Add to this the emotive issue of immigration. Again, middle-class liberals have patronisingly lectured the working class as to the benefits of immigration. For them, immigration means a range of trendy ethnic restaurants on the high street and access to cheap childminders. It is the working class who have had to endure diminished access to public housing as local councils highhandedly deem the needs of immigrant newcomers to outweigh the needs of the indigenous council tax payers, who may have been on the waiting list for years; it is they who have to see their children's education suffer as their local school fills up with immigrant children who don't speak English as a first language. And when they dare to complain, they are contemptuously dismissed as racists and bigots by those who are well insulated from the negative effects of immigration. Is it any wonder that out of sheer desperation, some working-class men and women may heed the siren call of the BNP?
If the BNP does do well (there is no guarantee that this will happen), please let none of us resort to that old routine of shaking our heads in sorrow and complaining that the working class has been taken in by the scaremongering of the right-wing press. Have the decency to credit them with more intelligence. We need to make an effort to re-engage with the working classes, to listen to them, and neither patronise them nor tell them that their concerns are not valid. As a start, we can have an honest debate about the costs, as well as the benefits, of immigration.
DAOUD FAKHRI
LONDON E17