Thank you for subscribing!
Relentless, unwanted change tore apart the community I once knew, leaving neighbours as strangers, writes the trade union activist and author
So it's official. The least-friendly place in the whole of England is the London borough of Barking and Dagenham. This district, located in the borderlands of the metropolis and Essex, came bottom of the pile in a major study looking into social division and disconnection across 296 local authority areas.
The study was published by the Independent Commission on Community and Cohesion – which is headed up by former MPs Sajid Javid and Jon Cruddas – and drew upon Government data evaluating residents' perceptions of loneliness, trust, belonging and pride in the place they call home.
On most measures, Barking and Dagenham scored lower than the national average. Startlingly, only one in five respondents in the borough felt that many of their neighbours could be trusted.
I find it difficult to express how dejected this sorry picture makes me feel. I grew up in Barking and Dagenham. It was never a fashionable or affluent place. But the streets were, back then, filled with social solidarity and neighbourliness.
Traditional working-class in every sense, the borough was centred around a sprawling council estate – once the largest municipal housing project in the world – which, when it was constructed a century ago, attracted thousands of families escaping the slum clearances in the East End. Family members quickly found work in new and thriving local industries, such as the iconic Ford plant down at Dagenham Dock.
As a boy, I knew virtually everyone who lived on my stretch of the street. Residents shared common identities, backgrounds and interests. The area was largely a monoculture – but no less fulfilling for that.
In fact, if a study on community cohesion had been carried out back then, I would wager that Barking and Dagenham would have found itself near the top of the list rather than at the bottom.
But in the first decade of this century, the borough underwent seismic social convulsions.
This was the period when the new global market was beginning to take hold and working-class communities across Britain suddenly found themselves subjected to rapid and far-reaching economic and cultural change, such as in the way of grinding deindustrialisation and demographic upheaval.
Barking and Dagenham felt the pain more acutely than most areas. Between 2001–11, the foreign-born population rose by 205 per cent – the biggest percentage increase across London for that period. In those years, the borough also recorded the highest London-wide percentage rise, at 169 per cent, in the foreign-born share of all residents.
In 2001, 81 per cent of all residents in the borough identified as "White British". By 2011, they had become a minority at 49 per cent – the largest decrease for any local authority in England and Wales. In 2021, the figure stood at 31 per cent.
As this phenomenon was taking hold, the area's well-established blue-collar industries were withering away, denying a new generation of workers secure and rewarding employment and forcing them into insecure jobs in the gig economy and suchlike.
Against this background, the community, perhaps unsurprisingly, began to fracture. The new arrivals were, for the most part, decent, law-abiding folk who were simply trying to make better lives for themselves, but the huge influx of people from a myriad of different cultures had the inevitable effect of weakening cohesion and common bonds. Neighbours interacted less and less, local institutions were hollowed out, and many felt the place was no longer their home.
Many local citizens had voted Labour all their lives and saw it as their party. But they also knew that it was the Labour Government which, during these years, was driving through these unwelcome changes. So, in what they saw as a desperate last stand, thousands of residents voted for the far-right British National Party in the 2006 local elections, giving that party its best-ever result in local government.
But the writing was already on the wall for Barking and Dagenham. A mass exodus took place in the borough in the decade to 2011, as around 40,000 residents upped sticks and departed. It was less "white flight" than it was a flight to familiarity. The place in which they and their families had once been deeply rooted had changed fundamentally. For many, it was now less a home and more an international airport terminal.
So, sad though I was to read that Barking and Dagenham was now the least-friendly place in England, I wasn't in the least bit surprised. The findings of the study represent, for the borough, the inevitable endpoint of a profound economic and cultural shift that brought little benefit to local citizens but was nonetheless foisted on them by their tin-eared political masters.
There is always a temptation to speak of the past, and especially of one's younger years, as "the good old days" and to see the present as something morally and spiritually inferior. But the people of Barking and Dagenham who found themselves in the eye of this social storm would be perfectly justified in viewing things this way.
What happened in the borough was a lesson in how wide social fissures are liable to break out when intense change is visited on a community and local residents are ignored. Globalisation, multiculturalism, permissive migration policies: all those things that the arrogant progressive elites told working-class people would be good for them, heralding a new age of economic and cultural enrichment, turned out instead to have set in train a deepening fragmentation and atomisation in our society.
Of course, no place can stay the same for ever. Change happens. But how that change is managed – in particular the pace and scale at which it is allowed to occur – can be the determining factor in whether a community remains cohesive or breaks apart.
In Barking and Dagenham, the change was overwhelming. And local people paid – and continue to pay – the heaviest price.
