Last Monday, Oldham Council met to consider the results of the inquiry into last summer's street fighting in the town, involving 20,000 young men, mainly of Pakistani origin. The report has 134 recommendations. The last inquiry of that kind was the Macpherson report on the implications of the murder of Stephen Lawrence. That offered more than 170 recommendations. The Home Office promised to implement every one of them with the assistance of Stephen Lawrence's father and Lee Jasper, Ken Livingstone's adviser on race.

I am certain that neither Stephen's dad nor Jasper can answer, even for a million pounds, the question: what is Recommendation 121 of the Macpherson report? Nor, I think, could the councillors and bureaucrats of Oldham, even as they left their meeting, have told you what was proposed in, say, Recommendation 27 of the report on their town.

Why all these recommendations? The aim is to trap activists in a merry-go-round of decisions without significant actions. Far better to have just six recommendations that every child in Oldham could commit to memory. Far better to have a few simple aims so that, in five years' time, people can point at this or that building, to this or that social development, and say definitely whether or not anything has been achieved.

When I made White Tribe, a documentary for Channel 4, I travelled through Oldham to find out what white people thought of the state of race relations. I wrote in this column that I was witnessing apartheid and that it would not be long before a mad bout of violence descended upon the place. There was a stench of decay about the whites who lived in dilapidated council flats. The authorities in Oldham - the same ones who now meet to consider the 134 recommendations - could not come to terms with the truth. Every bureaucrat and his cousin signed a letter of protest to the NS. I was a troublemaker, they said, a mischief-maker who was trying to stir up the sensible people of Oldham.

And then came the avalanche. Young Pakistani men, who had been gerrymandered into cages in northern towns, exploded in a violent attempt to break out of their isolation. Visit Glodwick in Oldham and you will see what I mean. It is all Pakistani. Even those who go to work have little contact with the rest of society. I suspect they know more of some small village in Pakistan than they know about parts of Lancashire or Yorkshire. They are trapped within their community, and the only intellectual life within this enclave is Islam.

Some individuals - small groups, even - have set up home in more cosmopolitan areas or gone out for the odd evening. Look what happened to them: the Leeds United bootboys kicked them into touch. Look at how the club, the Football Association and the courts reacted when an Asian student had his head kicked in as he left a nightclub. The Leeds and England footballer Lee Bowyer was found not guilty; his team-mate escaped prison. Bowyer was welcomed back to football with a handshake from the referee. The whole of Elland Road stadium rose for its heroes. Every single young Asian saw it all on the TV. They can make up their own minds about its significance and about what has to be done.

All they have to guide their thoughts in their dark moments is the imam. Young Pakistani intellectuals do not stay in the cages (Caribbean intellectuals and writers, by contrast, tend now to stay in areas such as Brixton, which have, in any case, become quite chic places to live in); they migrate elsewhere. Consequently, there is no internal discourse to challenge the minds saturated by Islam.

There are parallels with Brixton, 1981. We were trapped under the heel of the police. We had to blast a way out, so that we could go unhindered along the Victoria Line.

I doubt whether the young Pakistanis of the north will await the sittings of their councillors - in effect, their prison officers - to debate the 134 recommendations. They have already struck the first blow and experienced the powerful forces that stand in their way. They will come again.

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