the Choudhurys had moved on to the Island in 1987 hostility towards Bengalis had continued to rise, as demand for housing grew ever tighter. The construction of a tunnel to bring traffic into Canary Wharf – the Limehouse Link, still the most expensive road scheme in Britain per mile – meant that several blocks of council flats had to be demolished and their largely Asian residents rehoused. Things came to a head in early 1992, over the first social housing scheme in a decade to be built on the Isle of Dogs. In January, a group of Island residents proposed that all properties on Masthouse Terrace, a riverside development of homes ranging from one-bedroom flats to eight-bedroom houses, be allocated to ‘Islanders’ only, and that a ban be imposed on housing homeless people from outside the area.15 Then a local newspaper article claimed, erroneously, that twenty-one out of the development’s twenty-five homes had been allocated to Bengali families, with some receiving £5,000 to buy furniture.16 Finally, some new housing was being built – and it all appeared to be going to Asians. The Labour-run neighbourhood was powerless to intervene – housing was being allocated on the basis of need, in line with the law – and the Lib Dem council had broken its promise to provide homes for ‘Sons and Daughters’.
At a by-election in October 1992, the BNP came third in Millwall, with 20 per cent of the vote. Immediately after, the BNP distributed a ‘well done’ leaflet to homes on the Isle of Dogs that described the 20 per cent vote as ‘a well-deserved kick in the pants for the old complacent parties. But we’d have done even better if some of you had not lost your bottle or stayed at home.’17 Activists began to visit Millwall on a regular basis, selling the party paper and following up membership enquiries. Several months later, another by-election was announced, to be held in October 1993. Derek Beackon, the BNP’s chief steward, offered to stand. As Butler explained, the BNP was well-placed to pick up on local resentment: ‘We had our ear to the ground, so we knew what was going on. I used to live on the Isle of Dogs at one point and I knew the area. Derek Beackon’s sister lived on the Isle of Dogs. My partner’s brother lived on the Isle of Dogs. People knew people who would know what was going on in the estates. So you could do leaflets in tune with what people were talking about.’
As campaigning intensified, the Lib Dems redoubled their own efforts, distributing an ‘Island Homes for Island People’ newsletter, which demanded that Labour councillors ‘listen to Islanders and not the Commission for Racial Equality’.18 The Lib Dems also toured the constituency in cars flying Union Jacks and tried to paint their Labour rivals as unfairly favoring Bengali residents, distributing a leaflet that claimed Millwall councillors had given £30,000 to Bangladesh for flood relief rather than spending it on local repairs.19
All the while, the luxury apartments and office blocks continued to rise, on land that had once provided working-class jobs. The connection seems so obvious in retrospect – but the inhabitants of ‘yuppie’ flats, in gated developments and driving on and off the Island by way of the Limehouse Link, were in another world. As Sheila, a white resident of the Barkantine estate (where the Choudhurys also lived) told me, ‘None of the yuppies ever bothered us. At least you knew they were paying their way. That’s what you wanted.’
Then, one week before the 1993 by-election, Labour made a disastrous error. On 9 September, in an effort to squeeze the Lib Dems out of the race, Labour leaked a canvass report that claimed it was neck and neck with the BNP, on 34 per cent each.20 The idea was to scare voters into supporting Labour – but it also worked in reverse. As John Biggs, a former Tower Hamlets Labour councillor (and now London Assembly member), explains, while Tower Hamlets at the time was run by Liberal Democrats, many ordinary residents would still have perceived Labour, which had dominated local politics for decades, as the ‘establishment’: ‘People don’t sit at home going through the last opinion polls and the last election results and say “ah, it’s the Liberal council”. They blamed Labour for the state of housing on the Isle of Dogs and they wanted to work out who best to vote for to give Labour a kicking.’
It may only have been on a small scale, but this was a total breakdown of mainstream politics: the Isle of Dogs was a Labour-run neighbourhood, in a Lib Dem-run borough, under a Tory Government – and nobody seemed able to provide the basic necessities. As one Island resident, Maureen Lowther, 49, told the East London Advertiser several days after Beackon’s election: ‘It’s not a racial thing, it’s resentment. You are getting Bangladeshis getting eight-bedroom houses. Of course we’re going to be resentful. I’m not in full agreement with all the BNP stands for, but Rights for Whites, yes. All them councillors have created this situation, they are fighting against racism but why aren’t they fighting for all? All we want is equality.’21
On the Sunday after Derek Beackon’s election, the Reverend Nicholas Holtam gave a sheet of paper to his congregation at Christ Church on the Isle of Dogs and asked them to write down how they felt. The page was soon filled with words like ‘angry’, ‘tearful’, ‘ashamed’, ‘frightened’ and ‘pissed off’. One elderly man, a member of the British Legion, left the church in tears. ‘I spent four years of my life fighting Nazis, and now we’ve voted them in,’ he told Holtam as he walked out.22
With 33.8 per cent of the vote, the BNP never represented the majority of Islanders, and many whites had bitterly opposed the party. The day after the election, unionised council workers on the Isle of Dogs went on strike in protest at Beackon’s election (the first of a series of walk-outs), and groups including the Anti-Nazi League, the Anti-Racist Alliance and Youth Against Racism in Europe continued to organize protests across Tower Hamlets. Large anti-racism demos were also held in Trafalgar Square and at the BNP’s headquarters in Welling.
As Holtam – who is now the Bishop of Salisbury – told me when we met in 2011, the country’s media now seemed to regard the BNP as an expression of white working-class East Enders’ inherent stupidity and bigotry, seemingly encapsulated by the ‘Cockney Wanker’ character in the satirical magazine Viz shortly after Beackon’s victory. ‘There were jokes on TV about Millwall and the Isle of Dogs,’ Holtam continued. ‘The rest of the country looked at us and laughed. It was a hideous time.’
But the problems thrown into sharp relief by Beackon’s victory were national as much as they were local. Britain in 1993 was in the grip of an economic recession and John Major, derided by the Telegraph as ‘the least popular leader since polls began’, had taken to peddling sentimental nostalgia in speeches evoking a bygone England of warm beer and village greens. One of his backbench MPs, Winston Churchill (a grandson of the former prime minister), went further, warning that summer that the ‘British way of life’ itself was under threat from immigration. On 20 September, Churchill prophesied more fascist victories in British cities unless the government cracked down on immigration.23
On 26 September, the News of the World risked further inflaming the situation in Tower Hamlets by sending one white and one Asian journalist to the council’s housing office. The two did not present identical stories – one claimed to be homeless, the other a ‘refugee’ – and the Asian man was offered housing because his story fit the legal criteria better.24 For the right, the BNP’s emergence seemed to confirm their contention that immigration had been a disaster, and that local government was in the grip of politically-correct lunacy.
Worse still, all the negative attention generated by the BNP made it even less likely that the Isle of Dogs would receive the investment it sorely needed. Holtam, who had made representations to government on behalf of Islanders, said that some of the least creditable conversations he had ‘were with a government minister and executives at the LDDC. All of them owned up to the problem [i.e., that underinvestment in social housing was at the root of BNP support], but they all said, “We can’t be seen to be giving in to this sort of political pressure.”’ The LDDC executives in particular were terrified that an association with the BNP would jeopardise the whole Docklands project: ‘I had a conversation with a senior executive on the board of the LDDC who said, “You’ve got to understand it from our point of view that if this ward votes BNP at the next election, this development is down the tube and all of the money
