He is supposed to be fronting a campaign to propel his Brexit party into the European parliament. But Nigel Farage abandoned Europe at the weekend and flew to the US to give a speech where he claimed entire streets of Oldham in Greater Manchester are split along racial lines.

Addressing an audience of young libertarians at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, Farage said Oldham was a “divided society”.

He told the Young America’s Foundation: “I could 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. Whole streets in Oldham of people who have lived in my country for over 30 years who don’t speak a word of the English language. These, folks, are divided societies in which resentments build and grow.”

But Sean Fielding, the Labour leader of Oldham council who represents Failsworth West (which is 95.1% white), suggested Farage was talking nonsense. “I’m not familiar with any visits that Nigel Farage has made to Oldham since he came during the 2015 byelection [when Ukip trailed Labour by more than 10,000 votes] so I have no idea what streets he has walked down and what experiences he bases them on, because by all accounts, when he came to Oldham all he did was go to the pub,” said Fielding.

Waiting for a bus on Oxford Street in Oldham’s Werneth ward on Sunday, John Worswick thought Farage had a point. The 65-year-old, who is reconsidering his Brexit vote after realising it might complicate matters for his Lithuanian girlfriend, said Farage “gets misinterpreted”.

In Werneth, a tangle of terraces a mile south-west of Oldham town centre, 23.4% of the population was white at the time of the 2011 census, down from 43.2% 10 years earlier. Meanwhile, the Pakistani population grew from 38.2% in 2001 to 48.6% in 2011. The Bangladeshi community also swelled in that decade, from 11.6% to 17.8%.

Meanwhile, younger residents, perhaps not born at the time of the last census, are overwhelmingly of migrant background: eastern European as well as Asian and African. Ofsted reports from local primary schools say almost all pupils are from minority ethnic groups, and most speak English as an additional language.

Worswick, a retired electrical engineer, said he would like to move to Saddleworth, a hilly – and very (97%) white – part of Oldham, but couldn’t afford it. “When I first moved here in 1982 I’d say it was 80% white, 20% Asian. It would be nice to have more white people around … people might say ‘I have friends in other communities’, but for most people that isn’t true,” he said.

Another white resident, a 42-year-old woman who asked not to be named, said Farage was half-right. “The truth is we don’t have much to do with each other, but it’s friendly. A lot of people here we don’t have conversations with, but we live in peace.”

A 31-year-old man, a teacher of Pakistani origin who was born in Werneth, said any lack of interaction was more a sign of the times than an indication of a segregation problem: “The way I see it, everyone has got such a busy timetable that they don’t have time to chat any more. It’s not like 20 years ago where you’d be in and out of each other’s houses for a cup of tea.”

At Ashi’s takeaway, Mohammed Riaz was filling little plastic containers with minty yoghurt ready for a surge in Sunday evening orders. “It’s bullshit,” he said of Farage’s comments. “We all live here together. I deliver takeaways to everyone. We have all sorts of people here, from Somalia, Pakistan, West Indies, Ghana, Iraq, Kurdistan, Palestine.” Riaz moved to the UK 34 years ago from Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, and said Farage was “racist, that’s all I can say”.

Yet an ethnicity report by Oldham council, based on data from the 2011 census, said: “There appears to be little white and Asian social mixing, as expressed by dual heritage or mixed-ethnicity households. Geographical segregation, particularly between white and Pakistani and white and Bangladeshi, is exceptionally high and showing little sign of improvement.”

Fielding agreed that some parts of Oldham were dominated by certain ethnic minority groups – “but that has been the nature of any wave of immigration in Britain, where communities tend to live together, so I don’t think that’s unique to Oldham. It doesn’t mean that those communities don’t mix.”

He accepted that some primary schools were monocultural by virtue of parents generally choosing to send their children to the nearest school, but insisted older children did get a chance to mix, particularly at the very diverse Oldham sixth-form college.

Farage is just looking for attention, said Fielding. “Let’s face it, this is the latest in a string of desperate cries for relevance from a second-rate shock jock.”