Pride and prejudice: How the far right muscled in on middle England

It was the place he dubbed Everytown, the corner of Britain that most accurately represents the nation at large. So when the people of Maltby swung towards the BNP in this month's local elections, ex-resident Julian Baggini returned to discover how the politics of hatred took root in Labour's Yorkshire heartland

'Billy Blair? Yeah, he's a friend of ours. He's a good bloke." It's not unusual to hear local shopkeepers back their newly elected councillor straight after an election. What is extraordinary is that here in Maltby, Rotherham, Will Blair has just won the seat for the BNP and the shopkeeper in question is Birmingham-born British Asian Kaz Singh.

Singh's comment is a warning to anyone trying to make easy sense of the success of nationalist parties in this month's local elections. Blair's win is of particular interest to me because Maltby is part of the S66 district of Rotherham that I lived in for six months in 2005 to help write my book on English beliefs and values, Welcome to Everytown. S66 was the area thrown up by a search of a demographic database for the postcode that most accurately reflected the mix of the country as a whole. In the light of this, the results of the council elections were particularly intriguing.

The three main wards in S66 are an incredible mix of wealth, poverty and middling comfort, ranging from former pit village Maltby to affluent Hellaby.

Labour entered the election holding two of the three seats up for election and was wiped out. The BNP's Will Blair took Maltby, with only 23 per cent of the votes cast, but nationalists did well in all three wards, where nearly one in four of those who voted opted for UKIP or the BNP. For those who comfort themselves that these parties only do well in poor, white, working-class areas, this is something of a wake-up call.

So I went back to S66 last week, as I have done several times since writing the book, to find out why the BNP had done so well. It quickly became obvious that although the nationalist success defies simplistic explanation, the main push is an astonishingly deep and widespread disillusion with Labour.

I met countless people like the father and son drinking at the Joker pub, in Sunnyside, who had both voted Labour all their lives until this election, when they opted for UKIP over the only other alternative, a Conservative.

"This area's Labour," explained the father, "but it's not New Labour." Likewise, an 83-year-old called Margaret, who voted BNP in the other Rotherham ward where the party won, having voted Labour in every previous poll. "They promise you this, that and the other and you get nowhere, don't you?" she told me.

So why is Labour so unloved in one of its heartlands? Local factors played an important part. In Maltby, three independents stood in the aftermath of a bizarre parish council election following a row over the eviction of a church youth club from the town hall. A 15-3 Labour-Independent majority was turned on its head when Independents won 15 seats.

In Brinsworth and Catcliffe, the other ward to go BNP, there was deep discontent over the clean-up after last summer's floods, and because the sitting councillor was the mayor, he didn't campaign, as is the convention. Nationally, in contrast, UKIP and the BNP barely made any impact at all, and 93 per cent still voted for one of the main three parties.

But it would be complacent to write off the large nationalist vote as a purely local quirk. Rotherham could be a warning of how New Labour might pay the price for what has given it success so far: its efficient election machine which has been targeting the swing voters such as Worcester Woman at the expense of Maltby Man. When so much effort is made wooing the middle 20 per cent of the electorate, it should not be surprising that the remaining 80 per cent feel unloved.

Rotherham MP Denis MacShane goes further. "In 1960, if you were on average working wages, you paid 8 per cent of your income in tax," he told me in the sunny garden of his Rotherham home.

"By 1970 that had become 20 per cent, and Labour wondered why it lost. The contract then was informal but clear: you'll pay a lot of your income as a working-class man in tax; in return, you'll get health, education and housing; and, on the whole, that contract held until about 15 years ago, and then it was broken, particularity in the area of housing. I mean, we built 25 social houses in South Yorkshire the year before last. When one resource is scarce (and housing is scarce), the fight over that resource becomes potentially vicious."

MacShane's point explains how the pull of the nationalist parties has exploited the push away from Labour. Almost everyone I spoke to agreed that immigration was now out of control and that immigrants were being granted resources denied to the "indigenous" population.

Such fears are almost certainly heightened by xenophobia, which has an ignoble history in the area. MacShane recalls how collieries were split after the war when Polish soldiers were sent down the mines and the Yorkshire National Union of Miners wouldn't accept them, and how the National Front won 6 per cent of the vote in a 1976 by-election. The latent racist threat is probably why Labour councillor Shaukat Ali, who heads MAARI (Multi-Agency Approach to Racial Incidents), described the situation after the BNP victory as tense, and didn't want to talk at all.

But to dismiss all opposition to immigration as racist is nonsense. For example, Singh explained that he had no problem with his new councillor's anti-immigration stance because he was British too, born and bred here. It's just that he doesn't think there are enough jobs and houses for the large numbers still coming in.

He reminded me of many views I heard while working on a Joseph Rowntree inquiry into refused asylum-seekers last year. Opposition to new immigration by families of immigrants is not at all uncommon, and if this is not based on race, why can't the opposition of a white Briton be equally free of bigotry?

Artist and former miner Stewart Platt is a good example. His house proudly sports a cross-of-St-George plaque, but Platt didn't vote BNP in Maltby because: "I'm not racist and that's all I've ever known it stand for."

However, he also says: "If it were against all immigrants that's done owt wrong, then deporting them, I agree with that, but it's always been a black thing."

Most of those who did vote BNP differ from Stewart only in that they do not think the party is racist. This also seems to be the case with the elected councillor Will Blair.

The BNP national office wasn't keen to help me meet Blair. Nick Griffin's number two, Simon Darby, reacted to my requests by saying that articles in papers such as The Independent were usually just sneering, and saying (falsely, I believe) that I had once called the BNP nutters in print. Ironically, Blair turned out to be a much better advert for the BNP than the defensive and dismissive Darby.

Perhaps this is because, although he has been a BNP member for six years, Blair seems either not aware of or to disagree with its view that ethnic minorities should not comprise more than 2-3 per cent of the population. What he wants to defend is British culture, not Anglo-Saxon genes, which is just as well, since he comes from Co Antrim in Northern Ireland. "I've always believed in the British way of life," he says, a claim underlined by his racing-pigeon coops behind him.

Blair is, by all accounts, a model member of his community, involved in charitable events and chair of the traders' association. "I knew most of the people round this area would vote for me because they know me. I'm always helpful and try to do my best for people." But he thinks the people on the other side of town put their crosses next to his name because of his party. "They're frightened of losing their heritage and way of life."

Blair talks about the classic fears of a country transformed by immigrants, benefits claimed and jobs stolen. "We're not talking about any breed or colour here, we're talking about people coming into the country and if you'll do it for £10 an hour, they'll do it for £5 an hour. I think people worry about their families, their children, their grandchildren, they think that within the next 10, 15 years, there'll be no work for them. I think people are frightened."

It's easy to assume that racism lurks behind these fears, but Blair seems genuinely to be free of prejudice. "The best doctor I've ever had is a Pakistani. That man has done everything I have asked for my health. If he had a problem, I'd help him. I can go to the cash-and-carry and I can shake any man's hand, English, Indian, Pakistani, Polish. They know that they're here the same as me: they're doing a job and they're putting money back into society."

But this is not quite the politics of the national BNP, which explicitly talks about the importance of race. Its 2005 election manifesto claimed that the tendency "to create and sustain social and political structures in which individual freedom, equality before the law, private property and popular participation in decision-making, is to some extent at least genetically predetermined" and that therefore "the idea that it is possible to allow large numbers of people from very different ethnic groups and cultures to settle here ... is fatally flawed." If this is the real voice of the BNP, then nothing I heard from anyone in Rotherham gave me reason to think many truly support it.

I'm prepared to believe that, like many of his voters, Blair does not oppose immigration on the basis of race hatred. But if this is true, why do so many believe that incomers are causing problems? The question is puzzling, because the areas that voted most strongly for the nationalist parties actually have the lowest ethnic-minority populations. Maltby, for example, is almost completely white and was home to only nine out of the 363 racial incidents in Rotherham reported to MAARI last year.

Yet almost everyone had improbable stories to tell about the preferential treatment immigrants received, when we know benefit rules make this impossible. Blair told me: "If you went to France or these other countries, they don't give you the handouts, so they think: 'We'll go to that England place.'"

Platt says: "There's a shop in Maltby – they give them a grant and he furnishes their houses. They can't all be made-up stories, they do get money, and that's why a lot of people are against it."

Similarly, local former steelworker Colin Newey, whom I know and would swear hasn't a racist bone in his body, said: "My older brother told me someone from Poland got a van to go looking for work."

Lurid tabloid headlines are partly to blame for this. The Federation of Poles in Great Britain has repeatedly claimed that Daily Mail reporting has been defamatory to Poles living in this country. But it's harder to blame the media for the widely repeated claim that ethnic minorities are becoming the majority in certain areas of the town.

I asked an old friend to take to me these areas of the town which he said were now predominantly Asian. In one we saw more whites than blacks or Asians. In another, we hardly saw anyone from any visible minority at all. At one point, he pulled over, wound down his window and asked someone walking by: "Excuse me, are there many immigrants around here?" The guy shrugged his shoulders, perplexed. "Not really, no."

Rotherham town centre remains a predominantly white shopping area. And yet, looking around All Saints Square, I had to remind myself that, having lived in large cities, I don't see Rotherham as long-term residents do. When you're not used to seeing people who look or sound different, you notice such people when they do turn up, even if they are only a sizeable minority. Again, this isn't racist.

As Denis MacShane explains, it is "indisputable" that Rotherham, like much of the country, has experienced the fact that "three huge waves, coming from different sources, of non-indigenous 'Brits' have arrived very hard and very visibly in the last decade." These were asylum-seekers from Eastern Europe and the Middle East; people from the subcontinent who came, often to marry cousins, after rules on marriage were relaxed; and then the Eastern European migrant workers coming in after EU enlargement.

Whenever an area has a large influx of newcomers over a relatively short period of time, it always makes people who have become used to it having a settled, familiar character worried that it is all about to change. This is understandable. When small villages complain about the effects of city people with no links to the area moving in in large numbers, no one accuses them of urbanism. The great failure of those in favour of a diverse society with the free movement of people has been to refuse to face up to the challenges such changes present, for fear of siding with the racists.

But there has been another failure. Look at the BNP's literature and you'll find that, on occasion, it points to some inconsistencies in the stance of "politically correct" liberals that are indeed hard to justify. For example, by coincidence, only a few days before going to Rotherham, I had been interviewing the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton and he had mentioned how the organiser of the English Music Festival received no Arts Council funding "because of the word English". Yet a festival of virtually any other national culture would be funded. Even if the frequency of these sort of cases is overstated, there has been an inconsistency between the acceptability of asserting Englishness compared with other national or ethnic identities.

Things may now be changing in this regard. But if it is the case that minority cultures have sometimes been given greater respect than the majority one, then it is easy for people to believe that this is symptomatic of a wider bias against what the BNP calls the indigenous British population.

Patriotism, if not allowed to express itself, will gravitate to wherever it is given a home, which right now is in nationalism. Of course, this has been a worry for some years, which is why Gordon Brown, among others, has been trying to reclaim patriotism for the Left. So far, it has not succeeded; in part, because no one has found a way of promoting national identity that is genuinely inclusive yet not utterly banal.

Those worried by the nationalist success in Everytown should take heart from the fact that everyone seems to agree that, whether they loathe the BNP or love it, most people in Maltby are not racist. The most incredible testimony of this comes from a woman who is remarkably well placed to judge such things.

Brenda Abou El Ola has lived in Maltby most of her life and married a Palestinian man in Lebanon. She's writing a book about what happened when they went back to live in Rotherham and confronted the reality of being an immigrant in Maltby.

"Put it this way," she told me, "we are perfectly happily married, but I am now living on my own in Maltby, and my husband and the two lads are renting a house in Eastwood for the simple reason that it wasn't working in Maltby."

One incident in particular explains why. "One night, my son, who was born and bred in Maltby, was walking home and a 15- year-old boy came out, drugged up or whatever, with a knife, threatening my son about my situation – 'Why don't you get you're mother to take her black Bs back to where they came from?' – and various threats on his and our lives."

Her son went into his flat and called the police, who didn't initially come, but his mother was not so retiring when he called her. "Me, being the person I am, and against my husband's and stepson's recommendations, went out on to the street to ask what was going on. He came towards me with the knife saying the same comments, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor."

The attack broke her jaw and the next day her face was bruised and swollen so badly "I didn't want to leave the house for days, it looked so shocking". The attacker got off with nothing more than a "severe talking to", having said that he was sorry.

Despite this and racial harassment of her two stepsons at school, Abou El Ola chooses to stay in Maltby. "I like it here. I brought up my first family here and I feel at home." She thinks most of the people are good and decent, and that those who voted BNP did so for the main reason that they "have had enough of Labour and want something different".

So are the mainstream parties, and Labour in particular, ready to learn the lessons of the nationalist successes in Rotherham? It won't be easy. As Denis MacShane put it: "The difficulty is that you have to see that part of the argument that has some validity. Just because a BNP guy is saying that many people who are born and brought up here feel that there's too much foreign in Britain doesn't mean to say it's untrue. The question is how do you react to that?"

The answer, he believes, includes swifter return of asylum-seekers whose claims are unjustified, promotion of the English language, and construction of "a set of rules we expect people to abide by".

Whether he's right or wrong, to dismiss as racist the tough questions that he and others are now asking would be to repeat the mistakes that have led the BNP to victory in South Yorkshire. Unless mainstream politics finds a way of responding to the fears and desires of the voters who feel disenfranchised and afraid in a changing world, nationalist parties can look forward to even more success in the future.

Welcome to Everytown: A Journey into the English Mind is published by Granta. www.julianbaggini.com

The rise of the BNP

The British National Party was founded in 1982 following splits in the far right National Front, but its recent growth from political obscurity dates from 1999, when Cambridge-educated Nick Griffin (inset) took over as leader, and set about replacing its crew cuts with a modernised, besuited image.

The BNP secured its first council seat – in London's Tower Hamlets – in 1993. Today, the party has around 56 local councillors, a net gain of 10 in local elections earlier this month, when it also gained for the first time a seat on the London Assembly. With parish and community councils, the party claims 100 elected representatives across the country.

Richard Barnbrook, elected to the London Assembly under the capital-wide party top-up system, also polled nearly 200,000 votes in the mayoral election.

The party's greatest stronghold is in east London, with 12 councillors in Barking and Dagenham: it is the borough's official opposition party. It has moved out of its core areas in the North-west to target London and rural seats, playing on fears about immigration, but also attempting to benefit from anger over fuel prices.

In 2006, Griffin was cleared of race-hate charges relating to speeches filmed by a BBC undercover team. But the party – has suffered splits and polled less than 1 per cent in the last general election.

The BNP has fewer than 1 per cent of the councillors in England and Wales.

Independent