CAMPAIGN TRAIL:The BNP's Nick Griffin is after Labour's seat in Barking and Dagenham, writes Mark Hennessy
EIGHTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD Win Chapman remembers street parties to mark Empire Day, Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and, before that, the accession to the throne of George VI, “the old king” as she puts it.
On Saturday, Mrs Chapman and neighbours, many of them immigrants of recent decades, or the children of immigrants, gathered at trestle tables in the sunshine to celebrate St George’s Day.
Two local police officers served teas and lemonades, firemen gave children a tour of their tender, and members of the local residents’ association encouraged locals to stop off and join in.
The high visibility for the St George’s flag, a red cross on a white field, was not accidental, but, rather, an attempt to reclaim an image that has been seized upon by the British National Party.
BNP leader Nick Griffin is bidding to win the House of Commons seat in Barking and Dagenham from Labour’s Margaret Hodge, along with a parallel bid to take control of the local council on the same day.
“I remember the Blackshirts,” Mrs Chapman says. “I don’t like idea of the BNP at all. If we got the BNP we would lose the monarchy. They would slowly take over the country and run it their way.” Up to a decade ago, Barking and Dagenham was the home of Ford, in Longbridge, where up to 40,000 people toiled in the days when the car plant was the biggest factory in Europe.
Today, just 4,000 of the Ford jobs are left, while the local demographic has changed significantly – particularly in the last five years since Eastern European countries joined the EU. Immigration is the key issue; some of the feelings are racist and nothing else; some are fuelled by the pace of change, but many among poor whites are spurred by housing shortages and a sense that they are being ignored.
Some of the immigration concerns, indeed, are coming from earlier generations of immigrants: “One Asian woman said to me the other day that she had no problems until the Eastern Europeans started coming,” says Hodge.
On the doorstop, the Labour candidate quickly encounters it: “All of you are to blame. If I wanted to live in Nigeria I would have gone to live in Nigeria,” says one blonde-haired woman seething with anger from behind her patio door.
But Barking is not black or white.
The woman turns out to be of Dutch extraction, with a daughter married to a West Indian. Hodge, the child of German and Austrian Jews who fled Hitler, exclaims: “But you’re an immigrant. I’m an immigrant.”
Council houses are in short supply, but the shortages had been intensified by the Conservatives’ sale of properties under Margaret Thatcher, which led many Ford workers to decamp further east along the Thames Estuary to Claxton.
“That’s known now as ‘Little Dagenham’,” says Labour’s Darren Rodwell, who is running for the council. “Those houses began to be worth enough to sell from 2005 onwards.” Equally, many of the locals, and outsiders, bought houses as investments, which are now being let out to immigrants, while councils elsewhere in London have bought houses in the constituency to accommodate some of their overflows.
However, immigrants are not necessarily asylum seekers. In fact, many of the newcomers are lower middle-class Asians and West Indians, long-settled elsewhere, who moved east due to cheaper property prices.
Labour is struggling to explain the reasons for some of the changes, though the party’s failure for years to be present on the ground because it could afford to take Barking for granted has allowed the BNP room to grow.
The far-right party, which has one of its bases in the Cherry Tree pub on Longbridge Road, complete with a giant St George’s flag hanging from its roof, won 12 council seats in the 2006 local election.
Back then, it published untruthful leaflets claiming that a number of Labour-controlled councils were giving grants of £50,000 to African families to buy houses in Barking under an “Africans for Essex” programme.
Now, it is running 32 candidates for the 51-seat council, and victory in this campaign seems to be more of a priority for it than the House of Commons election race, from which Griffin has been more often absent than present.
Since 2006, Labour has worked to reclaim lost ground: “It used to be the case that you could put out a dog with a rosette and it would get a Labour vote,” says Rodwell, who has made enemies for orchestrating the deselection of 20 outgoing Labour councillors.
Some of the deselected are now running as independents, while their replacements – including a number of young Asian women – are campaigning hard for votes. On occasions, doors are slammed in their face.