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In a controversial new book, Geoff Dench and Kate Gavron argue that Britain's liberal welfare system has marginalised the white working class and helped fuel years of racial conflict
The election of a far-right British National party councillor in the Isle of Dogs in September 1993 still stands as the most graphic justification of what the liberal urban elite has come to hold as an article of faith: that many of the white working-class inhabitants of "cockney" east London are socially regressive and profoundly, irredeemably xenophobic. That simmering racial tension between the white working class and the large Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets has existed for more than 30 years is indisputable. But while conventional liberal opinion has tended to attribute its causes solely to white racism, the truth is far more complex.