"IF Rovers do put in a prayer hall at Ewood Park, it will need to be a very big one.

"When we are 3-0 down at half-time there will be 25,000 fans desperate to get on their knees in there".

This was the comment of one Rovers fan, who happened to be of the Muslim faith, at a meeting I attended in town.

We were discussing the recent report on the aftermath of the Oldham race riots in 2001.

This report, by Prof Ted Cantle, indicated there had been some progress since then.

Formally, race relations were much better. Asian and white primary schools were now "twinned", and did much to bring younger members of the two communities together.

But they remained two communities with much less natural contact than was healthy.

So the question before my Blackburn meeting was "could it happen here?"

I would like to think that "it" rioting, civil strife could not.

I would like to hope relations between the different faith communities are solid enough so that what has befallen Oldham and Burnley does not happen to Blackburn.

We have been blessed by good public administration in the council, and these days unemployment is around the national average, and low by comparison with East Lancashire past.

The man who made the joke about a prayer hall at Ewood Park was on the optimistic side.

He had been the only Asian in his year at school, had lived in a white middle class area of town all his adult life, spoke with a thick Lancashire accent and could not see what the problem was.

I pray he is right. But others at the meeting were less sanguine.

No one can tell people where to live.

But a consequence of thousands of individual decisions about where to buy or rent mean parts of the town are segregated.

Everyone knows this, but we need to do more to talk about its causes and consequences.

I have a suggestion. Saint George, whose cross makes up our national flag, never set foot on these shores. He was a Palestinian.

So it is rather fitting he should be patron saint of our nation, England, as it continues its multicultural journey that started centuries ago when the Angles and the Saxons drove the Celts west.

During the last Olympics you could not tell whether those whose faces were painted with the Union Jack were white, black or Asian (not least when Amir Khan won his boxing medal).

I look forward to the same with the flying of the flag of that Palestinian English man Saint George, as we back our lads in the World Cup.