Tariq Mehmood encountered the far right early – at primary school. “When white children surround you in the playground and sing, ‘God made little black people, he made them in the night, he made them in a hurry, and forgot to paint them white’, and the school doesn’t clamp down on that, then you’re living within the far right. It’s not one organisation, it’s a mass movement.”

I think it’s likely those kids used another word for “black people” but I can’t quite find the stomach to ask. Mehmood is speaking to me on a video call from Beirut, where he teaches at the American University. Now 70, he migrated, in 1967, from Pakistan to Bradford, where his grandfather and uncles worked in the textile mills, and immediately experienced racism. “The headmaster would tell us to be grateful to be in England, we were beaten up by white boys on the way to school, there was an intense violence and a feeling of helplessness.”

Until he realised he wasn’t helpless, or alone. “We knew we couldn’t come to school on our own, so we assembled somewhere, got off the bus together and walked together to the classroom.”

Later, when he was himself working in a mill in Otley in the late 70s, Mehmood was one of the founders of the Bradford Asian Youth Movement. The AYMs were a network of anti-racist groups demanding equal rights and a fairer world as well as defending their communities against attacks from groups such as the National Front (NF) and the British Movement (BM).