In January, the English Defence League (EDL) capitalised on the climate of fear and racism this has created – and took it to another level. More than a thousand racists, football hooligans and assorted known fascists ran riot in Stoke: the EDL’s largest mobilisation yet. Though they kept a low profile, local BNP activists welcomed the march.

Hundreds of the EDL’s balaclava-clad supporters went on the rampage through an area with a large Asian community, throwing bricks through shop windows and smashing up cars, shouting ‘Pakis out’ as they went.

How have the racists got this confident? How has Stoke become a flashpoint for organized racism and fascism? To find out, we visited some of the wards where the BNP gets its highest votes.

Who votes BNP?

We arrive in Bentilee – now the BNP’s strongest ward, where it holds all three council seats. The party lost much of its base in its other stronghold, Abbey Green, when charismatic former BNP council group leader Alby Walker left the party, amid rumours that he was pushed aside so that Darby could stand in the general election. Walker might still contest the seat as an independent, and the National Front is also set to stand.

Bentilee doesn’t look as you might expect. The roads are lined with trees and hedges; the grass verges are well-kept. The streets lead off to cul-de-sacs of semi-detached houses, each sitting behind its own little gate. It may have been built as one of the largest council estates in Europe, with around 4,500 properties, about a quarter of which have been sold under the Conservatives’ ‘right to buy’ legislation, but the feel is distinctly suburban. We’re not in the wrong place, though.

Bentilee fits the classic BNP pattern: an area on the outskirts of a diverse urban area, but one that has itself seen very little immigration. In fact, statistically, Bentilee is the whitest place for miles around. Fully 98.9 per cent of the people who live here identified themselves as ‘white British’ in the last census.

At the same time it has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. In an area built on ‘pots, pits and steel’, Stoke has lost almost all of its three staple industries. It had barely recovered from the last recession when the latest one hit.

We meet Kevin coming towards us. He is in his mid-20s and trained as a car mechanic on a government-funded scheme – though he still can’t get any regular work. But that’s not what he talks about when we ask how he votes.

‘Let me tell you something,’ he says. ‘Britain isn’t British any more. We’ve got people walking around, wearing their burkas and whatever, cutting themselves off from us. You go on the bus and no-one’s speaking English.

‘Go take a walk in town. Look at the huge mosques – stand there and tell me that’s England. I vote BNP because they’re the only ones who tell the truth and want to do something about it.’

While Labour and the Tories seem remote, distant ‘politicians’, even anti-BNP voters speak of the BNP as ‘local lads’. They get involved in community work while other parties focus their efforts on handing out endless leaflets. BNP members cut old people’s grass for them and fetch their shopping. And yes, they do wear smart suits. But BNP voters aren’t fools – they know what they’re voting for.

Down the road, we meet Karen, who says she has been unemployed since the 1980s. ‘The BNP come round here and they talk sense,’ she says. ‘They’re the only party that stands up for local working class people.

‘There’s nothing wrong with saying local people should come first. We’ve lived here all our lives, why shouldn’t we? Why should we sit back while this place turns into a foreign country?’

Bloody nonsense

Yet even here, one of the most solidly BNP wards in the country, only 829 out of 9,087 eligible voters voted for the BNP in the last local elections. Labour came second with 620 votes, but the vast majority of voters – almost three quarters – simply did not vote at all.

We walk down a driveway, passing two cars on the way, and knock on a bright red door. The woman who answers is Jane, a lifelong housewife in her mid 1940s, whose husband used to work in one of Stoke’s potteries before it shut down a few years ago.

‘I’ve always voted Labour,’ she says. But she is one of a dying breed. As recently as the mid-1990s, Labour held every one of the 60 council seats – now it has just 14. The decline of the area’s traditional industries has all but destroyed Labour’s base, and the one-party state’s financial mismanagement in the 1990s was the final nail in its coffin.

Labour has just a few hundred members left here, while the Tories and Lib Dems have only ever had a few dozen. The council is run by independents of various stripes who swept in after Labour lost it, in coalition with a few Tories and Lib Dems. But they, in turn, have been losing ground to the BNP – now the only party that has a real base of activists in Stoke.

We ask Jane about the BNP. She looks around behind us, and her voice gets quieter, almost a whisper. ‘There’s a vocal bunch who go around stirring up trouble. The candidates try to put on suits and look “respectable”, but their supporters drive around shouting “BNP” from their cars and vans. They stop to shout abuse at black people, Asians and Muslims and then drive off.’

Down the road, we meet Dan, a teacher with little time for politicians. ‘I don’t vote,’ he says. ‘There’s no one to vote for around here. But I don’t like these idiots running around, handing out their leaflets.’

He fetches a small pile of BNP flyers. ‘The Patriot,’ reads the masthead. It is the usual BNP formula – bad photocopying, crude cartoons. Most of them are about migrants ‘jumping the queue’ for housing. He shows us one leaflet about schools: ‘Local schools for local children’.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ Dan says. ‘I work at the school just down the road. The BNP put out this ridiculous stuff saying we’ve banned Christmas, saying the school’s full of Somalians. They make out like half the class is wearing the veil and say we’ve banned sausages from the canteen. It’s nonsense, but people believe it.’

This kind of deliberate myth-making is part of how the BNP builds its vote. One of the party’s tactics is to send activists to local pubs where they strike up casual conversations – not letting on about their politics – and spread lies about migrants. The question is: why does anyone believe them?

What do we do?

There are a number of things that are distinctive about the kinds of areas targeted by the BNP. There is the legacy of communities that are not just socially but physically divided. The BNP does well in very white areas where they can paint black and Asian people as almost mythical figures – an ‘other’ to be feared.

There is unemployment. The party succeeds in places that were once prosperous but have been in decline – where people who had expectations of ‘getting somewhere’ in life have found themselves facing a precarious future.

But it is only when we look at these two things together that we can see the common factor: the decline of collective class identity. The unions, and to a lesser extent the Labour Party, were once a source of support and collective self-respect, where people came together on the grounds of class rather than race. Their decline has left a vacuum the BNP has filled by constructing a new identity in the form of a narrowly-defined ‘Britishness’ – the ‘white working class’.

The task for the left is not to address this identity on its own terms. Instead, we should build something new that can start to bring working class people together – black, white and Asian – on the basis of fighting back against the area’s economic decline. After all, we all face the same problems.