So here we have Nick Griffin using the old nostalgia about community to bolster his racist arguments (interview with the Independent 14/6/09). More worrying still he happily quotes Kate Gavron's book the New East End in support of these views. This confirms my earlier arguments that this book with its nostalgic and communitarian perspective would do nothing but give ammunition for racists (see previous posts):
"Historically, in the 1970s I spent a lot of time in the old east end with the old community, and it was a wonderful place: poor, rough and ready but extraordinarily hospitable and really good people with an identity of their own, most of those people, some of them are still there, and according to that book, the new east end by Katy Gavron, there's an enormous amount of really bitter hostility in the old white east end towards mass immigration they don't even vote for us. They're so alienated by the process they simply don't bother".