Inside the multicultural UK town that sparked a warning from Pauline Hanson and Tommy Robinson
Updated ,first published
Luton: The music is blaring from the cars along Dunstable Road as they slow to a crawl under the English sun. It is lunchtime on a summer weekday, and the street is busy with shoppers.
A stall on the footpath is covered with flowing dresses and abayas from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Nearby is a restaurant promising authentic biryani from southern India, close to a shop selling food from Africa and the Caribbean. A young man wheels a pallet of white onions to the front of a grocery store with supplies from the Middle East.
Women in niqabs walk with their friends past the shops, only their eyes visible behind their veils and loose robes. The soundtrack from the next passing car has the beat of a Bollywood blockbuster.
This is Luton, in Bedfordshire, and Pauline Hanson cannot stand it. The One Nation leader was “gobsmacked” by this town when she came to Luton last week with right-wing activist Tommy Robinson, who was raised here. In a video timed to promote their podcast together, they warned about what they saw on these multicultural streets.
“I definitely don’t want Australia to become like this,” said Hanson. “This is not Great Britain to me.”
But this is Great Britain for Sharik Latif and his family.
Latif, 25, was born and raised in Luton after his father came from Bangladesh. Now the young man is running a clothing store on Dunstable Road with ambitions to build a bigger business. And he has no time for Tommy Robinson – real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – and his complaints.
“I say he’s just full of it,” Latif tells me.
“That’s because his main issue is about people taking jobs from the English majority, and that’s just not the case. Obviously, those people that come from different countries, they come to make a better life. Everyone should contribute to the UK, even if you’re from abroad, so we can actually move as an economy forward.
“So, if there is a problem with migrants, then you should see who you’re bringing in first.
“Obviously, they should contribute, and there are a lot of people struggling. So, integrate them well and help them uplift our whole economy.”
We are standing between racks of scarves and dresses in Latif’s store, which he opened about three years ago. He has just set up a separate stall selling jewellery, and he is thinking about one day branching into food. If Britain is a nation of shopkeepers, as Adam Smith wrote and Margaret Thatcher said with pride, then Latif seems to be right where he belongs.
Generational shift
The anxiety about places like Luton is hugely influential in the British argument about migration and social change – the issue that fuels the rise of the far right when its leaders call for a halt to new arrivals and even the “remigration” of people who have already settled.
Hanson is not alone in recoiling from what she sees. But it is not new for this neighbourhood, known as Bury Park, because the change began more than a generation ago.
I hear about the history when I walk from Latif’s shop to the Giftique general store, where customers are looking through the kitchenware. Rashmikant Shah has owned this store with his wife, Bharati, for 43 years. “That used to be the Woolworths,” he says with a glance at the building across the road.
Nobody forced the English stores along this street to close. They moved when a modern mall opened near the railway station, and business dried up in Bury Park.
“It was like a ghost town,” Rashmikant says. “Then new people started opening stores, and business increased.”
As migrants arrived, this part of Luton thrived. In a sense, the Shahs are a testament to how Britain and its empire have changed.
They are both from families that moved from India to Kenya in the middle of last century. Then the postcolonial era began, and they moved to Britain when it wanted more workers in the 1970s. They have been in Luton ever since. “It’s been good here,” says Bharati. “It’s a community. Everybody gets along with everybody else.”
Even so, the pace and scale of the change can be jarring. You can walk along Dunstable Road without hearing a word of English. And you can see the contrast in cultures – like the sight of mothers in traditional niqabs with daughters in Western school uniforms.
You could catch a train and be at St Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of London within an hour. But this neighbourhood feels like another country. Most people in Britain will never see it because Luton is mostly known for its airport. Tourists can go to the charming shopping village of Bicester, one hour west, or the grand city of Cambridge, one hour north-east. They will not come here.
And when you talk to locals in the centre of town, they will admit that crime is a problem. Last Friday, a court convicted local man Sarfraz Farooq, 46, and four accomplices of turning 19 homes in Luton into cannabis factories by setting up a fake real estate company and promising to look after them for landlords.
One week earlier, a judge sentenced a Luton man, Abdullah bin Yassir, 23, to 3½ years in prison for downloading instructions on how to make a bomb. Bin Yassir was arrested in June after returning to the UK from Pakistan.
The crime rate in Luton is no higher than similar towns. There were 92.5 crimes for every thousand residents over the past year. And London was worse: there were 312.4 in Westminster, and 138.5 in the fashionable neighbourhoods of Kensington and Chelsea, according to official police statistics.
All the same, some residents see Luton as a troubled – even dysfunctional – town.
“It’s not a proper community,” one young woman tells me on the high street, as she walks to her job at a store.
“I’ve seen stabbings, with blood everywhere. I know a lot of the younger generation who don’t have any aspiration.” She is black. She tells me that one of her friends died of stab wounds when he was robbed of his watch. She does not want to be named or photographed.
‘People are people’
The homelessness has increased since the pandemic, and there are more drug addicts, says a young man who works for a property agency in the centre of town. We are near the town hall in the centre of Luton, about a 10-minute walk from Bury Park, and I can see what he means: the pedestrian area near the mall is dotted with people sleeping rough, or struggling with alcohol and drugs.
I meet Paul, a support worker and former addict who works for a local homeless shelter.
He loves Luton and says it is the same as everywhere else. I talk to John, who tells me he is an alcoholic. He was raised in Luton, and returned after 40 years as a house painter in London when the work ran out.
“I love this place,” he declares. What does he think of Tommy Robinson? “People are people,” he says. “You should just accept them for who they are.”
One retiree, who has lived in Luton since coming from the Caribbean as a young child 55 years ago, tells me she is not worried about crime. She does not pay attention to the news. After a career working as a school cook, she is happy in Luton and dismisses the fears of the far right. “People are getting along very well,” she says. “What Tommy Robinson is saying is bullshit.”
The hard times are impossible to ignore, however, and this town is not alone in feeling the impact. People are struggling across Britain with higher prices, modest wages, rising rents and tougher job prospects.
The upheaval at the top, with Andy Burnham about to replace Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister, coincides with turmoil below.
Britain has high national debt levels and will spend £111.2 billion ($212 billion) this year on debt interest, about 8 per cent of total public spending. Welfare spending is already high, and defence spending is being increased. There are no easy options to improve living conditions.
What makes this worse is the fact that old industries are closing in regional Britain without enough new ones opening. Luton, the home of the Vauxhall car-making factory for decades, is still reeling from the closure of the plant last year: it lost 1100 jobs and £300 million ($578 million) in local spending each year.
A woman is walking her dog along the pedestrian mall, so I stop to ask what she thinks of the town.
It turns out she is visiting briefly from the Thames Valley, a comfortable area west of London, and is only here because her husband has business in Luton. “It’s an awful place,” she says.
“I feel so lucky I don’t live here.” This is harsh, and only based on a quick visit. But it is also honest.
Seen from the outside, the town can be easily framed as a prime exhibit for Pauline Hanson when she warns about a dangerous future for Australia. It offers no proof, however, that Hanson has a solution.
A halt to migration would slow the pace of change, and polls show this is what many voters want in both Australia and the UK. But it would not reopen the Vauxhall plant, or remove the homeless people from the centre of Luton, or stop stabbings, or cure the drug addicts, or turn the clock back in Bury Park.
A fractured future
As I talk to people in Luton, I am struck by the utterly different opinions about its community and its future.
Akif Ahmed, 24, is more worried about economic prospects than racial harmony. He says he has rarely felt any racism in Luton since coming here 16 years ago, when his family moved from the Netherlands after coming from Bangladesh.
His work at a retail chain has helped him buy a home with a mortgage. “I’ve got colleagues from all around the world,” he tells me. “The Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East. It all works very peaceably.”
But the community does not work for others. Kamal Dwyer, 23, thinks it has changed too much, with too many people, and with too much crime. He knows friends who have been stabbed. He was born and raised in Luton before leaving to study at Manchester University. On a return home for the summer, he does not like what he sees.
“It’s not about Islam,” he says. “It’s just too many people coming in. I don’t think ethnic groups should all end up in one place. They should spread out, so there is a more even demographic.”
So, what does he really think about Luton? “It’s a shithole,” he says quietly. “I’ll be leaving once I graduate.”
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David Crowe is Europe correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via X or email.
