As ordinary people feel the effects of divisive rhetoric, a local group is taking action to empower the community
“I don’t want to talk about him,” Selina Ullah said, when asked what she thought of Matt Goodwin, the GB News presenter running for Reform in the Gorton and Denton parliamentary byelection.
She would rather talk about the hope she took from the national reaction to the murder of her brother, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah – and the memorial campaign afterwards – in the same Greater Manchester constituency in 1986.
“There was revulsion,” she said. “There was such an outpouring from people from all backgrounds who came and stood by us. [National Union of Mineworkers’] representatives came to demos. An elderly miner from Newcastle gave me a badge and said: ‘Wear it with pride.’”
Ahmed, a “bright, popular” boy from a British Bengali family, was 13 when he was stabbed by another 13-year-old, Darren Coulburn, in the playground of his high school in Burnage, the suburb on the southern boundary of the modern-day constituency. A day earlier, Ahmed had intervened as Coulburn bullied another Asian boy. Coulbourn was jailed indefinitely.
