Gorton and Denton

Grassroots activists fight back against hard-right division

- Chris Osuh

‘I don’t want to talk about him,’ Selina Ullah says, when asked what she thinks of Matt Goodwin, the GB News presenter running for Reform in tomorrow’s Gorton and Denton parliamentary byelection.

Ullah would rather talk about the hope she took from the national reaction to the murder of her brother, Ahmed - and the memorial campaign afterwards - in the same Greater Manchester constituency in 1986.

“There was revulsion,” she says. “There was such an outpouring from people from all backgrounds who stood by us. [National Union of Mineworkers] representatives came to demos. An elderly miner from Newcastle gave me a badge and said: ‘Wear it with pride.”

Ahmed, a “bright, popular” boy from a British Bengali family, was 13 when he was stabbed by another 13-year-old, Darren Coulburn, in the playground of his high school in Burnage, the suburb on the southern boundary of the present constituency. A day earlier, Ahmed had intervened as Coulburn bullied another Asian boy. Coulburn was jailed indefinitely.

A public inquiry concluded it was a racist murder. It was a watershed moment for anti-racism in education and community relations.

Ullah now fears solidarity is being weakened as people become “desensitised” to “Islamophobic, racist or homophobic comments”.

“We're not horrified that somebody can say these things any more,” she says. “And that means a worse thing can happen. The public’s tolerance level of what is acceptable is changing.”