Mainstream politicians used to dismiss BNP voters with clichéd name-calling. Not now. It has taken the election of two BNP MEPs for those in power actually to look at why so many people vote for the far Right. It was about MPs' expenses, they explain. Or jobs and housing.
But the politicians cowardly ignore the obvious - it's also about identity. The white working class feels disenfranchised; sidelined by talk of a mythic multiculturalism that dismisses or demonises them.
I was born and raised in the street opposite the old Labour HQ on Walworth Road - a neighbourhood once defined by a civic culture born of the municipal socialism of the early 20th century. In that inward-looking working-class world many worked locally, married “in” and often remained in the same postcode (evacuation and conscription permitting) from cradle to grave.
By the 1960s, those of us within its rising generation would have willingly escaped as soon as puberty kicked in. I once wrote: “We arrived after the bombs brought people together and before the bulldozers pushed them apart. And for us it was merely the backdrop to the beginning of our biographies, not the beginning, middle and end.” Then as now, these neighbourhoods included the good, the bad and the ugly - it was far from idyllic.
Labour rejoiced in the collectivism of the working class as long as it could define them as “the workers”. But with constant mass immigration it suddenly became apparent that the collectivism of the white working class was defined by ethnicity too. Fear of immigration turned some to the National Front - from then on many a Labour voter used the lines “Enoch is right” and “We're second-class citizens” until they fossilised into cliché.
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Labour has failed to assuage those fears - and too many feel that those fears have become reality. Many of its long-term voters believed the party was responsible for eradicating anything that linked the white working class with an identity and a history, because it was at odds with the modern creed of multiculturalism.
But you can't talk up diversity and inclusiveness while ignoring white working-class culture, and not expect dissent. With multiculturalism came heavy-handed anti-discrimination laws and the McCarthyism of a race industry that appears to attach no value to a racist crime when the victim is white.
All this has played a huge part in pushing voters away from Labour. It will take more than new homes and jobs to bring them back.
Michael Collins is the author of The Likes of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class