Andrew Cann has another reminiscence of the Labour mask slipping:

One comment I would have made, if technically able, on the post you make about Mrs Duffy and the local labour candidates not condemning Brown is that I recall in 2004 when the Labour Party got stuffed in the local elections they blamed the electorate for not voting for them. For being ‘ungrateful’. Always stuck in my mind. It betrays that statist do ‘do as we say’ attitude of them.

Thank God we didn’t have Mark Battersea Dyson rather than Andrew Cann as the Ipswich candidate. The Lib Dem surge would have been very threatening with a candidate. There’s a film on the Guardian website which really shows the difference between the two.

By the way the comment on Comrade Ross and the other Labour twitterers (twits?) still stands. Every day you refuse to condemn that Scottish pension snatcher for his imperious attitude is another day you betray the voters that you presumably came into politics to advance and defend.

Labour activists have a strange attitude to the white working class. This was shown when Gordon Brown called an innocent Labour voting pensioner a “bigot” for daring to ask him questions about the effects of Eastern European immigration.

This will be placed as a question of the Prime Minister’s two-faced nature and his temper. Perhaps it will stretch to questions about Brown’s, ahem, mental stability or the judgement of Labour MPs like Chris Mole who know Brown one hundred times better than we do and who still wanted him as leader of their party. Those are all questions that should be asked, but frankly they are not the most worrying question.

The fact is that middle class Labour activists treat the white English working class with horror. They may think that they speak for them, they may depend on them for their votes and they may even pretend to be like them.

However they can not stand the views of the working class, and they genuinely do regard them as bigoted. This is especially so with immigration. What is in effect a narrow sectional interest – a desire for cheaper restaurants, gardeners and nannies – is transformed into a moral crusade and everyone else has to knuckle down.

When this hurts the loyal white working class, then there is no real sympathy. Obviously if you have been on the doorstep you know that the feeling is intense compared to ten years ago, and curiously non-racial. There is just a feeling that unchecked immigration has lowered wages, raised rents and put a strain on services.

When the white working class complain about immigration they are not calling for an all white Britain but some control over their circumstances. The problem is that from Corder Road or Severn Road this looks like bigotry. In most cases when the class interests of the representatives differ from the clearly expressed interest of those that they wish to represent, the representatives knuckle down and, well, represent.

This has been turned on its head. The people have to be “led”. God help them.

The BNP was never really an issue for me. They were racist and socialist and I was never either (being an hereditary lefty did not make me economically illiterate). Then I got married.

Suddenly I have a stake in the fight. Not a massive stake, after all if the BNP becomes really active in my area and wins a council seat or two I could probably ignore it and if I couldn’t then let’s be honest I could get a mortgage and move somewhere where the BNP were still coming fourth. But it is a stake.

The problem is that the BNP is not simply responding to a perceived failure in the system, they are responding to a real failure.

I’ve had a fairly senior Ipswich Conservative chiding me for saying that immigration was too high. It was something along the lines that people like me had to understand that employers really needed immigrants. I know that this person has since defected and become an immigration reformer, but that’s what the Digby Jones of this world still do say.

And that’s the root of the immigration argument. That’s who’s driving it. Employers, particularly employers who like cheap labour. After all who needs to pay the minimum wage when the reserve army of the unemployed is global?

The big employers also have a whole coterie of useful idiots on the left. I know Andrew Coates would bridle at the term useful, but he does fit the description. His latest post is a call to close down the debate on immigration. Anything that even hints at enforcing border controls must, per se, be “stirring up fear”. Well, no. It’s reflecting that fear, and perhaps hoping that this fear doesn’t go anywhere else. Like the real fascists.

The fear is already here, because getting more people in when jobs are declining will lead to greater unemployment, especially in the short term. Subsidising immigration through benefits, as we are, means that wage earners are subsidising their replacements. It also means that services are crowded out, unless you can afford to go private. And as for rents and mortgages, we all know what’s happened to them in the last ten years, much to the glee of the school teachers and local government middle managers in the Labour Party who had no idea what high rents and house prices did to their most loyal voters.

There is racism among much of the response to immigration, but that’s largely due to frustration. If the attempts to suppress debate by people such as Andrew Coates, or to dismiss it as “nasty” and ignorant by Ipswich Spy (or one head of the hydra), succeed then so will the BNP.

I don’t want that. Neither does my wife. That’s why she appeared on Ben Gummer’s leaflet. If we are to have a tolerant society then we shouldn’t be using uncontrolled immigration as a battering ram to force down wages, crowd out services and force up prices for the most vulnerable.

I can’t believe the amount of discussion that Nick Griffin coming on the BBC has generated.  What has been disapointing is that he’s come across as a victim.  I can’t see how the people who want to ban him from the airways can’t don’t recognise that.

Jack Straw came across as a robust but essentially complacent member of the ruling class, Labour’s Michael Howard.  Why couldn’t they have put someone like Jon Cruddas who would at least put up a fight?  Chris Huhne was unbelievably weak except, ironically, when he attacked the weakness of the Tories and Labour on immigration.  Bonnie Greer is irritating enough on Newsnight, and she came across as irrelevant with her talk about Churchill being, perhaps, just a little bit Mohawk – although her parting comment about the British . 

There were some clever people from the audience, but Baroness Warsi was a surprise.  She (along with Dimbleby) made Griffin appear evasive and boldly stole his clothes on immigration – by admitting that the political classes had got it wrong. 

This was no reverse for the BNP.  However the BNP did suffer a reverse when they attacked the “Tory generals” who complained about the BNP appropriating British millitary symbols, comparing the war leaders to Nazi war criminals who were hanged. 

The BNP can’t be defeated by shouting “racist”.  It can’t be ignored.  In Bridge they got more than 200 votes without even trying.  I’m in a mixed race marriage.  I live here.  I can’t escape to a plush house on the other side of the river. I’m invested in the BNP getting no further in Bridge. 

The BNP have to be confronted as a serious party.  I’ve praised a couple of Tory moves earlier in this post but when I stood for council for Bridge I got a letter from the party chairman Eric Pickles (well it wasn’t to me in particular but to every candidate who faced the BNP).  It told me not to debate the BNP, not to address “their” issues and to ignore the whole thing.  It was this attitude, shared across the political class, that helped them get a million votes.

It’s not just that.  It’s also the silly moves over time by various members of the media and political classes to play down any mention of our Christian heritage, to stop the British flag from being flown and – until recently - to only address immigration from the viewpoint of employers.  The East European mass migration may get marginally cheaper cleaners and builders for the residents of Corder Road, but in Rectory Road its driving up rents, driving down wages and crowding out public services such as schools and hospitals.

The reason why the fruitcakes of the BNP do well is because the political class spent a lot of time talking to itself rather than listening to the voters.

If that doesn’t change things will get a lot worse.  And Bridge will be the victim of a complacent absentee political class that has forgotten how to speak up for it’s voters, if it ever knew how.

It’s easy to say that politics has changed in the last two years, but the reason why we have truisms is that they are true.  One of these areas where there has been a dramatic change has been immigration.

Immigration has always been an issue in Bridge, but it has now shot to the top of the agenda. When I was canvassing in the Hayes a couple of weeks ago immigration had gone to the top in a place where I can’t remember it being mentioned once in the last General Election.  Part of this may have been due to the BNP raising the issue by standing in the last council election, but there seems to have been something else going on.

Even when I’m delivering leaflets I usually have at least one conversation with a voter about immigration and how it affects their area.  This is not the case when I’m on the other side of the river (although it’s still an issue).

Why is Bridge talking about immigration in particular?

The high level of buy to let activity in the Old Stoke area may be one reason why immigration’s so talked about which will probably explain why there are so many more European Union immigrants live around here.  I’ve heard very few complaints about crime and immigration (although anti-social behaviour certainly is an issue). Job insecurity may also be increasing people’s perception of immigration – but it wouldn’t explain why Bridge is so worried about immigration.

However the main parties in Bridge, both Labour and Conservative are going to have to find out why people are worried about immigration here and actually address those concerns.  Sadly this may be a bit too much to hope for when a Labour agent (who is not paid for by the taxpayer, honest) goes around a count accusing a Tory councillor of being friends with fascists due to the fact that he beat a Labour candidate.

This needs to stop.  We need to up the maturity on this debate and address the voter’s legitimate concerns on this issue, because if we don’t then there is a darker force waiting in the wings who will.