In the 20 years since the Brixton riots there have been at least half-a-dozen major inquiries and reports on the subjects of race and poverty.

There was the original Scarman Report into the causes and the policing of the violence in South London in 1981. That was followed by Faith in the City, a long hard look at poverty in Britain's inner-cities, commissioned by the Church of England.

More recently the MacPherson Report, following the murder of London teenager Stephen Lawrence, led to accusations of institutional racism throughout the police service. Last year the Runnymede report criticised the word 'British' as an inappropriate description of the UK's multicultural society.

Closer to home, in the past six years Bradford's social and political infrastructure has been the focus of the Riot Commission Report in 1996, following the June 1995 rioting involving Pakistani Muslim youths; now we have Lord Herman Ouseley's Community Pride, Not Prejudice Report, commissioned by Bradford Vision and written before the disturbances on July 8.

Inquiries take time and cost many thousands of pounds. Lord Ouseley's services alone cost £1,200 a day. Now the Muslim Council of Britain wants a high profile inquiry into race riots in Yorkshire, Lancashire and latterly the Midlands and, presumably, a report to follow.

One man who thinks there is space for another inquiry and report is Mohammed Ajeeb CBE, former Bradford Lord Mayor and member of Bradford Council's erstwhile Race Relations Advisory Group in the 1980s. He said an independent inquiry chaired by a senior judge should look into the recent race riots.

"It should look into the whole situation that started in Lancashire, spread to Yorkshire and then to Stoke-on-Trent where there are large sections of the Muslim community.

"We need a report that has a more authentic voice than small local inquiries. No one paid serious heed to the Manningham Riot Commission Report. Herman Ouseley's report has told us nothing new. People took notice of the Scarman and MacPherson reports.

"It's not just a Bradford problem: it's a problem for the whole country and for Europe. We need to look at how we can try to expedite or readjust the policy of integration. The alternative to multi-culture is the mono-culture, but I feel that that is fraught with more risks.

"I'm not going to give up on multi-culture either for Britain or for Bradford. It may take a little longer; but it should be possible to learn lessons and move forward in a democratic evolutionary society," he said.

The question is: does Bradford really learn from experience? Bradford University social psychology senior research fellow Ian Vine told the T&A that the city had failed to learn the lessons of the 1995 rioting.

"The primary underlying factor in the readiness to riot is not white racism or police incompetence; nor material deprivation. Rather, it is the motivation of an alienated minority of Muslim youth to assert power in the one way they know - coercive 'control of the streets' in primarily Asian local neighbourhoods.

"This deviance stems indirectly from how traditional culture gives most young males no effective influence in decision-making about the future of their own ethnic-religious community here. Its supposed leaders have encouraged a siege mentality of ethnic self-segregation and externalising blame.

"Self-aggrandisement has sometimes helped to inhibit a practical collective commitment to promoting internally those liberal values on which true multi-culturalism can only be based.

"Without socially inclusive civic loyalties capable of transcending tribal ethnic and family ones, these youths will always be susceptible to the instant excitements of 'gangsta-style' street confrontations.

"When and where they can be confident of their power to intimidate vulnerable members of what they have crudely defined as a white 'enemy', the temptations of deviant adrenaline-seeking will regularly become overwhelming - as it evidently is for the children who intermittently stone the bus I take home from town," he said.

Implicit in Mr Vine's explanations is the urgent need for action, for what he calls "inexpensive initiatives" such as a new-style neighbourhood forum to exchange grass-roots concerns, and a co-operative mass clean-up campaign.

"Speedy interventions are essential," he asserts. "Real progress remains realistically possible if those who genuinely do cherish tolerant multi-ethnic diversity take their chance now."

However, a former Bradford race relations worker, who worked in Brixton at the time of the 1981 riots, told the T&A that there was no need for yet another inquiry - at least as far as Bradford was concerned.

Wishing to remain anonymous, he said yet another report would would only delay matters. He pointed to the fact that the Home Secretary David Blunkett has already set up a ministerial task force, chaired by Community Safety Minister John Denham, which will take an in-depth look at the cause of riots and seek possible solutions to the problems that cause them.

"The situation now is very different to the situation in 1981 at the time of Scarman," he said. "The police are better trained, better educated and have better senior managers than they did 20 years ago.

"Scarman also looked into urban poverty. It took a long time to come through but it did come through in the end; it made people realise there was major urban poverty in the country.

"I am not so enamoured of the MacPherson Report. I think that took us back a bit. They misunderstood the concept of institutional racism. Most often it is an unconscious thing in an institution; it doesn't mean that everybody in it is a racist.

"There was institutional racism in Bradford Council when I first came here. The Council had an 'internal only' recruitment programme which excluded black people. People simply hadn't thought about it, but that didn't make each individual a racist.

"My fear about what the Muslim Council of Britain is talking about is this: they are implying that these lads that did the rioting are bad Muslims; their answer would be to make them good Muslims. That doesn't meet the point.

" The point is the way Islam is practised over here. Islam must adapt to Western culture rather than adhere to Asian culture.

"There's no point in setting up an inquiry unless you know what you want to achieve. We know what we want to achieve: the point is how you go about it," he said.

Bradford has yet to decide what to do about that hard-core group of Muslim extremists who reject integration.

This March, I removed a poster from the exterior of an empty shop in Manningham Lane. Under the headline: "The Biggest Hypocrites on Earth" there followed a call to arms to Muslim and announced: "It is our duty and responsibility to revive this forgotten obligation of Jihad."

Jihad, as we learned from the Rushdie fatwa years, means 'Islamic holy war'. Is that what the towns and cities of Britain and Western Europe are facing?