NUCLEAR WAR last week, the onward march of fascism this. Our only hope is that the bird flu gets us before Nick Griffin, the oyster-eyed capo of the British National Party, does.

This scare, however, is different from the rest, because it comes with a minister wrapped around it. Margaret Hodge told The Sunday Telegraph (in remarks that are bound to be have been taken out of context) that her white, working-class constituents in Barking are contemplating a serious electoral flirtation with Griffin’s bunch of assorted racists, anti-Semites and goons. As many as eight out of ten homes that she canvassed, she said, were thinking seriously about it. This was a figure not quite borne out by radio vox pops, despite a hilarious encounter on the Today programme with a man called Abdul who told his questioner that he believed that too many immigrants had been allowed in recently — and then very charmingly introduced his wife, a recent immigrant from Pakistan.

Even so, there was plenty of corroborative material around for Ms Hodge’s pessimism. A Rowntree report, about to be released, backs up some of the ministers’ worries, and that splendid anti-fascist organisation, Searchlight, is concerned about the inroads being made in northeast London by the BNP. Depending on who you believe, possible gains for the BNP in the Barking and Dagenham council elections on May 4 could range from between half a dozen seats to half the council.

Why? Because the white working class — according to Ms Hodge — “can’t get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry”. In her view they have been hit by a demographic shift so sudden that they cannot adjust. “When I arrived in 1994, it was a predominantly white, working-class area. Now, go through the middle of Barking and you could be in Camden or Brixton . . . It is gobsmacking change.”

Whether Ms Hodge is right about the pace of change being so much greater in her borough than that experienced by, say, the East End of London, mining areas, or parts of Yorkshire, is a matter for argument. My own guess is that there are other, more qualified, candidates for the position of most done-over part of Britain, and many of these places seem not to have reacted by falling for race politics.

Even so, we should take the threat seriously. Not because the BNP can become our Front National — despite Griffin’s obvious talents it does not seem to have the cadres to produce anything more than an ill-tempered voting blip before its new councillors all assault each other or resign out of boredom.

We should take it seriously because, like many suicide attempts, it is a cry for help. A friend of mine told me yesterday that blackbirds have taken to singing in the night, because — apparently — it’s too noisy in the day. They can be heard only during the dark. Perhaps part of the white working class now feels that it can only be heard in the dark.

Ms Hodge’s neighbour, Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham, has become something of a specialist in this subject. His assertion is that the BNP phenomenon is caused by a failure of mainstream, especially Labour, politicians to appeal to “traditional” voters. Instead, the parties try to maximise their appeal to middle-class swing voters in marginal constituencies. Labour’s project has ceased to be the “emancipation” of the still large working class.

I have real problems with Mr Cruddas’s analysis, seductive though many find it. The first is that many swing voters in marginal seats are also white working class, and that quite a lot of the Labour appeal is calculated to gain their support. The second is that one might expect that far-left parties, such as Respect, would benefit as much, or even more, from disillusion with Labour’s centrism than racist parties of the far Right.

In fact I don’t believe that the BNP votes will predominantly be ex-Labour votes at all. In 1983 the combined Conservative and SDP vote in Dagenham was 59 per cent, with Labour hanging on to the seat by a whisker. This was when Labour was at its most magnificently class conscious. Since then the Tory vote has collapsed. What may be fuelling the BNP vote is the moderation and commitment to multiculturalism of the Conservative Party.

And here we should admit something — the horrid pleasures of racism. Back in the Sixties my father was the district secretary of the Communist party of Great Britain in South Essex — a district that took in Barking, Dagenham, Harlow, Benfleet and other new towns. I recall his shock when, after Enoch Powell was sacked from his position in Heath’s Shadow Cabinet for his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, 1,000 dockers — the true labour aristocracy — marched in Powell’s support. Having someone to hate, to jeer at, to blame, has always been pretty seductive. Ironically, it’s the white working class itself, in its “chav” incarnation, that has become the scapegoat for many of us.

So there always was the racist possibility, held in check partly because the experience of the Second World War and the fight against fascism was fairly fresh in everyone’s minds. Now it’s 60 years ago, and the term “fascist” seems like an arcane bit of abuse. It doesn’t produce the same aversion any more.

Mr Cruddas’s solution to the problem is, as far as I understand it, to build a lot more social housing — so as to draw the sting of the accusation of unfair treatment for immigrants; to give existing illegal immigrants an amnesty and then get tough on new illegal entrants; and to talk more openly about the benefits of immigration. I agree with the first and last points.

One place where he argued this course was in the last edition of Renewal, a rather thoughtful publication for centre-leftists who now want to emphasise the “left” bit. The article that followed his was an interview with the renowned sociologist Richard Sennett. Professor Sennett believed, contra Cruddas, that Tony Blair was actually rather hot on deprivation — it was skilled workers that new Labour didn’t understand. They, said Professor Sennett, didn’t want emancipation, they didn’t want social mobility. “What they want to do,” he argued, “is to make a good life for themselves and their families without necessarily having to be different than they’ve been in the past. It’s not a lack of ambition. It’s a different kind of ambition.”

I spent Sunday evening looking at the stats for Barking and Dagenham. It is less deprived than my own borough, Camden. It experiences less crime. Its housing stock is no worse. But its educational attainment is lower, its VAT registrations (a sign of small business activity) are much lower and its teen pregnancy rate is much, much higher.

If you had Barking on the couch, you’d make sure that you listened to it and took its complaints seriously; people go bonkers if they feel that no one cares. But you’d also tell it the truth, which is that there is no protection from change itself — no stopping the world, unless you are prepared to pay the heavy price of getting off.

The author’s weblog is at: www.timesonline.co.uk/weblogs

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