Smash hit

We found that potential BNP supporters often fitted the expected profile. They tended to be older, poorly educated and lower middle-class (rather than the poorest working-class).

But, to our initial surprise, we found that people — especially women — with large and close families were also more likely to be hostile to immigrants. Old people without children were less complaining; they were inclined to be positive about the more cosmopolitan and prosperous Tower Hamlets of today.

But there was another subtle difference: people whose families had already moved away were slightly less likely to be hostile than those who still had family nearby.

Something akin to a siege mentality had developed: these East End families had seen others split up and felt they were having to defend themselves against the forces of modernity and mobility. The man with the largest number of family members living locally was already a supporter of the BNP.

So why is this? Why should family be so important here? The original 1957 study in the East End provided an answer. It emphasised the importance of mutual support networks in large working-class families and argued strongly against splitting up families by moving people to new towns outside London or into new family-unfriendly tower blocks.

Since then, those support structures have taken a battering. Families are smaller and more mobile, divorce common, and to some extent family support, especially of the very young, the disabled and the old, has been replaced by state support of various kinds.

People who remember the strength of families in the past, and compare them with the fragile networks of today, feel something important has been lost and look around for the culprits. They blame immigration.

Should we therefore ignore the BNP threat in Barking and Dagenham as drearily familiar xenophobia and nostalgia? There is no simple answer. One young woman, hostile to immigration, who thought it had contributed to the scattering of her own family, said to me: “Some white people don’t see their family hardly at all. But my Bangladeshi neighbours have always got other members of the family there visiting them and playing with the children. They’ve always got a smile on their faces. You couldn’t get nicer people.”

This was no racist talking, however much she resented what had happened to her family because of pressure on local housing. People were typically angry at the system itself and, especially, at “those big-hearted ones who’ve got their own big houses and make these rules”.

What it seemed to come down to is a feeling of having lost a stake in the democratic process. The people we talked to felt unconsulted and powerless about what had happened to their communities.

If the working classes of east London feel they are back in disgrace, as they usually were until the glory days of post-war national gratitude, no wonder a few of them find the BNP attractive.

Kate Gavron is the co-author with Geoff Dench and Michael Young of The New East End