White Fox Talking
Talk About Mental Health & Well-Being… Why Not? Mark ‘Charlie’ Valentine suffered life changing mental illness, before beginning a journey to recovery and wellness; the darkness of PTSD transformed by the light atop mountains and beyond. Mark is now joining forces with Seb Budniak, to make up the ‘White Fox Talking’ team. Through a series of Podcasts and Vlogs, ‘White Fox Talking’ will be bringing you a variety of guests, topics, and inspirational stories relating to improving mental well-being. Find your way back to you! Expect conversation, information, serious discussion and a healthy dose of Yorkshire humour!
White Fox Talking
E70: From Homelessness to Community Healing: Imran Shah's Journey
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What happens when hate crime tears through a community? Behind the headlines and political noise, real people suffer lasting trauma that transforms into a "siege mentality," severely impacting mental health and wellbeing. Imran Shah, recently honored with an MBE for his 25 years of work in community cohesion, brings us to the front lines of this battle.
Drawing from his powerful personal journey that began with homelessness at age 15, Imran reveals how misinformation, exploitation, and division are strategically weaponized in today's digital landscape. His Digital Cohesion Unit works around the clock to identify potential flashpoints before violence erupts. "After the Southport murders," Imran explains, "we were contending with two types of social media posts—those from state actors planting misinformation to drive divisiveness, and those from extremist groups trying to get people 'frothing at the mouth.'"
The conversation shifts between deeply personal stories and broader societal observations. When communities lose youth centers, educational support, and economic opportunities, the vacuum is filled by those seeking to exploit vulnerable people. Yet Imran consistently highlights the counternarrative rarely covered in headlines—how everyday people from different faiths and backgrounds come together after tragedies to rebuild and support one another.
Perhaps most powerful is Imran's insight into breaking cycles of hate through education. "The social values are being set at a much younger age now," he notes when discussing programs that teach children about exploitation, radicalization, and community values before harmful influences can take root.
This episode offers a rare, nuanced look at community cohesion work that happens behind the scenes, revealing how personal trauma can transform into purpose when supported by compassion and connection. As Imran powerfully states, "If you're waiting for somebody to come in and help, you're going to be waiting a bloody long time."
Join our conversation that cuts through polarized debates to find common ground in our shared humanity. Don't forget to support White Fox Talking through our website where you can buy us a coffee to help keep these important conversations going.
Hello and welcome to the White Fox Talking Podcast. I'm Matt Charlie-Varntine, and up the side of me is Seba Seba Seba.
Speaker 1:Seba, that's the one my sister called me Seba. Yeah, ah right, that's cool. Why don't you call her Seba? Couldn't have a idea. She's very creative. I'm not. I've just got to cut myself off because I can never remember what you want me to call you. How are you? I'm alright, thanks. Better question is how are you? How are your legs Today? They're a little bit sore. When this goes out, they should be okay. I'm hoping, yeah. So we have the team in the Sheffield Half Marathon and then, after we did the Half Marathon on Sunday, someone was looking on social media and found that part of the Sheffield Half Marathon's listed as one of the toughest in the country. So you picked Leeds for the full marathon, which is one of the toughest in the country.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And Sheffield for the toughest half. Yeah, probably. Well, you know how to pick them Exactly. Yeah, it were good. It were good. It were a good event. Big up to Mike Tomlinson and everyone at Run For All for organising it.
Speaker 1:I said you know the organisation must take ages and there's loads of people there and we met the guys from Erdinger, which was cool. I had some photograph opportunity with them and I'll be honest, the Erdinger Alcohol Free. I smashed them. I smashed a few of them when I finished. You did yeah, because we were a little bit worried before. My tummy's not the best when I'm running, so I was a nil by mouth from like seven o'clock the night before. I had a little sip of water and some Dior lights and then set off running and then by the end of it we're all cramping up. But yes, all done. So thank you to everyone that donated.
Speaker 1:And donated. Yeah, yes, it's all for good cause it is. It's not cheap doing these Cool, so one of the donators was our guest today. If he gets back on his stool, what's happened?
Speaker 2:Did he fall off his stool?
Speaker 1:I'm just adjusting myself Right, as long as it's just adjusting the stool, yeah, the stool. Because it is a video. So welcome, mr Imran Shah. The White Fox Talking podcast is sponsored by Energy Impact.
Speaker 2:How are you? I'm doing very well. How are you?
Speaker 1:Charlie and Seb, we're all good, good to be here. Yeah, I think I'm going to have to put my shoes on. I think I can smell my feet, smell my socks. Bit of a rush today getting in the house and then getting in, at least to get this done. So if you could give the listeners a brief introduction about yourself and then we'll sort of get on with a topic, many topics.
Speaker 2:So my name's Imran. I'm very passionate about my work. I do a lot of work around managing, mitigating and preventing community cohesion issues around public order, preventing things like riots, building harmony between communities After there's been criticality. I've spent about 25 years working on hate crime issues worked back 25 years ago, around 25 years ago around the Bradford riots, the Leeds riots and again recently as well. I've been doing a lot of work over the past few decades on challenging the police around how they deliver services to hate crime victims, and I grew up in Bradford.
Speaker 2:I ended up in Leeds when I was about 12 years old and I am the product of what I would say is interfaith, multicultural empathy and compassion. And growing up I went through a lot of challenging times, but what really got me through a lot of those challenging times and I'm sure it's the same for a lot of us is people that didn't necessarily look like me or come from the same faith background or same nationality background as me giving us a lot of support, a lot of love and that community cohesion support to me, my family and the wider community, and it's why I'm here, because really good people have really been there for me so I've done you for a long time now, aren't I?
Speaker 1:yeah, and it were basically on the leeds night scene and you were doing the sort of medic stuff there, weren't you?
Speaker 2:yeah, I was a. I was a doorman going back about for about eight years and then for about 15 years after that I ran a small project called the community safety initiative and it was basically the local economy basically sponsoring a team of us to basically look after people that become vulnerable, become ill, so dealing with, like first aid, dealing with people that have got mental health issues being a victim of some sort of crime, but also managing vulnerability, especially when it came to violence against women and girls, and helping people to just sometimes get home safely. And I did that for about 15 years due to some very committed and very generous sponsors like Santiago and Atrium Nightclub, sandinista, the Rent Pub, those kind of things. So we had a lot of crossover for about 25 years I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just mention the ones that are still open because we'll ask them for a fee. That's good for a plug fee, but you kept the other work pretty quiet, didn't you really?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think for me coming to work on a weekend was a real change of pace. It was almost quite a subservient role and I really enjoyed helping people there. It was almost quite a subservient role and I really enjoyed helping people. There was a lot of sense of satisfaction. I mean, one case that really stands out in particular was an old lady that that had lived in some rural part of Pontefact and she had an argument with her husband. She must have been in the 70s, never been out of the rural part of where she lived, and she got angry with her husband, got on a bus and said, all right, I'm going to the big, big city, fu, and gone to the top of the arcade and fallen over and felt sorry for herself and us turning up and looking after her, putting a blanket on her and ringing her husband who'd been worried sick about her all day.
Speaker 2:That job satisfaction you get from you know, being able to connect that couple that had been together since they were at school together. You can't put a price on that. We also dealt with lots of things, including stabbings, glassings and bitten off noses and ripped off ears and everything else in between. But it's those kind of jobs that really stay with you. So I really enjoyed coming out on a weekend and helping people and it was very different to my day job so that was my escape. So I kept those worlds a bit compartmentalised, yeah funnily enough, that's where Dave Baker came from.
Speaker 1:Innit Pontifract Came to the big lights of the big city. Yeah, we are looking at the Mental Health Podcast and looking into possibly the causes and effects of hate crime upon people's mental health or those with mental health issues being influenced by hate crime.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm more than happy to talk about that. It's something that I'm quite passionate about talking about and helping people kind of understand the impact of hate crime. I think if you're living somewhere where the circumstances are challenging already and what can sometimes be seen as low-level antisocial behaviour for the family, that have got not a lot of support or they don't have a lot of people being there for them, or they're going through socioeconomic issues, and on top of that, if people are bullying you or, you know, targeting you because of your you know your disability, your gender, your race, your religion, another thousand things in between you, don't you kind of start living under that siege mentality? And there's two cases in particular that I kind of go back to that keep me focused on delivering positive outcomes for those victims, and one of those is called the Fiona Pilkington case and it was many decades ago now and it was a lady with a child that had learning difficulties and they were targeted by local young people for for many, many years and it's countless times. They went to the police countless times. They went to the police countless times. They went to the local authority, the council, et cetera, and they were just let down and devastatingly and heartbreakingly. That woman felt she had nowhere to go and she drove to a car park with her daughter, poured petrol all over themselves and killed themselves in a horrific manner. That is the ultimate failure of, you know, that local resource in relation to policing and council. That's also a failure of wider society, because these are the things that should have been picked up.
Speaker 2:The other case that really stays with me, the Stephen Lawrence case, where it wasn't just racism and, you know, a far right or extreme far right ideology that basically killed Stephen Lawrence. It was also the debacle of how the police didn't take it seriously and how there was massive intelligence failures where even the community were, you know, had left notes saying who the people were and the case was just horribly mishandled. And it took, for example, the daily mail newspaper to say, you know, when the criminal case fell apart because lots of mistakes that were made by the police and the CPS, it took the Daily Mail to say, well, actually the threshold for a private prosecution is a lot lower.
Speaker 1:We're saying you murdered them. Challenges in court? Yeah, I mean. Daily Mail's not known for its balances.
Speaker 2:So that's how bad that was, yeah, so these are the kind of things that when people come to me and they say the police have they picked up on this properly? Or that we don't feel they're managing the case properly, I'm really passionate at making sure that you know the police are looking into and I'd say 99 times out of 100 they are. They just sometimes not great at communicating the work that they, that they're putting into. It is taken very seriously. There's lots of mechanisms in policing, lots of scrutiny from the combined authority, from her majesty's Inspectorate, constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services, also from community organisations and community scrutiny panels like the one one of the ones I deputise at the moment.
Speaker 2:So we really need to understand that for a lot of victims. We need to nip this in the bud, because if a family or a person or an individual is going through this, it's not just that impact of that perpetrator, what they're doing to them, it's how that person feels, devalued by that community, devalued by themselves, and it has a massive impact on your mental health because you're going outside thinking oh my God, have these people got it in for me? Has that person got it in for me? Am I going to feel safe, safe, and you literally live like you feel you're under siege. And that's one of the drivers that we're pushing the police constantly to say we need you to do a really good job on this, because it's in your interest to do so and it's certainly in the victim's interest to do so yeah, I'm just thinking.
Speaker 1:You know the fiona pilkington case what sort of drives people to. I mean, that was that that extreme bullying.
Speaker 2:I think it was extreme bullying. I think sometimes when people are bullying you, they might not even necessarily have an ideology in mind. A lot of it is around ignorance. A lot of it's around lack of education. You know it's that us and them mentality. It's, you know, no matter what happens, you know they might not understand your race or religion and it's, you know, it's always that us and them and that us and them. It just grows over time and if it's not challenged and that education isn't there and those people and we don't find common ground with each other, that's what really is a breeding ground for this kind of crime.
Speaker 1:So I suppose in that case we're looking at it's a hate crime, even though was it white on white, do we think?
Speaker 2:Yeah, though, was it white on white? Do we think? Yeah, but from my understanding, yes, it was. I think it was generally just another group of young people that had been targeting for a very, very long time. But hate crime, you know, it has many facets and many threads to it and different ideologies behind it and I sometimes think we hate crime. At the moment, a lot of people are being purposely, you know, divided.
Speaker 2:If you look back to what happened down in Southport after the horrendous murder of these little girls, we were contending with not just the community tension side of it, the digital side of the thing that was really interesting but also really impactful and hurtful and damaging and divisive was we had two types of social media posts going out.
Speaker 2:One was what we deemed to be from state actors, of foreign governments that were trying to plant misinformation in communities to really drive that, those flashpoints, drive that hatred, divide, that divisiveness.
Speaker 2:And then we also had people that were extreme, far right, that were pushing out posts to kind of motivate people to get start getting frothing at the mouth for us.
Speaker 2:They all hate each other and actually I think sometimes when it comes to a lot of communities, whether it's white working class or whether it's an impoverished community, like, for example, in hails. I think if you look at our educational and social and health outcomes, we're actually we've got a lot of commonality between us, and I think other people are trying to divide us and say societal problems are because of their color, their race, their, their disability, their, their own benefits or they're there, and there's a lot of us and themming and I think, regardless of what community you live in, you could live in two white working class communities and one side of a river could be a division. So it's human nature for us to be divisive sometimes. I just think that at the moment there's a lot of people really trying to exploit that divisiveness for their own political agendas and that could be the same, the same agency, for instance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, possibly putting messages out to both sides just to get that one reaction well, one of the things that we started noting after the southport murders that there was a lot of social media posts going out.
Speaker 2:The state actors ones were really easy to see because the spelling and grammar was really good and in fact they'd try and put a few apostrophes here and there to look like it wasn't going to be very good. But the way they would describe a location or they would decide that they were going to have a protest or a kickoff isn't what the local community would call that and there's never or there's been a history where there's never been that kind of protest there. So you know they don't know the locality. And then the other stuff that went out was for us from extreme far right kind of organisations that were saying you know, we're going to meet here and again you could tell them because again, spelling and grammar wasn't great, but they got the location right and they knew the local personalities. But then also from a left perspective as well, you know there was people out there wanting to challenge that stand by those communities and say, and I think sometimes that was well-intentioned, but actually that actually sometimes would fuel that fire as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that'd be me. I'm terrible with commas. I'll put them all over the place.
Speaker 2:I either don't put any of them Fake news from Charlie. Well, I never finished school, so trust me I. I never finished school, so trust me I'm not far behind you. Bloody hell, there's a lot there, isn't there.
Speaker 1:And is it trying to sort of? I mean, for that Southport thing, I mean the trauma from that. That's people trying to capitalise on, that trauma that's going to exist anyway. So it's a result of an incident like that, that trauma's going to be widespread.
Speaker 2:I think it is. And again, if you've come from a country or a part of the world where there's been conflict, you're going to feel like you're back in that area. You're back in that siege mentality. You're going to feel like you're going to feel marginalised, you're going to feel threatened, you're going to question whether your kids are going to be safe on the street. But also a lot of communities that are being kind of pushed into this hatred as well. They're also vulnerable in their own ways. They're disenfranchised. There's a lot of poverty in those communities as well. And actually I think sometimes both these communities, no matter where you are on that political spectrum, we've got more in common. I think Joe Cox said it better We've got more in common than we don't. We've all got a lot of commonality. We've all you know's been. You know, local services have been slash, jobs have been, jobs have gone, redundancies have gone up. So there's a lot of vulnerability out there for a lot of other people to go out and exploit.
Speaker 2:What I'd like to focus on is those stories. So, for example, the southport story, story that happened and the impact and the devastation from that was that the next day, you know, there was hotels that were attacked. There was places of worship, but actually the next day, you know, there was hotels that were attacked. There was places of worship, but actually the next day, if you look at what happened, a lot of communities came together and they were there to support each other and I don't think the press gave that enough coverage. But there was people that were from the Jewish faith, from the Muslim faith, from the Christian churches and we all got together and we were there for that community. So there's always going to be divisiveness, but I think the vast majority of people just want to get along with each other and just, you know, be there for each other.
Speaker 2:It's not a direct comparison, but I remember years and years ago there was a Kirkstall Floods and there was a really good poster. I remember this one gentleman from London just basically drew a map of every tool hire place on the way to Leeds and basically hired as many water pumps as he could and shovels and different machinery that he could. He just turned up in Leeds Churches, turned up, people from Beckett University and Leeds University just turned up, and it was the Islamic society, it was the Jewish society, it was across the board of intersectionality. There was people from different faiths and different nationalities just turned up to help One guy who ran a little caravan with a takeaway for festivals, festivals. He turned up and he was just giving free coffees and teas and I remember the poster and it was a poster of every race and nationality you can imagine just turned up to help these business owners in kirkstall after businesses had been devastated from the floods, and it said the caption read something like here for the entire community hashtag stronger together, bnp, where were you Fair enough?
Speaker 2:That's the thing you know. Whenever there's criticality or whenever there's you know, some sort of a community cohesion issue or there's, you know there's been devastation after public audit issues it's always all the people that come together the next day. And you know, if you look on social media and you were to judge society by that, you think everybody hates each other. What actually you see is two polarizing opposites of a spectrum. The vast majority of people are just getting on with things in life that you know. They want to raise their kids, they want to go home, you know, put food on the table, just want to get on with the neighbors, just want to get on with life. And that's what real life is.
Speaker 1:Social media is actually just a magnification of two opposite ends of how people feel I suppose when you look at like I was saying about the press, with selfport, they're trying to sell papers out that are not really bothered. It's all about profit and loss and that their profit matters more to them, influencing somebody who might be disillusioned and, like we've like we said before went and ate us. Well, they've got more than me. So I want, want a piece of that, and especially in these times where services are being cut.
Speaker 2:Yeah, couldn't agree more. And it's also what political agendas are behind those newspapers. What purposes and what interests do they serve and what section of society do they serve? You have to understand. I remember I mean the other players, it's not just newspapers, it's things like Yap App and Leeds Live. And I remember I mean the other players. It's not just newspapers, it's things like Yap App and Leeds Live. And I remember some local, you know, media publishers like that, like a couple of years back, did a story in Hare Hills and it was something like we spent 24 hours on the worst street in Leeds. And you're right, you know, if you were to look at some of the-.
Speaker 2:It's clickbait isn't it.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's massive clickbait. But we did a bit of research and 11 of the 15 stories they'd done about hails were absolutely horrendous and it's not like they told lies. They did take things that I think were taken out of context. Actually, some of them were quite factual. But you can't just base a whole story and narrative about a community based on their worst moments.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of amazing people in Hare Hills and if you look at Halter Moor and Seacroft and Swarcliffe and Bramley and Armley, there's a lot of poverty in these places but fundamentally there's a real sense of community. I've got a friend that lives in an area called Kippax and they're quite a well-to-do community. There's no crime, nobody talks to each other, checks on their neighbors, nobody is there for each other and but in these communities where there's poverty, there's a communal response to everything. We all look after each other and I think covid was a really good demonstrator the amount of projects and youth clubs and faith places whether it was churches, synagogues, seat temples that actually fed each other, supported each other. You know, rang into each other, checked up on each other, supported each other. You know, rang into each other, checked up on each other.
Speaker 2:That's not what Leeds Live is, you know, or Yap App is portraying about these communities. Don't get me wrong, they're not making lies up, but there's a lot of positivity. And one of the things that we did get them in a room and say with the local MP and local teachers and local activists and people that are doing some really good community work, to say you've got a right to shed a light on these stories, because sometimes you shedding a light might put pressure on the local authority to spend some money in that area. But also, why don't you focus on the positives of these communities as well?
Speaker 1:Yeah, at least give them equal amount of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can't just have one side of the story. You need to have both sides or give that community an opportunity to provide a counter narrative, which is what good journalism is. So you can't just point out the bad points of something without actually talking about the good things in that community. And if you don't, this is where those you know like I was saying with some of these newspapers and media broadcasters is what is their agenda behind that story? And if you want to be a neutral journalist, then you present both sides and let people make up their own mind, not sensationalizing clickbait.
Speaker 1:One issue when there are these reports, then this is where we can get into one influencing people that are disenfranchised, influencing them, and then we start getting into a tit-for-tat situation and it's just building and building and building I mean.
Speaker 2:When I say disenfranchised, I mean a lot. To kind of break it down a little bit If you look at three issues child sexual exploitation. You look at people that are criminalising children and you look at people that are radicalising young people or children, whether that's extreme far left, extreme far right, whether that's animal rights, whether that's you know, some sort of political issue that's going on. The ideologies themselves and the outcomes that they're looking for are very different from each other, but the methodology is exactly the same. Find people that don't have a sense of belonging. Find people where there's a vulnerability at home, like one of the parents might have an addiction issue, there might be domestic abuse in that household, there might be some sort of a modern slavery situation going on, but there's a level of exploitation going on and the young people or the vulnerable people or somebody in that house that might have some sort of neurodiversity, don't feel like they belong. But what happens is when people want to exploit people, they will make them feel good. They'll say you know, they're not your family. We're your family. Here's a mobile phone, or you don't get a school dinner every day. We're going to look after you.
Speaker 2:But what they don't realise at some point there's going to be a price for that and that price is going to mean some form of exploitation, and I think what's happened with the cost of living crisis and a lot of the tensions that have happened after Brexit as well, is that issue has been magnified and I don't think the sense of community that we used to have 20, 30 years ago I don't think we've got that anymore.
Speaker 2:And on top of that you've got social media and if you look at a lot of these ideologies and vulnerabilities that were exploited, I think a lot of that's happened during COVID, where there were children in school that were on things like child in need frameworks or they had a prevent concern about them, that were getting a lot of positive reinforcement, getting a lot of help from their school, but they've had two years or 18 months of being at home in front of the computer and sometimes, where parents don't speak English or parents are literate or parents are busy trying to put food on the table, where they've had 18 months of unadulterated access. People have had access to them to basically rewire their brain into different ideologies and different causes and they've not always been good ones. So that vulnerability to me has only got worse over the past few years and I think it's going to get worse.
Speaker 1:I don't think it's any coincidence that money to social services and, obviously, youth services, community centres, like you say, communities sort of being a bit broken up because there's nowhere to go now for young people is there, and we're not just talking about young people, is there? I mean, there's all the people that's generally financially confined to their homes, aren't they? If they've got homes?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, 100%. I think it's really got worse and worse as time has gone on and every year that cost of living crisis has meant, you know, whether it's the police or whether it's, you know, social services, or whether it's schools or youth centres. You know, I think if somebody, by some magic wand, were to 10x every organisation I've just mentioned, we're going to give you a budget, 10 times more money. I think it would take generations to build up that same infrastructure and to kind of start seeing a change in those outcomes for those young and vulnerable people. I think what also has made a bit of an impact is and I sometimes talk to communities when they, you know they have local community meetings with officers is that how we advocate for those, you know, those vulnerable communities is really important. And you know, say, for example, you know you've got the LGBT community, you've got the Muslim community, you've got the Christian community, you've got people that are charities, that are advocating on issues of health and all of those services. If you imagine them as a blanket, every year the cost of living crisis has made that blanket smaller and smaller and the communities that are really good at advocating for their rights, they pull that blanket towards them. So if you're a police commander and you come into Leeds District on a Monday morning for your accountability meeting to say right, what's going on, and one community has been smashing that 101 button saying actually there's drug dealing going on or there's young people being exploited or there's child sexual exploitation going on, and you are really good at building that relationship with your local inspector or feeding that information into 101, you know. And when that commander goes in onto the district on Monday morning and says, why is it that we've had a 34% increase in you know calls or demand on service in this area? What are you doing about it? But actually that issue might just as well be going on in white working class areas, but they've not really got good at advocating. So sometimes the people that shout the loudest get the resource.
Speaker 2:And I think sometimes this is where that two-tier policing you know allegation comes in. And I think and we talked about this earlier and two examples I'm going to give you I had a 74-year-old male that had been evicted from his house and he hadn't had his insulin in two, three days, hadn't eaten in two days, and he'd been evicted On a Sunday afternoon even though the local council is shut and there's no services available. We managed to stop that eviction and we managed to get him in a hotel overnight and next day get him back in his flat. We had another issue where a young Syrian family had come into the country aged four and eight and it was minus three and they were sleeping in a park because they'd come in on a Friday evening, managed to put a refugee asylum case in, but there wasn't enough time for them to process to get some housing. We managed to get them in a hotel that night or in temporary accommodation within the community or through a local mosque or a church that night. But when these issues play out in a white working class area because there's nobody there that advocates for them as much as we've learned to advocate for those communities, people are falling between the cracks.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you know what a section 60 is. A section 60 is a, a piece of legislation that the police use when a bladed article's been used. So you know. The past couple of years we've had issues where two organised crime groups are fighting against each other. One guy's nearly had his arm chopped off. Well, the police can actually kind of it's almost the way I would describe it is suspend everyone's civil liberties and the way they do that is normally for a police officer to stop and search you, no-transcript, and they are very good at using it liberally because it is a violation in some ways if you think about it in a societal way.
Speaker 2:But those Section 60s are also being used in areas like Hare Hills and Chapitre, but also in areas like Altamore, seacroft, swarcliffe and again, why are those Section 60s happening? And the section 60s very specific it can only be used when a bladed or a penetrating injury happens. What that says to me is that those white areas, or sometimes mixed areas, there are a lot of vulnerability there. But I don't hear the same level of advocacy happening there that we do in Hare Hills and Chapelstown. And I think this is where you know we were talking about agendas and political affiliations and you know what media say. These are the communities. I think sometimes that feel like they're not listened to and I think it's down to us. We can't wait for the police and local authority. I think communities need to work together with each other and say this is how we've got more rights and more resource for our community. Maybe we need to be working together so we can get that for you. I just feel that I think some of those vulnerable communities could learn from each other.
Speaker 1:A lot of reporting about homelessness in the white population. I personally think that a lot of that is done to promote or antagonise because if you look at the mental health issues that go on with people that are homeless, some of them just don't want to be confined, yeah. I think an argument is often that ex-servicemen that go on with people that are homeless, some of them just don't want to be confined yeah, they don't want to. You know, and I think an argument is often that ex-servicemen, yeah, but a lot of these, from what I've read in mental health, mental health resources, a lot of these people just don't want to be around people and in one place.
Speaker 2:But then that reporting comes across as work out where you find homes for these people, when we can find homes for refugees, etc I think you make a really good point and I think again, after the south port murders and other national issues that have played out, I think that's a narrative that is really strongly pushed and I do believe that I think that there's probably there is a lot of white people out there that are homeless and I think you're right to bring that up. What I would say is, fundamentally, our communities are slightly different. So if you look at the Asian community, we've come from countries where there is no NHS, there is no welfare system, so everything we do has a communal response. We have our own internal banking system that operates without any paperwork. I've never heard of it ever being violated. Where somebody's you know taken out, we call it a committee and it's a community. So every Asian business that's done well in this country that are now millionaires or billionaires, that's how they've started their businesses through that committee system. If somebody in my family has a heart attack, people from all around the country will turn up to hospital, which is not great for the NHS. The reason that you know a necessity breeds culture and the reason that culture has happened. So if you're in Pakistan or you're in India and your father has a heart attack. You go to a hospital and say, right, we want the equivalent of £20,000. You as a working class person don't have £20,000. However, you know an uncle from Manchester turning up, an uncle from Liverpool turning up an uncle, an aunt turning up from Leeds. We all put it's 500 quid, 500 quid, 500 quid done. If there's a death in your family, you might not even like your neighbours. That neighbour will empty their house, so the female worshippers and mourners can come to the house, pay their respects and they'll empty the house or put their furniture on the street or in the room and they will come there. The next door neighbours will do the same for the male mourners to come and pay their respect and then you'll find that your brother or your cousin or your neighbour will provide food for the mourners on day one and in some communities that will go on for 10 days. So everything that the Asian community do, we're communal. In what we do, we have a sense of community and I think when there is homelessness or those issues play out in the Asian community, there's a communal response to that. Somebody in the community will put you up for a day. I'm confident that if I got on a plane tonight and landed on Australia, I could go on Facebook to my friends or relatives and I bet you, somebody I'd never met in my entire life will put me up for a month until I get on my feet, until I get a job, until I get a place to live and this country. I think we had a sense of that. If you go back to before the inception of the nhs and the welfare state, we had that here, yeah, yeah, and that that went because we have these mechanism.
Speaker 2:But going back to ex-service personnel, the day you walk out the door from the army you no longer exist. They've got things like the british legion and other places that will help you. But if you've got post-traumatic stress disorder, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, being around people is probably not the easiest thing for you. You've lost a network of I wouldn't say friends, I would say family. You are person no greater next day because all the people that you love. With that you have affinity with that. You have a duty of care to your fellow soldiers. They've gone. They're getting on with their lives, they're getting on with their careers. You have got no one. You're fellow soldiers. They've gone, they're getting on with their lives, they're getting on with their careers. You have got no one. You're moving back into a community where sometimes the only career is criminality or it's a it's a minimum working job and then, on top of that, you are content with your mental health and you're going to go home and people are going to challenge you know where you're going, what's going on in your life, and the mental health support isn't there.
Speaker 2:We all know about the nightmares that ex-service personnel are going through in relation to receiving the right amount of. We've had ex-service personnel nationally who have probably gone through horrific circumstances with multiple limbs missing because of IED strikes, and there's been mistakes made by DWP saying, oh, you're fit to work, yeah, and these people are waiting at home for somebody to come and change their dressings, look after their mental health, look after their physical health, and the Conservatives have got a lot to answer for and I'm here politically in my work. But one of the things I will say the way they've stripped the disability system, the welfare state has really let down ex-service personnel and this is why a lot of them end up on the street with no support. And when your mental health is really bad, it's not easy. The other people that are on the street. They're on the street because of, you know, let's be trauma informed in this.
Speaker 2:They have got gone through you know, childhood exploitation, whether it's been, you know, of a sexual nature, whether they've lived in domestic abuse settings, where they've lived in houses. I mean, some of these kids, even before they're born, set up to fail and it's no surprise that some of these people end up on the street. But a lot of them are self-medicating because they've got mismanaged or undiagnosed health issues. And also, if you look at the prison system, it's full of people that have either had childhood head trauma, childhood trauma in relation to all those things I mentioned around domestic abuse and all those kind of things. But another category of people that we've often missed, and one of the things that's now happening in prisons, is that we're having educational psychologists go into prisons and the amount of people that they're uncovering that have got dyslexia, dyscalcia, autism, asd, asperger's, you know, across the board, all of these things.
Speaker 2:And these were the kids that were called the naughty children in school. They weren't naughty. We failed these children and this is why, and they say, if you have three, I think, mild to mid traumas as a child, I think your outcomes of going into the criminal justice system go through the roof. And it's no surprise. We've got these people on the street.
Speaker 2:And even if you were to give these people on the street a house today, fully furnished, they don't just need a house, they need mental health support, they need to be in assisted living some of them because they are very, very vulnerable.
Speaker 2:They need to be in assisted living.
Speaker 2:They need a support network around them, because what happens is they end up moving into a house and then they're also exploited by their fellow people and I know this because I've lived in a homeless shelter when I was 15, and you will move into those people and because those people have got nothing. The level of exploitation that happens within these settings is unbelievable. So if one of these people are given the keys to a house that's fully furnished, they're also going to be exploited by some of the people that are on the street with them, because they'll all end up in that house. And the next thing you know that house is full of needles, not because they're bad people, it's because they're poorly and they need support. So we've given them the house. That's one part of the support, but a house on its own doesn't change their health and social outcomes. They need a lot more support. They do need to be put into a dignified place to live, but they need the support to go with it. Otherwise they'll just end up on the street again.
Speaker 1:You just referred, then, to yourself living in a homeless shelter. Can you tell us your experience? What's your mind?
Speaker 2:No, it's something that I've kind of hidden for a long time. As I've got older and my children have grown up, I've learned to kind of talk more about. But I grew up in Bradford and, as you know, a lot of British Asians that came to this country in the 60s came here to work in the textile industry or to help rebuild the country after the Second World War. My grandfather worked in the textile industry and so did my father and my uncles. When that economy failed there was a lot of mass unemployment and I don't know if you've watched the TV series the Wire, and season three talks about the Docklands collapsing and how criminality fills a vacuum of employment and again exploitation plays out there. But because those jobs and everything went there, my father went in and out of mental health institutes for 10 years.
Speaker 2:My mother what I would describe now would be a victim of modern slavery. She ended up working in textile factories, you know, making clothes for big retail companies. But she was played a pittance and she worked her fingers to the bone for us to buy a business in Leeds and move here. My father had a lot of mental health issues because of intergenerational trauma, modern slavery, exploitation, and he went through a hell of a lot of physical abuse from his father and my father wasn't a well person so it was really difficult to be around him. So I ended up leaving home when I was age 15 and I was too young to get a flat from Leeds City Council.
Speaker 2:So I ended up living on and off under a bridge in Holbeck for 18 months and I ended up getting a place in opposite middle railway called Prospect House Hostel, and actually living under a bridge was much easier because you were on your own. The biggest thing that you had to battle was the climate and not having food, and I think I owned a pair of trainers that were the front was split open on my right shoe, I had no socks, a pair of jeans and a blue and white striped half sleeve shirt, and I remember in winters the thing that I was most concerned I was really badly asthmatic as a child was whether I was going to die of hypothermia or die of asthma, and I remember going to quicksave and places like that, bringing enough cardboard to sleep under this bridge, and the good thing about being under that bridge was the rest of the homeless community didn't know where you were. Your own community didn't know where you were, and the stigma within the Asian community of leaving that community meant that I didn't get that support network. But I got into this hostel and it was a massive eye-opener for me.
Speaker 2:I remember some of the girls living there might have been sex workers. A lot of the people in there had addiction issues. Some of the people in there were escaping domestic abuse and I can count on one hand the people that were well you know, they were in a relationship with a boyfriend and they'd just recently, you know, gone away. They just needed somewhere to stay until a place came available for them and they weren't there for a very long time. And I remember meeting this girl called Angela and she worked at a pub in Richmond Hill called the U3 Inn.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, she got me a part-time job there, glass collecting and afterwards she would take me to the Richmond nightclub. I can say that now.
Speaker 1:Proper living.
Speaker 2:Yeah, proper living. But what Angela and another lady called Sharon Berkeley did for me was they gave me the benefit of their lived experience and what they were able to do was say things like don't take food from this person, don't take a favour from this person, this person will get you addicted to heroin. This person will have you smoking this by the end of the week and this person will feed you on a regular basis and then one night you'll be in a room and you're going to have to pay for that, and not in money. I'm sure you can imagine what that would have been. So, fortunately for me, people like Angela and Sharon took me under their wing and they were that support network, because as a 15 year old, I don't know if my outcome whether I'd still be on the street or dead or something like that.
Speaker 2:And going back to ex-service personnel that go into settings like that, they don't thrive in those settings. You've been with a set of individuals that have got integrity, they've got honour, they've got a work ethic. You'll see a lot of ex-service personnel. Whatever industry they go to, when they've come out in good circumstances, smash it, because they've been taught to live a regimented life with discipline circumstances smash it Because they've been taught to live a regimented life with discipline.
Speaker 2:But when they go into a place where everyone's a heroin user or drug user or they've got post-traumatic stress disorder or they've been homeless for a long time, that's not the ideal setting for you. A bit like a lot of people that have got mental health issues don't need to be in custody. The police have done a lot of research around you know. People with mental health getting locked up in a custody for 24 hours. It's not good for the police and it's certainly not good for them, and it's the same situation with a lot of these hostels. So I know it sounds like my life's been a bit of a sob story. What I would say is, every time myself or my family have gone through some kind of difficult circumstances there's been I don't know whether it's God, karma, Buddha or whatever God's always sent us amazing people.
Speaker 2:So, going back to my childhood, we had a couple called lionel and margaret and they were ex-missionaries from india and pakistan. Lionel, bless him, had this horrible stammer but he persevered and he spoke urdu. Margaret spoke fluent punjabi and when our family kind of ostracizes for my dad having mental health, they would take us to flamingo land. They would take it to you know, they would take us Howarth Railway and they would come and read scripture with us, Not in the sense to say change religion, but they were your, our community. You might pray to a different God, but you're our community. So, although there's been lots of ups and downs in my life at every turn there's been I've met amazing people that have been there for me and my family, and it's taught me that your support network and your family doesn't necessarily have to look like you, pray like you or come from the same place as you. I just wonder, Imran?
Speaker 1:it's amazing what you do, but where does all this energy come from? I mean, something must have sparked it, because I couldn't do it, because I would feel like I'm banging my head against the wall because I can't fix this, but you seem to have this drive, which is amazing. I suppose that's similar to what I was going to say, so about you know life's. Life's held all these hurdles for you, but from that you've been, you're able to build and come from a place of experience, rather than in a job with a title but not the experience and the knowledge I'm really passionate.
Speaker 2:I love problem solving societal issues. I don't have the answers, and one of the things that my community has always looked at is the police are going to sort this out, the council are going to sort this out. And going back to people like Lionel and Margaret, they taught me actually that it's not always up to the police. The police don't have all the solutions and certainly the council don't have the solutions, but as a community and together we do have those solutions. And you know whether it was Angela, you know, got me a job in the U3 inn, or whether it was Sharon Barkley who took me under her wing, or whether it was. You know, like I said, lionel and Margaret, what it's taught me is that if you're waiting for somebody to come in and help somebody or help you, you're going to be waiting a bloody long time. So what you've got and I think if I can repay back 1% of the generosity that my family's had back, I think I could do. You know, I feel better in myself, but I think that drive comes from when those people have been there for us. I've always wanted to say I look forward to the day, and there's a saying in our culture that says you know, if God puts you in a position to always help, you're in a blessed position and it's a better position than needing help, if that makes sense. So a big part of our culture, the Asian culture or the Muslim culture and, I think, wider culture, you know, whether it's British values or Asian values or Muslim values, I think we've got a lot in common where we pay that forward.
Speaker 2:What makes it really easy for me is that I've got a group of people around me that you know whether it's Laura who's got, who I work with, who runs this AI platform with me, and she spends a lot of time working as a special constable again in her own time and she works at Beckett University. But she's that person that makes the ramblings of an old man look really good. Because she's that person that makes the ramblings of an old man look really good because she's really driven around policy and governance and how I do these things, matthew haddon, who I worked with for many years. I met matthew used to work in the bar industry, hated working in the bar industry. He put on four, five stone working in that industry and started drinking a lot, failing his degree, and he was one of my mentees and I think by the end of it he lost that five a cage fighter, you know started working with my city centre nighttime economy project and he and myself and Matthew started working a lot on a lot of projects. So there was a mosque and a Sikh temple a few years back that was attacked and it was designed for that community to kind of create that flashpoint and start falling out with each other. But Matthew and myself worked together to try and help de-escalate those tensions and that template that we created we still use today.
Speaker 2:And when I started working with Matthew, a few years after working with him, my cousin and children were murdered in an arson attack on their home and I was absolutely in pieces. But people like Matthew were really there for me. They really helped me take up some of my workload. They provided a lot of emotional support Matthew's family, brian and Sarah Haddon they were really there for me and they really gave me that sense of community and sense of support. And again, it's that kind of support that drives me to help other people, because I owe it to those people.
Speaker 2:Sadly, we lost Matthew to cancer in December 2017. I'm still in touch with his family, but he's one of these people I miss every day and if it wasn't for him, I think when I lost my cousin and the children, I don't think I would have got through that dark period. So again, I'm really, really blessed that I'm around a lot of people that have been there to support me and get through those difficult times, but also I've learnt a lot from them as well and they've made me a better version of me.
Speaker 1:I was just thinking. Then Matthew or Matt came and worked on Door With Me one night and I think that were enough for him.
Speaker 2:Yeah he became friends with Frank Turner because Frank Turner one night came and played at Santiago and, yeah, I think Frank Turner maintained a long relationship with him, especially after he's lost his leg to osteosarcoma.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it was a really good dorm.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you remember, one night we were at a bar that shall name homeless. We were working in the city centre and a group of about 80 people or 100 people turned up at a bar and they were there mourning a friend of theirs that had passed away and what they'd done is they'd actually vomited and urinated all over the Grand Arcade and rubbed it in and they were really slacking down the arcade. And then the year after they turned up again and I think there was about 150 of them I think there was me, you, matthew, and another gentleman that I should have named we won't name him for various purposes and we stood there and they were like we're going to come in and we were like no, and at one point I thought we're going to take him, we're going to give someone back, but actually they bottled it in the end and left it there. And Matthew being with us and that other doorman being with us, that was a really big reassurance for me, because, like yourself, they could all handle themselves really well.
Speaker 1:I just like talking to people. Do you want to tell us a bit more about the digital platform?
Speaker 2:So I worked on the Bradford riots, going back 20-plus years ago. I worked on the Hare Hills riots and then again the issues that played out in West Yorkshire because of Southport and because of the riot that had taken place a few days before the horrific murders in Southport. We had a bit of a riot in Hare Hills. I remember going back to just before George Floyd. I thought I could see that social media was starting to pick up resonance with communities in relation to how they will be manipulated and I thought to myself, if people with a bad agenda can use social media for good sorry for bad why can't we use it for good? And I developed a platform that basically 24 hours a day, we're looking at what's going on locally, regionally, nationally and internationally and, based on what's going on, is building a social map in relation to how that was going to play out in the coming hours, days, weeks or months. So, for example, when the George Floyd stuff happened in America, obviously a horrific murder of an individual by a police officer and the world has become smaller A trauma in New York or in Los Angeles or in Afghanistan or in Sierra Leone plays out on the streets here now and what we do is called social modelling. So what we do is we're looking at these things and we're saying right, how is this going to play out on counter-terrorism? How is this going to play out with public order? How is this going to play out if there's a riot? How is this going to play out for community tensions? Is this going to stir issues between existing communities in Leeds or in West Yorkshire? How's that going to play out? How is it going to play out in schools? Are kids going to? You know, if something happens between the India border and Pakistani border and there's an escalation of tensions, there are children from those backgrounds going to have tensions with each other in school.
Speaker 2:So when the George Floyd stuff happened, I've got a really good relationship with an amazing lady called Marvina Newton and she's one of the advocates and local leads for Black Lives Matters and I had a really good relationship with her and what had happened is, on the first couple of days after that horrific murder of George Floyd, a couple of students from the heading the area took the moniker BLM really well intentioned and they were wanting to do protests and you can understand when you've seen that horrific trauma play out. You know internationally millions of watching it. It is going to evoke emotion, and we had some meetings online with leaders from the black community and what we quickly did was develop a plan to say how is this going to play out and how are other people with bad agendas going to try and exploit the situation? And what we were able to do is ensure that people had their democratic right to be able to protest for this issue, but also how to make sure that they're able to do it safely. We're in the middle of a pandemic, and one of my other concerns at the time was black and Asian people in this country have a higher disproportionality on TB, on heart disease, on diabetes and lots of other health issues, so they were more vulnerable to COVID than other communities were. So they were more vulnerable to COVID than other communities were. So how do we keep them safe, help them be able to vent and be able to express and mourn that tragedy that's happened, but also how to keep that community and the wider community safe, but also make sure that people with an extreme, far-right agenda couldn't come in and destabilise and create another flashpoint. So that's how we set up this digital cohesion unit and, since then, every big incident that you can imagine, whether it's local or international.
Speaker 2:We've been constantly, you know, monitoring. So on the night of the Hamas attack, for example, we were able to get in touch with the police control room saying we don't want protection going in for the Jewish community on Monday. We we want it doing now. We want a passing interest, we want to be able to speak to the Jewish community. But a lot of the examples of people when we've had places of worship attacked before, some of the people that attack places of worship don't know the difference between a Sikh temple or a synagogue or a mosque, so they'll attack the wrong place.
Speaker 2:So what do we need to keep the wider communities safer? So that night we're in touch with the control room. We want a passing interest on these places of worship. They're also doing that, even whether I ask them or not, they're really good, they were going to do that, and it's about having dialogues with all the stakeholders involved with that and making sure that we're talking to each other. We've also got to understand that the people that want to destroy synagogues, they also want to destroy mosques. So we need to have diplomatic ties with each other. We need to talk to each other. So what the digital cohesion unit does is constantly looking at what's next, what, if worst possible case scenario, best possible case scenario, and bringing stakeholders together, law enforcement, police together, local authority together to map, mitigate or manage these issues. So that's basically what we do. So we you just scrape a lot of data basically from social media platforms.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it's not just the data. I mean, if you go back to 9-11, there was intelligence that said 9-11 was going to happen. But the problem is, collecting data is the easy part. It's understanding and triaging what's appropriate for us to manage, map or mitigate, what is the thing that's going to play out in the next 24 hours or the week or a month. That's what we've got and that's where the social modeling comes in. Now some of that is done by AI, but AI at the moment is still a bit of a blunt tool in relation to how we can resolve these issues or prevent or map or mitigate. But what we do is based on historical events that have happened in the city or in this region or in the country. We know or have a good guesstimate in relation to what's going to happen and what we need to do and who we need to bring in to help mitigate that issue.
Speaker 2:Four days after Brexit, for example, we had a mosque that was in Hare Hills, not long after, you know, brexit had happened, 200 yards where the Hare Hills riots had happened 20 years before, and a local imam had tweeted when this community centre next to a mosque had been. It might have been an electrical fire, it could have been arson. We didn't know what it was. But the local imam tweeted is this a hate crime? So instantly we're saying right, who's going to take advantage of this? So God rest Matthew's soul. I got in touch with Matthew. Matthew was visiting his parents in Darlington and says God rest Matthew's soul. I got in touch with Matthew. Matthew was visiting his parents in Darlington. I said I need you to put me a document together that says what is the fallout on the streets. Within 15 minutes we were out on the street talking to faith leaders, locality leaders, youth leaders to say 20 years ago or 15 years ago then, that the Bradford riots had started like this. What can you do to get these kids off the street? And we were also blessed because it was also Ramadan. So half an hour later the local mosque had been shut because it was next door to the community centre. We asked them to open an alternative entrance which was quite a distance away from the fire. It got 700 people off the street. The youth leaders went out, got the kids into the youth clubs.
Speaker 2:So Matthew did a breakdown relation to what was going online, where that tweet or where that social media post. Who was looking at it? Who was talking about it? Who's going to exploit that situation? And on the ground, I've got community leaders. We call them kins, key individual networks. We've got them in the background getting people off the streets, talking to people and saying we're not going to do anything silly. This is a tragedy. What's happened with this community centre? You're going to come in, we're going to do something in a structured place of safety for you, in a safe space. We're going to get you off the street. And in the meantime, we had we had we opened a dialogue with police, local stakeholders, local authority and police officers.
Speaker 2:So anything that you can imagine, criticality wise, that's happened over the past five or six years. We've either picked it up before it's happened or sometimes there's things that you can't prevent from happening. So, for example, we got a call one night saying that the Miami massacre had just happened, where a person had gone into an LGBT club in Miami and killed loads of people. Now again, the world's got a smaller place. So the LGBT community, rightly so, are feeling very unsafe here. So we got a community place. So the lgbt community, rightly so, are feeling very unsafe here. So we got a community meeting with the lgbt community to say, hey, how do we keep them safe in the nighttime economy and how do we keep them safe in general? What dialogue can we open for them? And we've got some really good advocates in that community, people like rob wilson that you know, for he runs a thing called bad mittens club around sports and the lgbt community and he does a work in the night-time economy with Freedom Angels, and himself and his community were doing a lot of dialogue and talk and we had Pride coming up not so long after. So the police were saying what can we do to make you feel safe?
Speaker 2:And I saw the day before that San Francisco police had created a vehicle with all the LGBT colours because, let's face it, historically the police have harassed and have interned people for being gay, so they don't have a massive history of a positive interaction with the LGBT community.
Speaker 2:That's got a lot, lot better over the past few decades. We've got a really good LGBT network within the police as well. And I forgot about it. And a few days later I got a call from the chief constable's office saying could you come to Wakefield. I thought, oh my, my god, I'm going to get in trouble here. I went there and they'd actually done two vans in all the lgbt colours and they were going to be part of pride and a lot of officers that are part of the lgbt network were also part of pride and it showed that the lgbt community, that actually we're a reflection of you because we've got officers and staff that are lgbt as well. But again, it's about what can we do to pick these things up before they become bigger issues that other people can take advantage of and exploit all our communities.
Speaker 1:Obviously, it's a massive subject, isn't it, of people being given misinformation and acting upon it. Is that the way into stopping hate crimes?
Speaker 2:I think education is a big part of it. A friend of mine he's called Azar Lahair and he's an ex school teacher from a really challenging poverty stricken part of london and he ended up joining west yorkshire police and I think he was at some sort of engagement while he was in training as an officer and I think the chief constable was saying what, what is it more that we could do be doing with young people in relation to stopping them being radicalized or being exploited for sexual or for criminal purposes? And he he said, to be honest with you, sir, I think when they're coming on our radar it's too late. And he says what do you mean? He said, well, actually, the social values are being set at a much younger age now. And you know I can't remember the name of the psychologist he said a young man now at the age of 12 can see more sexuality on on his phone in five minutes than the previous hundred generations of his family could. That's deep and that's the sexualization of children and we need to be tackling these issues. So they came up with this project called pollard and he had a similar conversation where he was told to come into the chief's office and the chief said actually, actually, I like your idea. So they created this thing called Pollard, and I think they call it PGCE or something like that, or PGE, and it's about setting social values for young people in schools, and that Pollard now has replaced that in many schools across West Yorkshire. It's absolutely free and it's about talking to young people about. You know what is violence against women and girls, what is misogyny, what does exploitation of young people look like, what does FGM look like, what does radicalisation look like? And it's about putting that thing into those young people's brains. I'm going to digress if it's something.
Speaker 2:One thing that I'm really passionate about talking about is when I started working with the Polish community. One of the things I said to them after Brexit was it took my family three generations to even know what a hate crime is, and if we're waiting three generations for you, I've kind of failed. And it made me realise that actually there's a bit of a pattern here. So when my grandfather's generation came here and before that the Jewish community came here, you know, before the Second World War set up amazing businesses and, you know, made a massive positive impact to British society. After that, the Indians came, the Pakistanis came, then the Bangladeshis came, then the Kurdish community came in the 90s, then we had the Somalians, sudanese, eritrean and then Nigerian communities and there's been a kind of a pattern that I've noticed when it's come to young people.
Speaker 2:I think, going back to my kind of experience, if my grandfather had stayed in Pakistan, what would have happened? He worked the rural areas of Pakistan and the men would work the fields and the women at home they would process. You know, if you were picking wheat or rice, they would process it, but the social values and the moral compass would be set by the grandparents. And the thing you'll find is that when most people come to this country, they don't come with their parents or grandparents. And when you're here, even if the women didn't work, when you're re-establishing yourself in a new society, in a new community, you'll find that both parents end up working.
Speaker 2:You know all the hours that God sends and I'm sure you know lots of Polish people and look at the work ethic they've got and it's very similar to my grandfather's work ethic. But the problem with that becomes is because of their stripping of youth clubs and after-hour clubs and schools, those children, their children. Because the parents are working all the time they end up hanging out on the street. Who becomes their moral compass? The other children on the street.
Speaker 2:So this is where I'm really angry at the Conservatives that integration, that family, instead of taking one or two generations, ends up taking three or four, or generation two, three and four have a massive identity crisis because the parents haven't been around enough. Or you get people that marry from abroad and come here and their mum or their dad might not know the system here around. You know, if you go to Bradford you've got kids that are living in £70,000 houses and they're driving £150,000, £200,000 cars. And if mum says, where have you got the car? Just go to finance. You know. We know what's going on there, don't we? And that happens in every city, happens in every faith and every culture. But again, that setting of that moral compass and going back to pollard, I think that really started to help with that and having an impact on that. But if we don't start doing more work to help people integrate into british society, this is where those failures happen and those children are exploited yeah, I mean slightly different, but the same, and I'm thinking of young people not having opportunities.
Speaker 1:And people are actually talking about where are your premier league footballers going to come from? Because no one's playing football, because they haven't got access to watching football and they're not going to play football in the community centres. Do you know what I mean? But so we're comparing that we've got all right. People are panicking. Where are these footballers coming from? But they're not worried about all the crime rate from, yeah, you know, young people that are like you say.
Speaker 2:The moral compass is set elsewhere I think people that have done well, so people that have might been in hells or chapel town or halter moore that have done good generally don't hear from them again because they move to an affluent area. They want to get on with their lives, and rightly so, yeah. But the people that are a success, they've got a responsibility to go back into those communities and push that ladder down. I'm going to talk briefly about two projects I know in hair hills and there's lots of these kind of projects across the city, but I'm just going to talk about them. So there's a project in hair hills called catch and it was set up on some wasteland and it's this amazing building. And this building is basically the old porter cabins that were from the 70s and 80s, that were at the West Yorkshire Police Training Grounds called Bishop Giles. So before this multi-million pound car gate training facility for firearms and public order, we had these porter cabins.
Speaker 2:And this police officer put two and two together and he noticed that a lot of the kids in his community, arresting them, taking them into the criminal justice system, actually didn't improve their lives. So he set up a youth club and he begged, stole and borrowed and got all these port-a-cabins that were rotting away and he's actually won architectural awards for this and I remember going there. And there's these two young Eastern European lads and there was a picture of them that they do a little presentation there and there's a picture of them in the back of a police van after they've just robbed somebody at knife point and they've had very challenging lives growing up and they give a talk about what, what happened with them and how this youth club turned their lives around. There's other children there that were that were circling the criminal justice system again being exploiting, being exploited people, whether it was for criminalisation purposes or for other purposes. Those children have gone there and you know what. They found a sense of purpose. They found somebody that would listen to them and we've got all the emergency services going into that place talking to young people, giving them a sense of belonging.
Speaker 2:And you know a lot of the stuff that we do when we're young. We're all looking to belong somewhere and what it does it shows you that children that we've written off because they might have you know, they might have some neurodiversity, they might have a learning disability that's never been diagnosed or you know, they're not doing well at school because they've got domestic abuse going on, you know, in their household. But if you give them the right support and it doesn't necessarily always have to be academic I think we're far too reliant on judging young people by if they don't fit into a particular hole or peg, we write them off. But this place, some of those people that have gone to that place that were circling the criminal justice system or heading to jail, some of them are at university now. Some of them are teachers now. Some of them are at university now. Some of them are teachers now. Some of them are working in emergency services now and it just goes to show the right investment, the right empathy, the right compassion, that right sense of community makes everything.
Speaker 2:And I always say to young people if you're going to do a job, do a job you love, because it won't feel like work. But also, if you don't give young people something good to do, the bad people will Exactly yeah. So you're right, we do need these sport settings. We do need these. And I know Leeds Rhinos I was with them at their community iftar a couple of nights ago their new head of DEI, former rugby player I forget his name now, but he's doing some really good work about reaching out into communities and inspiring the next set of you know, rugby players. We've got Leeds United that are doing a lot of outreach work into communities, so they're doing a lot. Could they do more? Probably, but I know the passion is there to kind of bring that connection between young people and those sporting facilities.
Speaker 1:Can I ask you about MBE?
Speaker 2:Well, you've put me on the spot now. A few days before New Year's I got a phone call from the chief's office saying imran, now we've heard you've had a bit of a letter, and I was like I didn't know if it were real. First of all I thought it might have been a bit of a hoax because it said from the cabinet office and somebody like me who slept under a bridge don't get letters from the cabinet office saying that you've been put forward for an mbe, you're not allowed to tell anybody about it and I thought it would go away. And then, you know, a few days before New Year's I got a call from the chief saying, imran, have you had a letter? And I said yes, but I'm not sure if I'm supposed to talk about it, and he said congratulations. And then it was out in the newspapers first or second of January.
Speaker 2:I'm going to say something very politically incorrect. When an Asian man goes red, you know he's blushing. I was blushing, blushing, astounded, humbled. But it was also a moment of reflection for for me and I also felt a sense of great pride, but I also felt a deep sense of humbleness for all of those people, whether it's angela, whether it's sharon, whether it's lionel and margaret, whether it's those people that have had a positive impact on my life and on my family's life. So for me, matthew Haddon. I share that with him and his family because a lot of the ideas I had back 10, 15 years ago when I was working with Matthew, he really helped me put pen to paper. I'm not an educated man, but people like Matthew, people like Laura, have kept me on my toes, held me to account when I've not been doing what I'm supposed to be doing, because I'm getting pulled in lots of different directions by different communities. But that MBE for me is a reflection of all of those people that have supported my work, that supported me, supported my family and helped me become a better version of me. So I share that with my independent advisory group members, my hate crime scrutiny panel members, the officers that I work with, people like Paul Money from Leeds City Council that have been a massive inspiration to me, and people like yourself, charlie.
Speaker 2:You know what you showed me is. You know being a doorman is to me is a very honourable thing, because I think the right doorman for decades, even before violence on women and girls was a thing, we were out there. You were out there helping those vulnerable people get home safely to their loved ones. If there was a woman that was drunk and somebody was trying to take her home, you were that kind of doorman that you would spend money out of your own pocket, never ask for it back and put those women in a taxi. But when you started your climbing and your podcast and stuff, what you showed people like me is that society can't define you.
Speaker 2:Being a doorman is something that I loved doing for a while, and being a doorman is something that I loved doing for a while and it really really kind of gave me a lot of social skills that I use in my work with the police and community now. But what you did by inspiring me was to show that you're not defined by one job. You can be who you want to be. If somebody said to me that you know 10 years ago, charlie, we're going to be this great mountain leader, inspiring young people, taking them out and doing all these amazing activities and diverting them from crime, I don't know if I would have believed that, but you've clearly done that. So for people like me, if I'm in a room where I'm the most clever person. I'm in the wrong room. I need to be in rooms with people like yourself.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you very much. You made Charlie blush now, yeah, so when you see an Irish-Italian blush, you can tell they're playing white anyway. So I think thank you for that. Obviously, seb was a doorman as well, or is a doorman still. We're going to have to wrap it up there, mate. I think we could talk for hours, couldn't we? Over many, many different subjects, so that may be a part two to this. So thank you very much for coming in, imran. Thank you for the opportunity for letting me waffle no, it's brilliant, mate.
Speaker 1:Really good, we haven't had to do much. Well, some really important subjects, really, which we touched on. So thanks for sharing, thank you. Thank you very much for your time and if you'd like to support us and help us keep the podcast going, then you can go to Buys a Coffee or you can click that on our website, whitefoxtalkingcom, and look for the little cup. Thank you.
