BREXIT Party leader Nigel Farage’s claims that entire streets in Oldham are split along racial lines have sparked a bitter backlash in the town.

Two of the town’s MPs and the town’s council leader have hit out angrily following Mr Farage’s speech at Lock Haven Unitersity in rural Pennsylvania which were reported in the national press.

He said that Oldham has streets where “one side is white and the other is black” and told the audience that people of different races do not even speak to each other in the town.

In the Mail on Sunday, he reportedly said: “Let me take you to a town called Oldham in the North of England where literally on one side of the street everybody is white and on the other side of the street everybody is black.

“The twain never actually meet, there is no assimilation.

“These, folks, are divided societies in which resentments build and grow.”

Oldham East and Saddleworth MP Debbie Abrahams was the first to react, describing Mr Farage’s comments as “disappointing, but not surprising”.

She accused him of “continuing to try to divide communities from his removed, arrogant and privileged position”.

She went on “The vast majority of Oldham and Saddleworth people reject him and his cronies, their political opportunism and their language of fear and hate.

“As my dear friend Jo Cox, who was murdered by a far right extremist, said ‘we have more in common than that which divides us’. Mr Farage would do well to remember this.”

Oldham Council leader Sean Fielding said: “I’m not pretending there isn’t more to do around integration in Oldham.

“But you can’t allow people to get away with making broad, ill-informed statements about the town when they’ve never actually visited it other than an in and out drop-in to a pub four years ago.”“

Oldham West and Royton MP Jim McMahon said: "It seems Nigel Farage is a man who holds a grudge. After his brief visit, and Ukip’s resounding defeat during the 2015 Oldham West & Royton by-election, he is now taking the trouble to attack our community.”

He went on: “Oldham was built on hard work, the workhouse of the Industrial Revolution turned villages and hamlets into a sprawling cotton giant, and with each wave of migration and immigration the nature, culture and fabric of the town changed. That is no different today.”

Mr McMahon also called on Mr Farage to rescind his comments after “having spent little time in our area and knowing little of life in the region”.

He said: “It is a mistake to believe that means Oldham is divided and that communities from different backgrounds do not come into contact with each other.

“Our futures are intertwined, and our success will be a shared one, enriched by where we’ve come from and united in where we are heading.

“We are not defined by Nigel Farage or anyone else seeking to divide us. And by the way; if the alternative to Oldham today is assimilation to become a population in the mould of Nigel Farage, I’d sooner leave. “