That same evening, less than five hours after the ceremony, someone levered the plaque off the wall with a crowbar and stole it. West Yorkshire Police immediately classed the incident a hate crime and opened an investigation. Hilary Benn, MP for Leeds Central, spoke for many when he declared: “It is not who we are as a city.”

In recent years, attempting to do justice to the memory of David Oluwale has been central to Leeds’s hopes of presenting itself as a more inclusive and tolerant city. Just weeks before the Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque was fixed in place last month, a bridge bearing Oluwale’s name was completed, spanning the river where he was found drowned in May 1969. More than half a century later, Leeds now finds itself contending with uncomfortable memories the city thought it had overcome.

When David Oluwale arrived in Britain as a stowaway on board a cargo ship carrying groundnuts from Lagos to Hull, he hoped to find a “New Jerusalem”. Within a few years, those hopes had been firmly dashed: in 1953, he was committed to a mental asylum following a violent altercation with Leeds police officers. Oluwale didn’t surface for another eight years. The effervescent dancer known to fellow Nigerians in Leeds as “Yankee” emerged a broken man. Now homeless, he picked up the kinds of criminal convictions born of living on the streets.

In the late Sixties, the climate across Britain was becoming more hostile for black people. Nowhere was this more pronounced than in Leeds. In April 1968, the same month Enoch Powell delivered his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, Inspector Geoffrey Ellerker was assigned to Millgarth police station in Leeds city centre, teaming up with Sergeant Kenneth Kitching in a pairing that would make Oluwale’s grim life even more hellish. The two officers made it their mission to clear vagrants off their patch, but Oluwale came in for special attention. Calling him their “playmate”, they urinated on him while he slept, forced him to bang his head on the pavement as “penance”, and drove him to the city limits where they would dump him in the dead of night. When Oluwale was arrested for disorderly conduct, the police entered “WOG” as his nationality on his charge sheet.

On 4 May 1969, a group of boys found his body when they were out walking by the River Aire close to Knostrop sewerage works, a few miles downstream from the city centre. The only mourners at his pauper’s funeral were the undertakers. But 18 months later, after a police cadet reported rumours he’d heard about Ellerker and Kitching, Oluwale’s body was exhumed. A Scotland Yard investigation concluded that the officers had pushed or caused Oluwale to fall in the river in the early hours of 18 April 1969, and the two were eventually tried for manslaughter and several assaults.

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Yet the trial at Leeds Town Hall brought further attacks on Oluwale. “What right have we to call him a citizen?” Basil Wigoder QC, representing Ellerker, asked the jury in his opening speech. “His only claim to being a citizen was that every now and then he was lodged in the local prison.” Even the judge failed to hide his distaste, describing Oluwale as “a dirty, filthy, violent vagrant”. Though Ellerker and Kitching received prison sentences for a number of assaults, they were ultimately found not guilty of manslaughter on the direction of this judge: the witnesses who’d seen two uniformed men chasing someone by the river could not identify Ellerker or Kitching and could not even be sure of the colour of the man being pursued. Despite the two officers’ violent hounding of Oluwale over several months, the judge concluded that there was no evidence they had caused him to drown.

That didn’t stop football fans taunting the police from the terraces: They’re the boys from Millgarth and they don’t care, they threw Oluwale in the River Aire. But the unsettling story of Oluwale slipped slowly from the broader public mind.

In the Seventies and Eighties, no northern multicultural city was without its racial antagonism, and none could boast of healthy relations between its police forces and black communities. As the socio-economic climate worsened, those strains intensified. And Leeds entered a particularly dark period. During a riot in the Chapeltown area on Bonfire Night 1975, several West Yorkshire Police officers received serious injuries.

Days before the Bonfire Night riot, Wilma McCann — a woman from Chapeltown — became Peter Sutcliffe’s first known victim. The Yorkshire Ripper was known as the “Leeds Ripper” in the early days, as his first three murders were in the city. This was the Leeds that David Peace excavated in his blistering Red-Riding quartet: a grey concrete hell “abandoned to the crows and the Ripper”. All the ills of the Seventies — the misogyny, the civic corruption and police violence — were rampant in Peace’s city.

It was in this same period that Leeds became synonymous with racism, mostly down to the reputation of the followers of its football club. National Front publications such as Bulldog were sold outside Elland Road containing proud league tables of the “most racist fans”: Leeds United were usually near the top. Black visiting players were regularly pelted with bananas.

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Tony Harrison’s 1985 state-of-the-nation poem V. didn’t help Leeds’s reputation. It achieved notoriety with a film adaptation aired on Channel 4 in 1987, becoming the first time the word “cunt” was uttered on British television. V. was inspired by a visit to Holbeck cemetery during the Miners’ Strike, when Harrison saw tombstones, including that of his parents, desecrated with swastikas and NF slogans and the ground littered with Harp lager cans.

“What is it that this aggro act implies?” the poet asks in his clash with the vandal, an alienated skinhead who’d “been on t’dole all my life in fucking Leeds!”  The poet wants to suggest that the hooligans’ “mindless desecration” is something more than lager-fuelled frustration at Leeds United letting them down every week. He portrays it as springing from feelings of loss: of real jobs, a sense of place, dignity and security. Harrison’s V. was a moving cry for a more united country, a revival of post-war decencies and solidarity.

I was teaching in Leeds in 2004 when I came across the then-obscured story of David Oluwale. In those days, I was immersed in the novels of David Peace, though the contemporary city was confident and buoyant.

But there was another Leeds that stood outside this new prosperity. The British National Party’s anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim message resonated in poorer parts of the city, particularly after the suicide bombings in London on 7 July 2005. Three of the bombers had been raised in the Beeston area of Leeds, coming from the close-knit terraced streets near to the cemetery that had inspired Harrison’s poem. A leaked membership list revealed that Morley, a few miles down the road from Beeston, had more BNP members than any other constituency in the country. Though the BNP had been picking up council seats in the region, it still came as a profound shock when, in June 2009, a BNP candidate was elected to the European Parliament for the Yorkshire and Humber area. The declaration of what was the party’s first major breakthrough into the political mainstream was made at Leeds Town Hall, the setting for Oluwale’s trial.

Lifting Oluwale’s story from the shadows of Leeds’s memory into the centre of its public history, and onto a plaque, had been a long, slow process. My own 2007 book was part of that effort. When it was adapted for the stage by Oladipo Agboluaje two years later, a large image of Oluwale’s face — a mugshot after one of his brutal arrests — was plastered onto the theatre wall, facing accusingly towards Millgarth police station.

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Back then, however, there was little appetite for a permanent memorial to Oluwale. Leeds Civic Trust acknowledged that his was a tragic case, but I was told this was not sufficient to merit a plaque. Such honour was bestowed on celebrated scientists and writers, the great brewers and tailors of Leeds, sporting heroes or social reformers. Marking a terrible event so that later generations might learn its lessons was not deemed good enough. It took the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in the United States to change hearts and minds in Leeds.

Fast forward to last month, and the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial serves as a bracing reminder that Leeds is still doing battle with its historical demons. This was no random act of hooliganism; the perpetrator was no “HARPaholic yob”, as Harrison calls his Holbeck cemetery vandal. In an echo of the original offences against Oluwale, someone had set out to deny his citizenship and humanity.

The perpetrator might well turn out to be a solitary, embittered individual, but it comes in the context of a white English backlash against multiculturalism and against those calling, with growing confidence and assertiveness, for a different vision of Britishness. The recent Black Lives Matter assaults on monuments to white power and dominance seem to have provoked a kneejerk response: you tear down our history; I’ll tear down yours.

But the desecration of Oluwale’s memorial has also proved to be a spectacular own goal. The removal of the plaque was bigger news than its unveiling. Many more people, in Leeds and beyond, are now aware of the story of Oluwale. His name cannot be erased: a replacement plaque has already been crowdfunded and an image of the original one has been projected onto screens and billboards across the city. For all that Leeds is wrestling with its past, Tony Harrison’s dream of a more united society might not be a vain hope after all.

I’m sure there must once have been a law passed which prohibited the citizens of Barking and Dagenham from voting anything other than Labour. It would explain why, when I was growing up in the borough, I never met anyone who did such a thing. Such people did exist apparently, but whichever party they voted for never achieved the merest modicum of electoral success locally. Every MP and local councillor in Barking and Dagenham wore a red rosette.

The place was a working class, blue-collar, industrial heartland. The sprawling Becontree estate, built in the 1920s and 30s, was the largest municipal housing estate in the world. Thousands of families, both sets of my grandparents among them, settled there after moving down the track from London’s East End. The Ford motor plant in Dagenham dominated the horizon.

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We were the first family in our social circle to own a video recorder. My dad won it in a competition at work. I recall that he recorded the 1983 election night programme on it, and I can see him now, cursing at the TV the following morning when he replayed the tape and discovered the scale of Michael Foot’s annihilation by Margaret Thatcher. I was eight years old, but I understood then that we were Labour. It was tribal. The party was our party. It spoke for people like us.

Trade unions were on our side too. I knew that, because my dad told me he was something called a ‘shop steward’ at his depot, and my mum worked for the GMB. That was good enough for me.

It was natural that I should stand as the Labour candidate at the mock general election held at my secondary school in 1987. (I won by a landslide — though, frankly, it would have taken some effort to lose.)

Later, as life’s grotesque social and economic inequalities became apparent to me, it seemed obvious that the labour movement — the Labour Party and trade unions together — was the only force interested in tackling them. And I wanted to be a part of it.

This innate tribalism and sense of injustice motivated my 16-year-old self to organise (unsuccessfully) a wildcat strike at the supermarket where I stacked shelves, and later to rub up against every boss who sought to exploit work colleagues or failed to treat them with respect.

It was also what inspired me to join the Labour Party at 19 and plunge straight into activism with the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) when I became a firefighter three years later.

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The FBU — a proud, powerful union — had its share of hardline activists, many from the ranks of the Communist Party, Socialist Workers’ Party and their fellow travellers. These activists always wielded far more influence than their numbers merited. I fell in with some of them and soon became that very dangerous thing — a person who is utterly certain in his own mind that he is right. Anyone who didn’t subscribe to my worldview, which was so obviously correct, was plainly an Inherently Bad Person. That — trust me on this — is how most radicals on the modern Left think.

I embraced the standard patter and slogans of the far-Left and used them relentlessly in debate. (I often smile when interlocutors use the same language to attack me today — often in a way that suggests they think I have never even heard such clichéd arguments before, never mind deployed them, and will be instantly converted by them.)

Around this time, Barking and Dagenham, then still my home, was experiencing a period of rapid and deep-seated transformation. The settled, stable, culturally homogenous place in which I had been born and raised was suddenly caught in the crosswinds of globalisation. Thousands of newcomers had arrived in the borough in a few very short years. Most were fundamentally decent, hard-working folk, but in a social and cultural sense they had little in common with those who had lived there for years.

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Very quickly, Barking and Dagenham found itself in the eye of a storm of national debate over immigration. Local people felt bewildered and disorientated by the abrupt and far-reaching change to their community. Many simply upped sticks and departed. Streets in which neighbours had known each other and grown up together, which had buzzed with friendship and human interaction, were now places of loneliness and solitude in which people often lived parallel lives. The social solidarity and common cultural bonds that had sustained the community over generations were suddenly fracturing.

Not that any of this bothered me at the time. On the contrary, I welcomed it. This was liberal cosmopolitanism in all its vibrant glory. It was enlightened and progressive. All decent people embraced it, didn’t they?

Besides, it was the class war that mattered most, and the newcomers were working-class allies in the battle against capitalism. Who cared if a few reactionary locals were uneasy about this dramatic change to their community and traditional way of life? These bigots, with their stupid notions of place and belonging and cultural attachment, obviously lacked ‘class consciousness’. And why did they doggedly refuse to be won over by the argument that open borders meant improved GDP?

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It was because of people like me — tin-eared, patronising, certain in their own moral rectitude — that the British National Party won 12 seats on Barking and Dagenham council at the local elections in 2006. It was the party’s best ever performance in an election. The citizens of the borough, angry and resentful at being ignored and insulted, used the only weapon they thought was left available to them. Abandoned by Labour, they turned to the far-Right.

It was only in the years afterwards, once I had taken the time to actually engage seriously with local people and listen to their concerns, rather than simply bombarding them with boilerplate rhetoric, that I began to understand how wrong I was, how wrong Labour was, and frankly how wrong much of the political establishment was, to dismiss the grievances of communities such as Barking and Dagenham so scornfully.

Here was a place of largely decent, tolerant people who would have been perfectly willing to accommodate a modest and manageable number of new arrivals without complaint, but which had instead been expected to accept fundamental social and cultural change, imposed at breakneck speed. And if they did quibble, they were called racist. No wonder they hit back.

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The whole experience taught me that, contrary to what so many on the Left now seem to believe, it isn’t all about the economy or austerity or the class struggle. Of course no place can remain for ever unaltered, but if you are going to foist change upon hard-pressed working-class communities, you had better do it carefully. These places are often bound together organically through a culture of language, custom, solidarity, tradition and social mores passed down through generations. Violate that so casually, and you are inviting blowback.

I am still Labour to my bones. That’s why I argue night and day that the party — and indeed the wider Left — needs to urgently rethink its entire worldview if it is to maintain the support of its traditional base. If we keep force-feeding working-class voters a globalist, liberal cosmopolitan view of the world that fails to resonate with them, we are inviting electoral wipeout. And it would be thoroughly deserved.

Delivering a fairer, more equal economy — crucial though that is — is only half the battle. Millions are crying out for a return to a more rooted, patriotic, communitarian politics that respects their sense of belonging and seeks to build a nation of shared values and common bonds — one in which everyone, regardless of their background, should be encouraged to participate, and where communities are not simply abandoned to the forces of globalisation.

To this day, very few in mainstream politics are speaking for these voters. The lesson of Barking and Dagenham — and I learned it up close and personal — is that if you neglect a community for long enough, the quiet anger will soon become a roar. And the price to be paid will be a high one.