after this letter was written? Race riots. I repeat: race riots. Oldham experienced the largest mobilisation of police in its history because the National Front had called a demonstration to set out its wares for the election campaign. The Home Secretary banned the demonstration. I have no doubt that, in some close huddle with the local police, those letter-writers who had been so confident of the town's stability nearly two years earlier had a part in advising Jack Straw to take that decision.

There followed open battles on the streets of the city between whites and Pakistanis. Later, white Oldham football fans organised themselves to fight back, and then a white pensioner was battered and bruised by "an excited" Pakistani.

Oldham illustrates much that is wrong with race relations in this country. Those who are in charge of communities in the inner cities know little about the people whose lives they are responsible for: who we are, where we come from, what we aim at. Even some black leaders have no idea. We are governed by hit-and-miss operators.