The council that trolls its residents with foreign flags

Britain’s town halls are increasingly resembling outposts of the United Nations

Paul Embery is one of the most interesting, insightful and original voices to have emerged in British journalism for some time — Douglas Murray

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I would venture that I know the London borough of Barking and Dagenham – where I was born and lived for 35 years – better than most people.

Home to what was once the largest municipal housing estate in the world – built in the 1920s and 1930s to accommodate families displaced by the slum clearances in the east end of London – the borough was once comprised overwhelmingly of the white working class. Though never affluent, it was, for most of it existence, a settled, stable community and one which could boast of deep wells of social solidarity and integration. Employment levels were healthy – thousands worked in thriving industries, including the iconic Ford motor plant (backdrop to the hit film Made in Dagenham) – and local institutions flourished.

But at the turn of the century, it all began to change. For it was around this time that the new global market was really starting to take hold in Britain, and its effects – particularly the phenomena of deindustrialisation and profound demographic change – were being felt by working-class communities.

Barking and Dagenham suffered the worst of it. Long-established industries began to disappear – the Ford plant all but ceased production – and there were dramatic population shifts. In the decade 2001-11, the non-UK-born population of the borough increased by 205 per cent, while the share this cohort represented of the total number of residents rose by 169%. These were extraordinary statistics. Meanwhile, 40,000 locals – many of whom had lived in the borough most or all of their lives – upped sticks and departed.

All of this meant that the place underwent radical economic and cultural transformation. After the British National party won 12 seats in the council elections – its best ever performance in local government – the borough found itself thrust into the centre of a national debate about the effects of globalisation and immigration. A community that for generations had been perfectly at ease with itself was fracturing in the most tragic way. The events in Barking and Dagenham provided a lesson in how rapid and far-reaching change, imposed without the consent of the local population, can generate social and political convulsions.

In 2021, the borough’s white British population stood at just 31% - down from 81% in 2001 and the sharpest decline for that period of any local authority in England and Wales. It was recently ranked the unhappiest London borough in which to live.

Many of the newcomers into Barking and Dagenham arrived from Albania, a country that has spawned more than its share of criminal gangs and drugs lords. Doubtless many of these arrivals were decent law-abiding individuals. But a sizeable number weren’t. One notorious Albanian drug trafficking gang – nicknamed ‘Hellbanianz’ – took root in the borough, bringing fear and torment to long-term local residents. The Gascoigne estate, where my family once lived, fell into the grip of the gang, whose members would often flaunt their ill-gotten gains on social media.