If things were to go truly, badly wrong, out of all of Britain’s big cities, they could probably go the worst in Birmingham. But so far it hasn’t — whilst it is plagued with the same problems of crime and social dysfunction as any other urban area in England, the nation’s second city, once the most dynamic bit of the world economy, usually manages to go unremarked upon.

But on Monday, as England appeared to be on the verge of descending into a spiral of racial violence, the terrible realisation dawned on the West Midlands police that moment they had most feared might be at hand.  As has been the case continually since disorder began in the wake of the Southport atrocity a week earlier, rumour swirled on Whatsapp; this time suggesting that a far-right mob was on its way to the Bordesley Green area. Given the events of the previous twenty four hours, it was not at all implausible. 

Senior officers engaged in some emergency community outreach with “leaders” of the Muslim community

The sheer diversity of Birmingham’s economy in the mid-twentieth century, dominated by secondary industries and a rapidly growing service sector (until it was strangled by central government) meant that patterns of outward migration from the city to the surrounding counties were more piecemeal than in some of the northern cities, where primary industries collapsed more suddenly.  One consequence of this is that patterns of immigrant settlement in Birmingham from the 1960s onward are more of a patchwork quilt than a blanket; more London than Leeds.  The city also retains some pockets of majority white, working class residents, even in very central parts of the city, interlocked with areas that are almost entirely South Asian, or almost entirely black. 

That said, the area immediately to the south of the city centre, around Moseley and Sparkbrook, has a very large Muslim community, predominantly Pakistani Kashmiri, whereas the area southeast of the centre moving toward Warwickshire is more varied, with a bigger white population.  It was around the interface of these two areas that the police expected trouble — and it was there that the Muslim community prepared to defend its places of prayer and learning; and if it came to it, its people. 

The police were already overstretched, and were painfully aware that if it came to the worst, they may have needed to have spread themselves over the many miles of potential intercommunal flashpoints throughout the city.  Following established best practice, senior officers engaged in some emergency community outreach with “leaders” of the Muslim community, to establish what was going on around Bordesley Green, and how they were going to respond to it.  

But here we must leave the story because, other than a small number of videos from mobile phones, we have very little idea what happened next in south-central Birmingham.  We do know that the far-right mob never materialised; they may have sensed the change in the wind of public opinion, or feared the swift administration of justice; they may have become aware that the Muslim community was ready for them and prepared to defend itself.  Or as now appears likely, they may never have existed at all; local MP and Home Office minister Jess Philips suggested that the rumours of the far-right mob was itself spread by the far-right in order to provoke the Muslim community and generally spread bad vibes.  

But, since journalists and members of the press were chased off from the area by a growing crowd of young Muslim men, some of whom appeared to be armed, there is little detail on what happened from professional reporters. We know a man was seriously injured in an attack following a confrontation outside a pub; there was some damage to vehicles; there were reports of cars entering the area being stopped and questioned by elements of the crowd. There were also videos of vehicles, some bearing Palestinian flags out of the windows, driving aggressively around the area, with crowds occupying pavements and traffic islands.  

But there were very few arrests and, despite significant evidence that members of the crowd were armed with dangerous weapons, the police seem to have taken a hands-off approach.  This was obviously in stark contrast to the policing of predominantly white protests and mobs in the days beforehand, and has bolstered the accusation of ‘two-tier’ policing which, despite the best efforts of the government and the police, seems to be sticking. 

Questioned about this on Tuesday, Superintendent Emlyn Richards of West Midlands Police gave an extraordinary account of how the police approached the disorder, and the manner in which it had worked with “community leaders” to coordinate the appropriate ‘style of policing’. 

By Wednesday, the question had started circulating;  who exactly were these “community leaders”; how did they acquire that position, and how might one go about assuming a similar position in relation to one’s own “community”?  The term “community leader” first gained widespread prominence during the New Labour era, and as a result, a lot of people tend to associate it with the sort of bland, somewhat inauthentic third sector organisations that proliferated during that period, in which professional campaigners representing various minority interest groups were paid comfortable salaries to lobby the government to do things it already wanted to do. The New Labour quangocracy, down at the local level.  

But, in the case of Pakistani Kashmiris at least, this is probably a misconception, and it’s worth taking a closer look at the networks and social structure of the community to get a better idea of who it is likely to have been that the police were dealing with; and the questions that raises both for policing, and for social integration. 

Unlike in Indian Kashmir, ethnic Kashmiris only make up a small percentage of Pakistani Kashmir’s population — the bulk of the population being made up of groups who have migrated from further south over the course of recent centuries. In Birmingham, as well as in many northern English cities, much of the Pakistani Kashmiri community is from the Mirpur Valley, and speaks a language descended from Punjabi — and like their language, other aspects of traditional Punjabi culture were brought by the Mirpuris’ ancestors from the fertile plains of the Indus river, up to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir. 

Among these cultural aspects was the clan system that has become known as “biraderi”, meaning brotherhood. These groups are essentially extended family structures, in which individuals are tied in, through birth or marriage, to what researcher Eleanor Hil describes as a hierarchical system of social stratification. Whilst being somewhat comparable to the Hindu caste system (which, like the biraderi, are based loosely around occupation categories), they go far further in providing social and financial assistance in times of hardship; a sense of psychological belonging and well-being, and a framework of mutual obligation. Each individual biraderi group fits into a larger structure, essentially tying each individual into a strict hierarchy within the entire ethnic group, under the leadership of ‘elders’ drawn from the most senior men in each sub-group. 

This type of structure is not at all uncommon across South Asia, however among the Mirpuris, supplanted in the unforgiving and remote mountain valleys of Kashmir and often surrounded by potentially hostile outside groups, what began as a useful extended family system became a critical means of group survival, creating a particularly tightly-knit social structure. Perhaps only Pashtun kinship networks are more rigid. 

The political scientist Parveen Akhtar, who is one of a very small number of UK-based academics to have devoted serious attention to biraderi networks, has described the critical role of biraderis played both in facilitating chain migration to Britain between the 1950s and 1980s, and then subsequently in the lives of the Pakistani communities that settled here. Whereas, back in Pakistan, individuals may have relied on their biraderi for access to electricity, or a telephone; in the UK, they were critical in arranging visa sponsorship, finding employment and accommodation, providing legal assistance, and generally navigating life in an unfamiliar land. 

The consequence was that, rather than a loosening of social bonds as they moved into a more individualistic society, many arrivals from Pakistan came to rely even more heavily on kinship bonds than they had back home. Furthermore, for second generation members of the community, the biraderi also provided the link back to their ancestral homeland – which was of critical importance in facilitating marriages, thus perpetuating the bonds between ‘the two worlds’ – including in many cases, ensuring that individuals resident in the UK also maintained properties back in the old country. 

We’re replicating 19th century colonial systems on the streets of modern Britain

The broader social and political role of biraderi networks in the UK remains controversial, to the extent to which they are discussed at all. The thesis by Eleanor Hill, linked above, is an extremely interesting examination of their role in the Labour party.  Following elections in old northern mill towns, one can occasionally hear muttering about ‘bloc voting’ by Muslim (usually Mirpur Kashmiri) communities in the places where they are highly concentrated; this is an unknowing reference to the biraderi system of electoral patronage.  Furthermore, due to the necessarily patriarchal system of decision-making, as well as the role they play in facilitating marriage along extended family lines, some have made the accusation that these networks hold back the rights of women and girls. 

Coming back to Monday’s events, and Superintendent Richards’ comments about consulting “community leaders”, it seems quite likely that these had been assembles from the elders of the biraderi system, probably through the auspices of local religious institutions (which would be the typical means of assembling such a gathering at short notice).  It is notable that the police haven’t mentioned dealing with ‘community leaders’ for white protestors or potential trouble-makers, even in the relatively tight-knit community in the vicinity of the initial outrage at Southport. 

Perhaps this is because the police prefer to blame that trouble on malevolent political forces from outside “the community”, but a moment’s thought about the structure of English society would tell us that such ‘leaders’ don’t exist in the way they do for groups with strong kinship networks like the biraderis. The closest one might come would be local ward councillors, and it’s very hard to imagine them holding any authority over such people in a situation of acute community anger, or even that their constituents would know who they were. 

It might well be that consulting with the elders was the right thing for the police to do in this situation, which could have gone very much worse than it appears to have done. Unlike the astroturfed third sector types that the police worked with in London’s black communities during the aftermath (but notably not in the heat of the moment) of the 2011 riots; the elders in the biraderi system are genuinely the leaders of their communities, with real authority, and also the ability to cascade information and orders through the entire community very quickly.  

But even casting aside the resentment that it creates regarding lack of even-handedness, it raises some troubling questions about the failure of integration, and the way in which minority communities are policed.  Governance and policing in Britain have, for the last couple of hundred years, been done on the basis of the individual British subject or citizen.  Recognising, even informally, any kind of clan system (as biraderi most surely are) deprives those within them of that individuality – and it confers real authority on people who have not won it at the ballot box. 

It might be that we decide that we’re comfortable with this; after all, Britain retains plenty of pre-democratic institutions of its own, not least our head of state and the upper house of our legislature. The British certainly weren’t shy about using kinship networks as pillars of authority and governance in the Empire – indeed the historian David Gilmartin has described the critical role of the biraderi under the Raj as a structure of colonial rule. 

But this is something that police need to be open about, if it does in fact represent their routine practice. At the very least, it would seem to represent the final abandonment of a strategy of integration for Britain’s Pakistani communities, and a move toward the kind of true multiculturalism that we have often talked about without really understanding what it meant. And what it turns out it might have meant is replicating 19th century colonial systems on the streets of modern Britain.