Pizzas galore!

"The cornerstone of New Labour has been the assumption that working class voters in communities like mine have nowhere else to go, as they would never vote Tory," he wrote.

"Yet this mixture of population movement and policy failure alongside the national discussion around race has meant that many are now developing a class allegiance with the far right."

Professor John said however that this would not necessarily translate into electoral success for the BNP. He said that the researchers who compiled the report, The Far Right in London, had asked which parties voters might consider voting for.

"It is not what party you will vote for, but who you might vote for. The idea is to try to tap into some underlying attitudes which may translate into electoral support, but may not and in the past have not."

He accused the BNP of spreading "myths" which had particular potency in areas experiencing significant levels of change.

Mrs Hodge agreed, adding: "The political class as a whole is often frightened of engaging in the very difficult issues of race and . . . the BNP then exploit that and try and create out of a perception a reality which is not the reality of people’s lives."

Phill Edwards, a BNP spokesman, agreed with the Rowntree report that a sense of "powerlessness and frustration" among communities was leading to an increase in support for his party.

He told Today: "People in Britain for the last 40 years have seen Britain transferred from a racially homogeneous society and a society with indigenous British cultures transformed into one where the cultures are now quite alien and the races are from different parts of the world. That does add quite a lot of tensions and stresses."

He said that strong borders protected population groups, and gave security and freedom, democracy and identity to population groups.

"These people shouldn’t just be allowed to wander wherever they like," said Dr Edwards. "The fact of the matter is that people who come from these countries in the Third World, many of them, do not share our culture and identity."

Dr Edwards claimed that tuberculosis had been brought into Britain from the Indian sub-continent and HIV/Aids from Africa. He also claimed that Britain’s Christian traditions had been compromised by such developments as "the abolition of the Christian name".

He alleged that grants had been offered to encourage people from sub-Saharan Africa to move into areas of east London including Barking and Dagenham.

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