So the soul-searching which wracked Bradford after the Manningham disturbances of 1995 has begun again. In the wake of some of the worst rioting this country has seen, the city and its people now face another period of intense and agonising navel-gazing, wondering what went wrong and how we're going to repair the damage to our national and international image.

But is that the answer? Certainly, there are many questions to be asked and lessons to be learned.

Were the police right, for instance, to advise Bradford Council and Festival organisers to cancel the Saturday finale? Or was their decision merely an open invitation to the troublemakers: "We've cleared the battleground for you, get on with it"?

Why did they allow the Anti-Nazi League meeting to go on for so long when they could have dispersed the crowd and dissipated some of the tension much earlier? And if they had intelligence which suggested serious trouble was on the way, why did they so badly underestimate the resources they would require to quell it?

But these are operational issues and there is an overarching belief around the city today that these riots were going to happen whatever efforts were made to head them off. There was clearly a determination in some quarters for Bradford not to be left out of the chain of racist violence which has wracked the north of England this summer. And it is clear that some wouldn't be happy unless the scale of it was "bigger and better" than the incidents in Burnley and Oldham.

What Bradford must really concern itself with is why we appear to be back at square one five years after a detailed and thorough examination of the issues facing the city. In our leading article after the Bradford Commission report into the Manningham riots, we stated: "In Bradford there is racial hatred; there is fear; there is ignorance; there is dire unemployment; there is poverty and deprivation; there is religious fundamentalism; there is political extremisim; there is petty politics; there is ineptitude and incompetence; there is misplaced optimism; there is damaging pessimism and apathy; there are good intentions, and there are evil ones."

Five years on, can any reader put their hand on their heart and state in all honesty that anything has changed?

Yes, there have been many more worthwhile community projects; yes, there are many well-intentioned people still working very hard to bring about change; and, yes, there is a general improvement in relations between police and the ethnic minority communities.

But at the root of everything there is still a fundamental and deep-seated hatred of white people and of authority in general in the hearts of a minority of young and mainly Muslim activists and thugs.

And nothing - nothing - has been done to change that.

Their macho posturing and territorial viciousness is despised by whites and Asians alike. They are unrepresentative of all Bradford's Asian communities of whatever religious background and they tarnish the image of their own communities and that of the wider district.

Their criminal thuggery cannot be excused by deprivation or unemployment, by alleged police mistreatment or by provocation by the fascist scum of the National Front.

Bradford's Muslim community needs to help root them out and hand them over to the police. They need to demonstrate that they will not tolerate the damage that this mindless, evil minority does to the cause of racial harmony in this district.

The police must work closely with them to ensure they are brought to justice and the courts must deal with them in a way that sends a clear signal that the old excuses will not wash.

There must be no more reports and no more inquiries: the Race Review document due to be launched this week is certain to identify many of the same issues spelled out in the Commission report of 1996. Hopefully, it will give some more concrete guidance on the way ahead. But the truth is we all know what needs to be done and we must set about it with a vengeance.