‘I would lay part of the blame for family break-up on council housing. In days gone by, children used to live with the parents even after they got married. Now that is not accepted, so the parents get left in inner London, places like Hackney and Tower Hamlets, while the children have to go out to Essex to get a council house.”

This was said to me by a woman in Bethnal Green, Tower Hamlets, in 1995 and, having met and talked to many like her over the past 15 years, I was not surprised to hear Margaret Hodge, MP for Barking, warning last week that 8 out of 10 working-class white families in her east London constituency were tempted to vote for the BNP.

It’s taken the political class a long time to wake up to the concerns of the East End: I came across the sort of worries Hodge mentioned — fear of change, anger at the lack of housing, the influx of immigrants and asylum seekers — many times while carrying out research for an update of the classic study Family and Kinship in East London, by the noted sociologists Michael Young and Peter Willmott, first published in 1957.

Hodge said her constituents “cannot get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry . . . Nowhere else has changed so fast. 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. That is the key thing that has created the environment the BNP has sought to exploit”.

But it would be far too simple to put this flirtation with the BNP down to racism alone. With the rise of immigration has come a collapse of the traditional support network of the East End family.

It has come about for a number of reasons: families are smaller than they were in the 1950s and more women work. More people travel a long way to work. Children, as the woman in Bethnal Green pointed out, have had to move away to find suitable homes, diluting family bonds. It has all led to a sense of isolation and resentment and a feeling that the root cause of all these problems is the way the welfare system appears to give priority to immigrants over the existing population.

Housing is allocated on the basis of “need”, objectively the correct — indeed, only — way to allocate scarce resources like housing. But subjectively, if you need a house and have been told you will have to wait many years because someone more “needy” has been given priority — which to you is queue-jumping — there is bound to be a sense of unfairness. Locals in Tower Hamlets were incensed at incomers being given priority because of poverty or family size, just as they are in the borough of Barking and Dagenham today. “They give preference to people with children, and the Bengalis have three to every one child we have,” one disgruntled white mother told me.

Housing is a particular bugbear because decent housing was a post-war promise made to the heroes of the blitz. This inherited sense of entitlement has been pooh-poohed by some, but it came up so often and with such passion that we couldn’t ignore it.

The history of immigration to the East End goes back centuries, and there has been a pattern of hostility, grudging accommodation, gradual integration and dispersal. This was the experience of Huguenot refugees from France, Irish economic migrants and refugees from famine, and Jewish refugees from eastern Europe.

The Bangladeshis — who made up one-third of all people and just under two-thirds of the school population in Tower Hamlets by 2001 — are the first community whose settlement was assisted by the public sector. Previous groups had to find their feet in a disorganised working environment and chaotic privately rented housing market. But ironically it is the very helping hand offered by the government that has caused such fury among the locals.

Barking and Dagenham is now experiencing the problems that beset Tower Hamlets a decade ago. In addition to immigration there are wider economic pressures, including jobs lost in local manufacturing. In both places there is an acute shortage of social housing, exacerbated by right-to-buy legislation and too little replacement building, and in Tower Hamlets by gentrification. Rising prices may be good news for some, but for others it increases insecurity as access to the housing ladder recedes.

Schools, largely populated by Bangladeshi children, many of whom did not have English as a first language, were another frequently mentioned source of anger. Many people felt undue prominence was given to multiculturalism and to “foreign” religious festivals.

Class comes into play here, too: the middle classes do not, on the whole, compete for social housing with new migrants. Those worried by local change, or finding themselves with restricted access to good state schools, may move house, but such “white flight” further hinders social cohesion and is impossible for those of lesser means.