In the hours before watching the BNP Question Time special in a Wolverhampton pub, I read a feature that The Observer published in 1968 about racial tension in the town, a few weeks after Enoch Powell, the local MP, made his “rivers of blood” speech, and a year before my parents arrived in the town as Indian immigrants.

The headline screamed “Town that has lost its reason”, and the racial abuse it quoted from white locals, speaking to a reporter in a “coloured area of Wolverhampton known to the locals as Wog Alley”, was extraordinary. “They are violent, they take our jobs, they take our houses, they breed like rabbits, they don’t want to mix, Enoch was right, the stink is enough to blind you, they’re taking us over, they don’t understand income tax because they don’t want to, they live off the country, they want their teeth kicking in, ‘you go into the park and you’ll see that many turbans it looks like a field of bloody daisies’.”

A “timid coalman” even claimed that his seven-year-old daughter had been raped by a West Indian.

The contrast with the mood in Wolverhampton, now a city, on Thursday night, 40 years later, was stark. I persuaded the manager of a city centre pub to show Question Time in the corner of his establishment and the reaction from the mostly white punters, while low-key, was generally disapproving of the BNP. Natalie, a 28-year-old IT trainer, laughed out loud at Nick Griffin’s bizarre views on mixed marriage. Henry, a 36-year-old carer, muttered “fair play” when an audience member tackled Griffin on his anti-Semitism. There was a quiet boo when Griffin claimed that Churchill was Islamophobic, a murmur of assent when Jack Straw remarked on the role played by blacks and Asians in the Second World War, and laughter when Griffin was tackled about his dealings with the Ku Klux Klan.

Having said that, the majority of patrons were more interested in the Sky Sports News results on the screen opposite, and the mood in a local café on Friday morning was similarly one of indifference. “Got better things to do than watch that circus, to be honest,” a council worker muttered over his cup of tea. “Thought that Griffin came across as a bit of a plonker,” added another. “But then they all did.”

Encouraging? In a way, yes. Wolverhampton was the first town in Britain to experience mass immigration, and while racial politics has defined its postwar history; the issue is not such an obsession now. The success of the local university has made the place more cosmopolitan, a certain amount of prosperity has reduced racial tension over jobs and housing and people have simply got used to living with one another. Powell’s prophesy has not come true.

Then again, I’m Asian, and the average Wulfrunian is hardly going to admit to me that they think darkies are ignorant, useless and should be sent back home. Also, even if I weren’t Asian, a huge amount of self-censorship goes on when people talk about race to the media, unlike in the Sixties. As Griffin demonstrates, even racists are keen to sound reasonable in the media in 2009. In other words, racism is now silent. In Wolverhampton you only feel it in the hush that descends in certain pubs when you enter, in the surliness of the service you get in certain shops. There are occasional bursts of violence, of course, and I guess the idea is that by giving people like Griffin airtime on the BBC, the anger won’t build up so much, and such explosions become less frequent. I hope it works.

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