Coming and going

Dagenham and its neighbour Barking have focused debate about immigration, national identity and social provision.
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To me, Dagenham has mostly meant Ford Motors, post-war football stars and the ranks of interwar terraces they grew up in. To Liam Smith, Labour deputy leader of Barking and Dagenham Council, it means home and history. He's third generation Dagenham, went to the same primary school as his grandfather. He knows the territory like the back of his hand.

"That's where Lawrence Rustem lives," he says, pointing from his car to a front window screened with a union jack. "Strange character." But the point of our little spin is not to admire the home furnishings of pond life politicians but for me to see evidence of housing trends that Smith - like his close colleague, Dagenham MP and deputy leadership contender Jon Cruddas - regards as a root cause of the surge in support for the BNP that enabled Rustem and 10 others to take seats in last year's local elections.

"There you go: 'To Let' ... and another one over there ..." Smith says. He slows up so I can savour the dilapidation. This happens several times: beside well-kept homes in those distinctive Dagenham rows stand shabby, tatty ones with bits of furniture out the front and gardens overgrown. "Buy-to-let is a cancer," Smith declares. He says the same of right-to-buy, which helps fuel it.

Why is this the "source of all the problems"? Because, in Smith's view, the private landlords don't care and many of their tenants are just passing through, sometimes whether they like it or not: poor or problem families, economic migrants, refugees, some of these shipped out by other London authorities ("That one over there, they're from Newham ..."). Often, it's the sheer speed of turnover that creates unease and unrest. People don't have time to get to know each other. In such climates resentments fester, myths thrive. It's over how to deal with these that Smith - and Cruddas - have sharply disagreed with Barking's MP Margaret Hodge, whose recent Observer article and follow-up interviews have stirred up the latest hornets' nest about immigrants and entitlements, identity and community.

There were two main themes in Hodge's piece: one, that politicians should listen when local people "link the problems in their community with the migratory changes"; two, that polices should be introduced so that "the legitimate sense of entitlement felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated migrants," especially where social housing is concerned.

What is Liam Smith's problem with that? After all, MPs are meant to listen, including to things that aren't pretty to hear. As for the criteria for allocating council houses, why shouldn't being "settled" give a family greater rights? It's instructive to tease out their differences. In fact, Smith and Hodge agree on quite a lot. Both want more social housing (a term Smith dislikes: "What's wrong with 'council house'?"). Both recognise that the Barking-Dagenham area has changed in its ethnic and cultural make-up and has lately changed still more from the definitively ex-East End white-working class suburb Dagenham certainly was in the decades of Ron Todd, Sir Alf, El Tel, Sandie Shaw and of Liam Smith's grandmother, who grew up in Stepney.

Caribbean Britons, too, are now long established - many worked at Ford before it closed. The latest newcomers, said Smith, as we chatted in the constituency advice centre before going out, are mostly West Africans - Nigerians and Ghanaians who've often sold a place in Tower Hamlets or Hackney and, following the cockney self-improvement trail, bought somewhere larger further east. Plus there's Poles and Lithuanians, all migrants. He acknowledges their impact: when his 10 year-old started school, only a couple of her classmates weren't white Britons. But in his five-year-old's year there's a 50:50 split. Like Hodge, he knows all this alarms some locals. He also favours better-managed immigration: like Cruddas, he'd like to see an amnesty for existing illegals. He also favours the introduction of a points system for assessing applicants, like Australia's. The immediate question, though, is how politicians should respond to the present levels of anxiety.

In one respect, Smith's disagreement with Hodge is honest and straightforward: Hodge wants being "indigenous" to sometimes outweigh need where the allocation of council housing to non-Britons is concerned, whereas Smith believes that need should be the sole criterion. What's really nettled Smith, though, is Hodge seeming to give credence to the belief that the economic migrants routinely enjoy preferential treatment. Not in Barking and Dagenham, Smith says. What's more, "No non-UK citizen has ever, not even once, asked me for advice about housing. It's their immigration status that worries them."

As you can watch him tell me here Smith thinks, "It shouldn't be about who's getting the housing, it should be about the provision of housing." Barking and Dagenham used to have 40,000 council houses. It's now down to 20,000 and the waiting list in 9,000 long. As well as Hodge's choice of emphasis there's her choice of words. "Indigenous" does not mean "white," but many voters think it does; and speaking on the radio Hodge referred directly to "my white families." The Observer article was marked by those dog-whistle terms and that insinuating rhetorical mood muzak so characteristic of the late Blair period: "rebalancing" of rights; talk of "Britishness"; asserting the need to "listen" without mentioning the need to challenge errors or correct misunderstandings; the laughable assertion that debating immigration is "taboo". Meanwhile, out on the Dagenham streets, Smith sees the task of defeating the BNP get harder every time Hodge opens her mouth about "listening". Far from cutting the ground from under Griffin's gang she is adding to their credibility, he feels. "If there'd been a bye-election in a BNP ward last week, I think we could have won the seat back. Now I don't."

We drive on past local landmarks: the pub where the BNP hold their meetings; the unofficial bus request stop handmade by an old lady called Doris ("People thought it was a joke - but Doris doesn't joke."); the social club founded by the Irish who came from Cork to work for Ford ("Dagenham Yanks" they were called when they went back home). Smith likes to point this out to those of their local descendants who give him grief about immigrants. But his best story is about the British Legion and the Pentecostal church. The former is a bastion of stand-alone patriotism, the latter recently founded in a disused pub. Smith is a member of the Legion - it's where he first met Jon Cruddas - and walks with them on remembrance parades. Their route took them past the church. With the two-minute silence approaching, the Pentecostalists' songs and voices filled the air.

"I went over to them and asked to speak to the pastor," Smith says. "I explained about the silence and asked if he'd mind everyone being quiet while it was observed. He said, 'Would it be all right if we came out and joined you?' So that's what they did. And after, at the Legion, it was all, 'And what about those black people, wasn't that great?' But if we hadn't talked, it could have turned out a lot different, couldn't it?"

"Listening" and "sending messages" is easy. Doing the right thing takes a bit more.

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