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A former Labour stronghold has become home to one of the ugliest fights in politics. In one corner, a long-standing minister. In the other, the leader of the BNP. John Harris joins them on the frontline

The tube heads east, through Whitechapel, Stepney Green, Mile End, Bow Road. Canary Wharf is there in the near distance, but seems like another world. The train passes through post-industrial remains – rusty gasometers, empty canals – and blocks of flats, from inter-war mansion blocks to the great leviathans put up in the 60s. Finally, the landscape opens out into a grey plateau, and you’re there: most of the way to Essex, into the borough of Barking and Dagenham.

As arranged, Nick Griffin’s bodyguard calls me at 1.30pm, and picks me up at Dagenham Heathway station – whereupon we drive to the home of Richard Barnbrook, one of the British National Party’s leading Barking councillors and their solitary member of the London Assembly. An English flag and a Union Jack fly either side of the front door; inside, the lounge is dominated by two big glass tanks populated by Chinese water dragons and other exotic reptiles.

And there he is, like a Bond villain relocated to the set of the Royle Family: Nick Griffin, 51, here for the day before resuming his current job in Strasbourg and Brussels as the MEP for England’s North West. He is personable, if a little nervous. Depending on your point of view, the scene’s fine details suggest either the banality of evil, or the comfortingly Pooter-esque tastes of the house’s owner: a matter not just of the reptiles, but of Barnbrook’s insistence that everyone, his leader included, walks around in their stocking feet, and the fact that he makes a point of offering Griffin a soft drink: “Do you want an apple juice, Nick?”

“Oh, I’d love an apple juice.”

Eventually, we make our way to the Thames View estate, a blighted housing development cut off from the rest of the borough by the cacophonous A13. Seemingly for my benefit and that of a BNP volunteer making a campaign video, Griffin, Barnbrook and another five or six BNP members – at least two of whom are wearing secret service-type earpieces – approach the few members of the public who are braving the rain, and talk to them about the more difficult aspects of their lives.

In Shannon’s bakery, 60-year-old Shannon Slattery tells them about her daughter, who lives with her four-year-old son in a grim, privately-rented flat full of pigeon droppings that have apparently made the boy chronically ill. They’re on the council waiting list, “but every time, she’s, like, number 200 or 300″. She and her husband Derek now vote BNP: “They talk straight – they stand up for the English.” All this is explained while a few black schoolkids jostle at the counter for cakes, and Barnbrook makes awkward small talk with them: “You going to take some exercise after that? You don’t want to get big round the middle.”

Once a dependable Labour stronghold, Barking and Dagenham is now represented by two MPs who could not be more different: the left’s favourite, and likely post-Brown contender, Jon Cruddas; and Margaret Hodge, New Labourite, and minister at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. They have one thing in common: a long, grinding fight against the British National Party. Since 2006, the BNP has had 12 councillors here – nine of whom are in Hodge’s Barking constituency – and come May it could make it to 26 seats and be handed control of the borough. Meanwhile, Hodge is in the early stages of a general election battle against the far right’s most recognisable and infamous face: Nick Griffin.

Modern politicians don’t talk about such issues much, but the underlying problems here are simple enough. Local life used to revolve around the massive Ford car works, which once employed 50,000, but is now home to a diesel engine plant staffed by only 2,000. Back then, the borough was also a byword for plentiful council housing.

Margaret Thatcher’s Right To Buy scheme changed things for ever, though only once former tenants sold up and moved on. As that happened, thousands of ex-council houses contributed to the cheapest rental market in London, drawing more and more of the economic migrants who now keep so much of the city running. The borough was thus transformed from a largely white community where abundant accommodation ensured that extended families lived within doors of each other, to a multi-coloured milieu in which people at the sharp end had to compete for scarce supplies of just about everything: decent jobs, adequate schools and, most of all, somewhere to live. The result: a tinderbox, where issues get reduced to race and nationality.

One Saturday in January, I follow a crowd of Labour party people on one of Hodge’s Days Of Action: six or so hours of door-to-door calls. She flits between packs of canvassers, talking to the public when required, noting down their sources of anger and concern, endlessly talking about the BNP’s fascist pedigree. To some people now in the habit of voting for them, this is news.

At the entrance to one of the Becontree Estate’s cul-de-sacs, we meet Jackie Morrell, who clocks her MP – and starts shouting. “All the trouble we have down here, and the council do fuck all. We have trouble from black people, but they call us racist: music all hours of the night at one house. At another they chuck dogshit over the fence.”

Morrell is 42: a trained chef, currently unemployed. She lives in a one-bedroom flat with her mother. She’s on the housing waiting list, but way down the queue. She votes BNP. “The reason I go for them is because they go for a lot of my policies.”

Such as? “Stop the immigrants. You’ve got to shut the floodgates.”

“You’re fed up with us lot, then?” Hodge says, and out come a few of her stock lines: “The borough’s changing. But we can make it work. It doesn’t have to be bad.”

Hodge is 65. Born in Egypt, she came to Britain with her Jewish parents, who were refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria. Her father Hans founded the firm that eventually became Stemcor, the world’s largest independent steel trading business, in which she owns a major stake. Having served time as the leader of Islington Council, she became the MP for Barking in 1994. Back then, according to local Labour insiders, she and the local party struck a deal whereby she saw to her Westminster commitments and they focused their attention on the council. In this telling of the story, it was assumed that Labour rule would extend into eternity, so there was little neighbourhood campaigning, leaving the door open for the BNP when local affairs turned troublesome.

So I wonder: how much responsibility does she feel about her party being asleep on the job?

“Oh, of course… I share the responsibility. When I was first the MP in Barking, we were a safe constituency and people felt they could weigh the votes in without bothering… And that included me. I kick myself that I didn’t hear the alarm bells. I wish I’d been tougher.”

Some of the big failures, she acknowledges, happened at the heart of government. “We failed to realise the importance of the quality of life on council estates and the importance of affordable housing… I think we got that wrong. From 2001, I was saying, ‘Housing is the key issue.’ I showed all the decision-makers in the party my research” – she means people right at the top – “and they all thought it was very interesting. Did it change what they did? No.”

A month later, sitting in a pub on the Thames View estate drinking a pint of light ale and bitter, Nick Griffin tells me that Hodge is an easy target: “far more unpopular than Jon Cruddas”, “fantastically wealthy” and the embodiment of the ties that bind politics and big business. Could he win? “I’m not particularly fussed: I’d love to be an MP, certainly. I’d like to represent this place. I’ve been coming down to Barking – in fact, this estate specifically – since I was 17.”

That was with the National Front, presumably?

He goes quiet. “The NF, yeah.”

His plan, he tells me, is to draw media hostility away from other BNP candidates – particularly for the borough council – and thus allow them a relatively clear run. “The flak will only potentially damage my chances here. So in terms of the benefits for the party, and especially our drive to take the council, well, that’s the real prize. It really is.”

When I ask what the BNP might do with local power, he outlines a “sons and daughters” housing policy, and a few measures – from the teaching of “British values” in schools to unspecified work through local youth clubs – that would aim at “integrating” outsiders into his party’s understanding of British life. He mentions “integration” at least twice, so I remind him that, despite being forced to admit non-white members, his party’s constitution still says they are “wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples”. The two don’t sit comfortably together, do they? “They don’t sit particularly well. But this is practical politics as opposed to… um… ideological perfection.”

A more brass-tacks question: are his people up to it? If you look at BNP councillors’ attendance records in Barking, even the best-performing one comes in pretty miserably – at number 28 out of 51.

“It will be a hell of a challenge. Bear in mind that if you look at the stats fully, there’s plenty of Labour councillors who are far, far worse.”

In fact, the bottom seven places are all taken by BNP people. At the last count, the worst performer – one Jamie Jarvis – managed to show up at only 28% of the meetings required.

“Well, Labour councillors don’t have to put up with intimidation, the changing of dates and meetings, and not letting people know.”

This, according to council leader Liam Smith, is ”complete and utter rubbish – these meetings are programmed a year in advance.” And even if it were true, the BNP would still be less than blameless. A good example: according to plenty of locals, one BNP councillor spends a good deal of his time running a guest house on the Isle Of Man. Is Griffin familiar with that case?

“I’m familiar with these things, yeah. We’re not blameless… At this election, we’ve got more people wanting to stand than we have places to fight… We’ll have a far stronger base than we had before. But inevitably, it’s going to be an enormous struggle… at the present, we’re knocking up against our upper limits.”

There’s no excuse for going to only 28% of meetings and still drawing a £10,000 allowance, is there?

“There’s not. No. No. Sure…”

A church “coffee afternoon” hosted by Hodge in Bastable Avenue, Barking. Around 30 locals have showed up, mostly pensioners, none of whom votes BNP or says they’re minded to. The exchanges with Hodge are stilted and sedate, until she mentions immigration and the room explodes.

“We’ve gone stark raving mad,” shouts one man. “We take in more people than anywhere else in Europe.”

“You can’t even get on the bus,” offers a woman at the same table.

Nearby, another voice bemoans the predicament of his son. “Generations after generations of my family have been here. Even if you build new flats, what chance has he got?”

In 2006, just before the BNP won all those council seats, Hodge caused outrage by claiming that eight out of 10 people in Barking were thinking about voting for them. The response of Labour councillor Liam Smith was not untypical: “We have had people saying they’re considering voting BNP because they feel that once the Labour minister says something, it must be right.” The BNP sent her a bunch of flowers.

“It made me unpopular with people who didn’t like me anyway,” Hodge says. “It gave them something to latch on to. But I think the idea that it was, in any way, the reason why 12 BNP councillors succeeded in the borough elections is… fatuous.”

A year later, she sparked another uproar when she argued that the system for allocating council houses should be changed to favour local people, arguing for policies whereby “the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants”. Last month, via an article in the Daily Mail, she pushed the same point again. As her critics see it, this is desperate stuff: a proposal that blurs into the BNP’s policies, and thus makes their drive for respectability all the easier.

“One of the mistakes we made in the past was refusing to tackle some of the issues which draw people to the extreme right,” Hodge says. “If we don’t capture that terrain with our purpose and our values, we leave it to the BNP. And then you get what I get on the doorstep, all the time: ‘Everything the BNP say, I agree with.’ They’re impelled by racism, right? I’m driven by fairness.”

The Sun’s headline, seizing on what she also said about benefits, was Minister: Ban Dole For Migrants, which can’t have done wonders for community relations. “Well, I can’t control the headlines. What I won’t have is, ‘Don’t enter this territory – it’s territory for the extreme right’. I won’t have that. We’ve got to capture it for us.”

In the pub with Nick Griffin, I bring up the reluctance of pensioners round here to vote BNP, based on their memories of the second world war (in any gathering of local seniors, there are scores of people who were bombed out of neighbourhoods such as Stepney and Poplar and given new homes here), and his party’s history of neo-Nazism. “We have things there, sure, yeah,” he says, though reminders of his own backstory are either denied or dodged. For example: yes, he led a National Front march to the cenotaph in 1986 – alongside people who were Sieg Heiling, according to reports – with a banner that said, “No more brothers’ wars”, but that was “about the first world war”.

When I ask where he now stands on what he once called “nonsense about gas chambers” – surely given even more charge because of Hodge’s family history – he pleads the same defence he tried on Question Time: “I genuinely cannot tell you what I used to believe, and why I’ve changed my mind… three times a month I go through France and Belgium, where you’re accessible also to the German courts, and even to say why I’ve changed my mind and become more mainstream would lay me open to a Communist magistrate.”

The subject is batted between us fruitlessly for a few minutes, before we get to the BNP’s campaigning in Barking and its apparent habit of telling lies. Late last year, it falsely claimed Hodge had a personal financial interest in plans – since cancelled – to build a new prison in the borough. “That was an error for which I wasn’t responsible. I didn’t even see it before it was printed. The moment I saw it, we pulled it.”

What about this one, from at least two BNP leaflets, put out in 2006: “Various Labour councils are giving Africans grants of up to £50,000 to buy houses under a scheme known as ‘Africans for Essex’. It is believed that Labour-run Hackney have been conspiring with Labour-run Barking and Dagenham to change the population of this area to ensure safe Labour majorities in the future.”

This most out-there of theories, I remind him, has been conclusively disproved.

“Have you looked at the schools here? What do you mean, ‘Conclusively disproved’?”

The racial mix of the borough may have changed, but African people were never singled out and paid to settle here.

“They weren’t being paid specifically as Africans. But people who were tenants in Hackney were being paid that kind of money.”

Contrary to his own leaflets, he may agree, then: there may have been a scheme whereby home-buying grants were given to families across London, but not because they were African.

“It just happened they all were.”

They weren’t.

“The vast majority of them were.”

They weren’t: 1,300 Londoners took advantage of the scheme, 30 of whom moved into Barking and Dagenham. Seven were white, nine Asian, nine black and the other five’s ethnicity was unclear.

In response, Griffin returns to his theory that recent changes in Britain’s racial make-up have been the product of a politically-motivated conspiracy dreamed up by a Labour government run by “Marxist cranks”, before arriving at a denouement, of a sort. “Let me put all this another way. The middle-class Guardianistas have this concept that the working class are basically happy. They’re OK, until along come these wicked people to stir them up. And it’s basically a way of saying that because these people are working class, they’re stupid and they can’t make up their own minds.”

But when it comes to patronising judgments of his beloved white working class, Griffin himself isn’t wholly in the clear. I read him what he said to two reporters masquerading as French fascists about the white people of London, caught on camera in 1997 by ITV’s The Cook Report: “The people who have the brains and ability got out years ago, one way or another. The people who are left are either the 15% of the population who are happy to put up with it, they’re so decadent they actually like it, or they’re too stupid to do anything about it. They will vote BNP, but you can’t build a movement on those people.”

“I wasn’t talking about this part of London. We were talking about the likes of Brixton and Hackney. People here have still got fight in them.”

That still implies a pretty dim view of white people in Brixton and Hackney. “It’s not a dim view. I feel very sorry for them. But we can’t organise in a place like that. They’re good, decent people. But to organise something, you have to have people who’ve got an unusual flair and spark.”

I repeat his words: “They’re too stupid to do anything about it.” Is he minded to take that back?

“Yes. Yes. I was probably extremely drunk. And I was talking to a Frenchman who didn’t speak very good English, so it had to be simplified.”

In early March, I meet Hodge again in her Westminster office and ask what she thinks would happen if the BNP took control of the council.

“I think Barking and Dagenham would become a no-go area for the rest of the country. That’s the thing that scares me most. Would you buy a house there if you knew there was a BNP council? I think we’d get unrest and violence in the street that we haven’t seen yet, because it would put race at the heart of what the borough was about.”

If Labour is to hold on to the council, it faces problems. In a drive to revive the local party, Hodge says, 13 of Labour’s 36 councillors have been deselected and replaced with “people who see themselves entirely as campaigning in the community”. Her Labour adversaries see it as an act of war against her opponents on the council; in the midst of local rancour, another seven Labour councillors have resigned, and some are threatening to run as independents. Might that split the vote and let in BNP candidates?

“I’m not worried about that. The thing that bothers me is the Christian party.” The latter are a new outfit who want to “honour Christ in politics” by putting up candidates for parliament and the council, and are going for the votes of Barking’s black churchgoers. She has pleaded with them to stand their people down, to no avail: as they see it, her views on abortion, gay rights and stem cell research are just as salient as the great fascist menace.

Inevitably, the BNP campaign against her is not pretty. In leaflets she is portrayed as a witch-like figure in high-heels (“and fat,” she reminds me), handing out goodies to stereotyped immigrants drawn according to the usual far-right rules: bug-eyes, goofy teeth. Bob Bailey, leader of the BNP group on the local council, has described her thus: “Poisonous bitch. Lives in Islington. A multi-millionairess and a foreigner to boot.”

Though Griffin hasn’t mentioned her Jewishness, she claims his people bring it up on the doorstep, via her maiden name, Oppenheimer. By way of a response, he claims the issue is “irrelevant”, and the idea of the BNP playing it up is “a classic Labour smear… there’s plenty of things to hit Margaret Hodge with without getting into red herrings and anti-semitism“. Of late, his party has been trying to shed its history of the latter, in order to court Jewish votes and pursue its loathing of Islam, though Griffin obviously has no end of form. What about his infamous pamphlet Who Are The Mindbenders?, aimed at exposing “Jewish influence and control in Britain’s news and information industry”? “That was a long, long time ago. Under my leadership, the BNP’s got Jewish councillors” – it has one, in Epping Forest – “and Jewish members.” The pamphlet, I remind him, came out in 1997: not that long ago at all. “It is in political terms,” he says.

Back in Westminster, the bell rings for a House of Commons vote on some arcane matter of constitutional reform. Hodge runs off to the lobbies, with her mind presumably on much more important things. “I feel totally passionate, in a way that I’ve never felt about an election before,” she says. “I want to expel them, so Barking and Dagenham in 2010 will be seen as the point where we started to see the decline of this wave of fascism. That would be great, wouldn’t it?”

Belligerent optimism is her message, though as I walk to Westminster tube station, it’s hard to shake off a creeping feeling of unease. Eight weeks remain: at the far end of the District Line, the morning of 7 May may yet feel like the start of a long, splitting headache.