I suddenly feel able to tell a story which has been lying low in my head for a good three months. I was at a glitzy award ceremony full of pop stars, actors, politicians, mediawallahs and millionaires, at a Knightsbridge venue. It was a diverse crowd representing a new, emerging metropolitan élite, and I was feeling incredibly optimistic Glittering prizes at last, I thought We have arrived. The glow didn’t last.The table next to us was occupied wholly by black Britons Most were big names, talented people who had made it. As the awards were being handed out, a couple of them (both men, a little worse for wear after too much champagne perhaps) started making offensive statements about Asians.Every time an Asian went up on to the stage, we heard them shouting “bloody Paki, go back to the corner-shop” and worse, much worse.

The striking thing was that nobody else on that table tried to stop what was going on. I started writing down the comments and the sharp-suited star of this obscene performance made some threatening noises and then left.Meanwhile, the show went on celebrating “ethnic minority” achievements What a sham. For once, we cannot blame white people for what is happening. Sure, the old trick of divide and rule can still be found within institutions, but this hatred between black and Asian people comes from within the two groups and is never addressed by community leaders.For years now in schools, Asian children have been bullied, taunted, assaulted and mugged by black and white children ganging up. The fact that most Asian children are taught to value education is despised by those who attack them. I have seen this with my own eyes in school playgrounds.I was in a school in Hackney once and I was forced to intervene as a young Iranian boy was first called names (“dirty Paki”, even though he pleaded that he was “Persian”) and then kicked savagely by four black boys and one white boy. Small Asian shopkeepers are deliberately marked out by young black thugs, and in some areas relationships between the two communities are as bad as those between young African-Americans and Koreans in the United States, and for the same reasons.Asians are seen as moneybags and as weak – easy meat for predators.

There is also an increasing amount of poisonous anti-Asian envy felt by some black Britons. If an Asian makes it in public life, some young black will make it their business to undermine them. When my last book was published, the most vicious review was not by one of the white, middle-class men (who were extraordinarily objective), but by a black female academic.Asians have their own hideous stereotypes, and a different way of manifesting their prejudices against black people. A large number of Asian businessmen refuse to give jobs to black people and exclude them from rented properties that they own.Members of my extended family, who owned a large number of houses in London and Birmingham, had a policy of never, ever letting anyone black even see the properties.

One of the local Asian shopkeepers where I live used to say that he hated blacks coming into his shop because “they were dirty and thieves.”I am always horrified to see how older Asians recoil when they see a black man approaching them. The one area which raises the most violent reactions is inter-racial relationships. I am at present writing a book on mixed-race Britons, and have met Asian parents who have told me that they would never accept a black partner for their sons or daughters. Young Asians who break this taboo are rejected, beaten, and in one case even killed. A Mr Singh, one time police inspector in India, said without shame: “They are not quite human yet They are nearer monkeys. Would you let your daughter marry a monkey?”Two films, Mississippi Masala and Bhaji on the Beach, have dealt with this issue sensitively and with courage. Both were regarded with contempt by traditionalists, with reports of near riots in cinemas.

Mississippi Masala was about a love affair between a Ugandan Asian girl, played by Sarita Choudhury, and a black American, played by Denzel Washington.I wept buckets when I first saw the film, because it reminded me of one of the most formative experiences of my life. When I was 17, I played Juliet in a school production of Romeo and Juliet. A white teacher had decided to put on the production to illustrate the divisions between black and Asian Ugandans Romeo was black, handsome and very bright. The play won some British Council awards and so got into the press Both communities were shocked. This is something that never happened in that society, not even in people’s dreams My father never spoke to me again.