I was raised in Elm Park, having been born in nearby Romford. Elm Park was and remains almost exclusively white, lower working class. It is perhaps the most chav chav-town in chavdom.

The Times gets a warm welcome at the Elm Park Pub from the BNP

Built in the late 1930s, Elm Park was designed to attract young working class families seeking to escape the worst of London’s smog. Its housing consists of well-built three-bedroomed semi-detached properties with back and front gardens. Its streets are tree-lined. There’s a healthy mixture of council houses and privately owned homes in an urban setting on the edge of London’s greenbelt, wedged between Dagenham and Hornchurch. There are parks nearby and a very good swimming pool. It has much going for it.

My parents arrived and met in Elm Park just before the Second World War. They lived next door to each other. My dad’s a Hackney boy and my mum’s from East Ham. They went to school across the road from Hornchurch airdrome, which played a major part in the Battle of Britain.

My father pays homage every year to an American airman who crash-landed his plane into the playground wall rather than risk smashing into their classroom by attempting to fly over it. The class saw the plane dip away from them and explode. They were covered in glass. The boy next to my father was injured for life. And ever since, the old boys meet annually at the pilot’s grave to say thanks to the Yank. Yes, there’s a good heart in Elm Park.

There was plenty of work in the early days. There was a massive Ford factory in Dagenham, as well as the pharmaceutical company May & Baker. There was Roneo Vickers, then Britain’s largest manufacturer of office machinery. And, not least, there were London’s East End docks working at full capacity.

My dad worked on the buses as a conductor. My mother worked at May & Baker. My grandmothers worked at Roneo Vickers. One grandfather was a leading communist shop steward at Ford’s (he left the party in 1956 in protest against the crushing of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet Union) the other was a self-employed Tory-voting builder.

But something went wrong in Elm Park. Part of the problem was the run-down, then closure, of both Ford’s plant and London’s docks. But seeing as we were connected to the rest of London by the tube, I don’t buy that explanation for my town’s decline.

Elm Park began its big slide from working class respectability to chavdom in the early 1970s. Elm Park somehow came to embody all that was worst about Britain’s loss of direction at that time. The kids got out of control. We glorified in football hooliganism and ignorance. Our low-grade local schools told us we were there to be trained as manual workers. We said “stuff that”, we don’ want to be like our parents.

For many the rebellion meant giving up on education and ambition. For a few, like me, it meant going up the ladder.

Since the 1970s, the Elm Park pub has been the haunt of gangsters, druggies and football hooligans. I learned to drink and to fight there. The room in which the BNP met was where I practiced karate. Its adjacent bar was where I had many a-run-in with local toughs. As 16-year-olds we got drunk and watched the strippers there on Sunday lunch-times (imagine a mob of 150 baying adrenaline-driven yobs screaming at the girls to get their kit off). The police tried many times to have the pub shut.

Today, the town has a run-down early 1960s feel that’s more “up north” than “down south”. There’s boarded up shops, cheap clothes and food, a very bad cafe and an Indian restaurant which serves abusive racists once the pub shuts. Gangs of young kids roam the streets – it’s an intimidating place to be.

Yet, still, I remember that my gang of West Ham United thugs was a mixture of black and white. Some of us used to leave the footie on Saturdays to help the Socialist Workers’ Party beat up National Fronters, some of whom were our school mates.

I can’t put my finger on Elm Park’s decline. I also don’t want to go blind to the good that remains (hey, that’s my home and I’ve friends still there) or to sell its decent residents short. Any quick tour of my town’s back streets will reveal the pride many still take in their homes and gardens. Most people avoid the Elm Park pub. They take the train or bus to Upminster or Hornchurch instead. There’s many hard-working people living there.

As I sit in my villa by Zurich’s lakeside, I’m still inspired by the best things in the Elm Park I knew. I’ll be forever grateful to many of its old folk (including my parents and a couple of cops who once roughed me up and then lectured me) who set me straight and told me to get a life, get organised, clean up my act, get educated, and get out of town, when I was kid. But part of me regrets ever leaving its streets. Yesterday I wish I’d been there to tell the BNP to f-off.

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As somebody who once was accused of organising a race riot in Handsworth, Birmingham, I know something about definitions.

My first defence was to say that if it was organised, it was not a riot. The police perhaps kindly ignored that challenging thought and moved on to my second line, and accepted it: I was attending a conference in London when it happened.

But I digress. Here’s some examples of some crises.

When Edward VIII abdicated from the British throne in 1936 so that he could marry his American lover Wallis Simpson, it created a crisis. It did so because it threatened the nation’s sense of itself and might even have wobbled the UK’s constitution. The credit crunch was a crisis. It threatened to very severely disrupt capitalism by destroying huge amounts of wealth (especially savings) and confidence. Note: what actually happened was very nasty but has so far fallen well short of what was threatened. So it was a crisis and we seem to have got through it.

Those events threatened abrupt or decisive change. They created very real and deep fear. The worst outcomes were seriously in play, and did not materialise.

There are, of course, cases where dramas needlessly become full-blown crises.

For example, there are the cases where people imagine a danger which would be dreadful if it did occur. One was Three Mile Island in 1979. The ironic thing about Three Mile Island was that the worst case scenario core meltdown occurred within the first minutes of the accident. It was such a non-event that nobody noticed, not even the plant’s operators. Meanwhile, the world’s media stood outside the plant for weeks hyping up the “what ifs”. (BTW: Three Mile Island still generates electricity today, just as electricity was generated by Chernobyl’s nuclear reactors until very recently.)

Here’s another twist. Disasters are quite often not crises. That’s to say, a chaos is unleashed, but nothing very much is threatened. When Richard Branson interrupted his holiday to fly to the scene of a Cumbrian train crash in 2007, that was not crisis management, so much as good PR and (for all we know) a compassionate act of a good boss responding to a disaster. Of course, if Branson hadn’t turned up, and was thought callous, that might have produced a drama for Virgin, since one cannot afford nowadays to be invisible at such moments. Even so, it would not have been a crisis.

Interestingly, when it comes to accidents, firms rarely get punished as hard as did Windscale, Value Jet, and Union Carbide, all of which anyway survived their genuine crises. Yet it is at least possible that rebranding a disaster or crisis-hit organisation merely produces a legacy of bad-taste jokes and ill-feeling about slippery PR. That’s to say, there may be a deep understanding among the public that accidents do happen. That understanding can withstand, I maintain, the media approach (and victim reproach) which tend to assume that total safety is available and would have been achieved except for the villainy of firms and governments.

As people speculate about Toyota’s fate, the fact is that there’s never been a major car firm destroyed by a recall or by an accident. Companies destroyed by sudden events are normally in the class of totally corrupt Enron and its grey accomplice Arthur Andersen. In both companies trust collapsed because their skulduggery accurately defined what their brands were about. Their reputations were beyond repair, and quite rightly so.

Then there’s the likes of Ratners. The collapse of that company had more to do with a loss of nerve in response to a gaffe than, arguably, necessity dictated. But Ratners’ experience was another exception that stands out precisely for that reason. If you doubt that, just look at the positive share prices of oil companies today and then review their accident-prone histories.

But let’s stay contemporary here. Toyota’s worldwide recall is not a crisis in the true sense of the term. It is actually a drama focused on a narrow range of issues. The chances are slim that it will become a long-term disaster for Toyota. That’s not to say that slow sales, halted production lines and global recalls of millions of cars is business as usual. It is just to remind us to retain a sense of perspective.

For a start, who’s panicking? Who thinks their Toyota (their car, their share, their job) is really threatened here? Here’s the important thought: we see this storm and we think, “Toyota’s a damn good car-maker and will be an even better one after this”. Maybe a few victims (some half-embarrassed that they panicked instead of finding neutral), with their US lawyers rubbing their hands behind them. But I don’t think anyone seriously believes that Toyota’s existence is threatened by its current problems. Though I imagine that the pressure must be bloody uncomfortable for Toyota’s bosses, and not good for the nerves of Japan’s stock exchange in the midst of recession.

Before we lose our nerve, or tell Toyota to, we should remind ourselves how well Ford survived its tribulations with its “exploding” fuel tanks in the Pinto and Mercury Bobcats (1.5 vehicle recall). It was claimed they killed 27 people. Ford ordered the recall – and did not contest the accusations – because it was more motivated by supposed public perception than by what it knew to be true (The Suicidal Corporation: How Big Business Fails America, by Paul H Weaver, a Touch Stone Book).

So most things labeled as being a crises aren’t any such thing.

We PRs need to consider very carefully whether we should avoid the elephant trap which is laid for us here. We should perhaps develop a determination to avoid reacting to every drama and panic and even disaster as though it were a crisis for our clients. The media, after all, is in the business of making a crisis out of drama, and we all too often risk doing half their work for them.

Heather Yaxley writing on PR Conversations hit the notes well recently. She attacked PR crisis management theorists for their panicky hyper-active overreaction to dramas:

Tell it fast becomes tell it before you know anything.  Tell it all means let the media and its rent-a-quote experts speculate about worst case scenarios.  Be open means unlimited social media engagement (regardless of what the legal or other ramifications may be). Have the CEO (or celebrity if a personal faux pas has occurred) lead communications with mandatory appearances on chatshows, a tour of news stations,  and a YouTube apology.  Mea culpa – the universal panacea: “I’m sorry if…” – anyone resisting the calls is bullied until they comply.  The pound of flesh must be paid.

I fear she rightly roughs me up a little for my recent piece Where was Mr Toyoda yesterday? She certainly compellingly argues that every so-called crisis is different. She adds that too many PRs try to impose commoditized crisis management plans onto unique situations:

It’s a comfort blanket of how to…, what not to do…, common mistakes and miracle cures.

I would add that PRs often corrupt the everyday management of risk in business. The sensible cry from PRs for clients to stay ahead of the game risks turning the commonsense desire to spot problems before they occur into crisis management paranoia.

The result is the creation of a risk-adverse culture which inhibits innovation. That’s a point that is well argued in Paul H. Weaver’s The Suicidal Corporation. It is why I’m recommending people read it. The creation of a risk-adverse culture helps spread indecision and insecurity. During media hurricanes it becomes a sort of PR own goal. In other words, making decisions under under pressure calls for risk-taking, but risk-taking like winning and losing is habit forming.

The truth is that people admire and respect risk-takers and they make allowances for their failures. Moreover, unpopularity in the media is just as temporary and superficial as popularity. Bad headlines don’t destroy good reputations, no more than positive ones make them. Good reputations are based on innovation, delivery on promises and a certain arrogance based on success. They are sustained by people’s experience of the brand  (El Buli, Ryanair, Apple, Toyota and much more).

Hence, rather than becoming hyper-active advocates of risk-aversion, PRs should instead do more to inspire courage and balls into the mindset of their clients. PRs could do much more to push back on media and other agendas and to help their clients ride out the storms they face with their integrity intact.

The reassuring lesson from most Toyota-type troubles is that consumers are as quick to forgive as they are to condemn. So I’ll risk a prediction. There’s every chance, as Insigna’s Jonathan Hemus says here in The Guardian, that Toyota will come out of its storm with its reputation enhanced (though his advice is too skewed toward institutionalized risk aversion for my liking).

So a crisis is a crisis when it threatens the viability of something or other. Otherwise it doesn’t qualify. The job of PRs is to make sure situations never do qualify or to clear up the mess if the you know what hits the fan.

Oh, I never did advocate that people riot, dread the thought. But I do own up to having been a revolutionary, which is something completely different.

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I’m from nearby Elm Park on London’s East End border. Ian defined my white working class identity, theatrically and parodically thuggish, gaudily irreverent. Bits of Byron and bits of Mr Pastry thrown in. He was more art school than me (and back then, the difference between art school, university, technical college and plain worker was quite something).

Ian embodied English white working class culture long before my clan recognised the chip on their own shoulder. But this was suburban streets working class – lower middle really – not even your two-up, two-down terrace (later your seven-storey, deck access) working class. His was no racist spat. He was a Bohemian with an attitude problem, aesthetic aspirations, with a bully-or-be-bullied cockney swagger. And then there was the limp, which made him sit up and fly right in a way.

For all his career I identified with his roots and vast grasp of the world of music, poetic lyrics and his f***-you, leave-me-alone guttural gruff Essex-boy bellow. During my teens I pushed fruit & veg barrows on Saturdays on Romford Market, and on Sundays I unloaded the van and manned the stall selling blankets and bedspreads on Peitticoat Lane, Wentworth Street. I knew where Ian was coming from: his father drove somebody else’s Rolls Royce, my father worked on the back of somebody else’s Routemaster bus.

I left Dury Falls Secondary Modern in 1975 with no qualifications. (Even my school in Upminster Bridge was a punning homage to my later hero.) I was into football violence and Motown. Friday’s and Saturdays were for getting drunk and punch ups.

My first job was as a railway operating apprentice on London’s Underground. I lasted one day. I phoned my mum from White City tube station and told her I’d resigned because uniforms with caps were not for me.

Instead, I enrolled at Havering Technical College. Everybody was shocked – I’d failed both maths and English at school. What people didn’t know was that when I was bunking off school (I was rarely there in the final year) I was wasn’t out causing trouble. I was touring London’s museums. I was gate-crashing lectures at the Science Museum, Victoria & Albert and the British Museum put on for other schools’ parties. My horizons were being widened.

I knew there was a better world out there than wasting my life in the Elm Park Hotel, as rough an East End boozer as ever there was, or at Zero Six in South End, with its Kermit Pogo Stick Double Ups and onstage knees-ups. So I told London Underground to do the other thing and set out on my great adventure to develop myself.

At Havering Technical College I was a chaotic disaster. I spent too much time flirting in the Spencers Arms at lunch time to ever stand a chance of passing my exams. But from the students’ union events I found arty films, left wing politics, Ian Dury and how to lose badly at poker (no logical connection).

I was never fully comfortable with punk, which like the hippies I dubbed middle class wankers. Motown became boring. I needed something more grown up, more modern, more me. The Clash appealed, I’ll admit. I liked the Sex Pistols, but couldn’t stand their act-tough but soft fans. I sang Tom Robinson’s Glad to be Gay at the Victoria Park anti-racist gig in 1978. Those were empowering times that opened our working class eyes to new ideas.

I’ve never forgotten seeing Ian Dury and The Blockheads at Hammersmith Odeon. During the break my gorgeous companion distracted the man behind the kiosk in the foyer with a full-on view of her bust while I stole a large box of Maltesers. It was very Ian Dury:

In my yellow jersey, I went out on the nick.
South Street Romford, shopping arcade
Got a Razzle magazine, I never paid
Inside my jacket and away double quick.
Good sense told me, once was enough
But I had a cocky eye on more of this stuff
With the Razzle in my pocket, back to have another peek

If the film lives up to the great reviews it has been getting, I’m gonna be in for a treat.

If anyone had told me, back then, that I’d be living in perhaps Switzerland’s most prosperous village, on Zurich’s lakeside, amongst the billionaires, bankers, oligarchs and entrepreneurs, I’d have said they were Barking as well as Romford. Reasons to be cheerful? You bet!

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PR Week reports that up to 100 Lib Dems are set to convene at the end of this month to figure out ways in which the party can improve its internet communications. It seems the Lib Dems want to obtain a louder voice on the web than their Labour rival Derek Draper and Tory Iain Dale. But it is the racist BNP which is eclipsing them all online.

BNP is currently the number one political hit on the web in the UK. They’re followed by Guido Fawkes’ blog which ranks as 84,182 most hit website worldwide, and by Iain Dale who has a traffic ranking of 100,289. Neither blog matches the BNP’s “UK political-chart-topping” position of 48,382, according to traffic ratings agency Alexa.

Britain’s mainstream political parties lag further still behind the BNP in terms of popularity online (see graphics below). The supposition is that the internet has been neglected by the official party machines. They might have created websites, but they never attracted an audience with which to interact.

The dirty little truth here may be that the web is not crucial to mainstream retail politics. After all, the successful “Conservative” sites are unofficial to a degree. They appeal to a Private Eye sort of market (the “Wannabe Insider”) and the obsessive pol rather than to the routine undecided marginal voter. They are not a model for the mainstream, “official” parties.

Moreover, as Rachel Sylvester has hilariously pointed out in The Times, some of the recent interventions on the web by the mainstream political establishment have been embarrassing. For instance, Derek Draper has just been suspended from Twitter for inappropriate usage. (There’s an amusing report on this from Iain Dale here.) And was John Prescott really the right person to lead Labour’s charge on the mainly teenage Facebook; or was it that he was the only senior figure willing to give it a go? Politicians do need a measure of gravitas, and that peculiar beast may leak away online.

Confronting the BNP online’s presence may be very difficult. But this is because the BNP can resort to dog-whistles and nudges-and-winks and general dissembling in a way which can’t be matched by mainstream parties.

It’s certainly a real problem. One fallout from the recession is that more and more unemployed people have time on their hands and access to the internet. Sections of this constituency, including Chav-town Dagenham-man (employed as well as unemployed), feels that the “traditional” white working class has been bypassed. It should be no surprise that the BNP has tried to pander to such sentiments.

One of the major concerns of this audience is immigration.

Thank goodness, the mainstream debate is now free of racism. Policy itself is daring to be slightly less permissive. Where that “tightening up” will end up, and whether it will leave a big rump of angry refuseniks is important, of course. Will the mainstream leave a large pond for the BNP to fish in?

The good news is that though the party is as unpleasant as ever, most casual BNP supporters are not hardline racist bigots any more than are the rest of Britain’s population. Most of them are not racist at all: rather, they are angry about their recent experience.They could probably be brought back into the mainstream.

But the mainstream policy shifts which might achieve this probably won’t need a specially online approach. Remember, the online world has an element of the Samizdat about it: it is somehow slightly forbidden. That mood inherently appeals to the BNP because for good reasons and bad, its messages aren’t much heard on the mainstream media but are always faintly and deliberately paranoid.

So in this most important case, the mainstream parties can win this and other battles out in the open – and the BNP can’t easily win the battle, however well it uses the web for which it is so well suited.

I am of course very keen that the mainstream use the internet as best they can. But they ought to use the web in a good, richly informative way. Success online, just as it is offline, is about communicating the right messages in the right format in the right place to the audiences which inhabit the online space. For more on this I recommend Stuart Bruce’s PR blog here, on which he usefully challenges the blogging glitterati’s obsession with social media netiquette.

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Today’s Jade Goody story in the Sun is very touching. The PR trade needs to get over its aversion to Max Clifford and his brilliant manipulation of a story at once luminiously modern and as old as time. He’s on the side of the angels.

Two things stand out about Jade. She’s doing all she can to leave a legacy for her kids. She’s campaigning for improvements in screening of young women for cervical cancer. In the process, she’s roused a nation’s passions for her and her causes. And, with Max Clifford, she is using the modern media to tell an old story.

There’s certainly been drama in her life. And it’s been made public by Big Brother, which shines a compelling light on the minutiae of modern life. In The House, she became a part of our family – somebody we felt we knew. She went on to embody the nation’s Chav side.

But her life in the spotlight has really been about her flight from Chavdom – or at least an aspiration that her children escape from it.

That’s the point about Chavs. Theirs is a shout from the unreconstructed unrespectable working class, but it often disguises quite a strong desire to better oneself. Victoria Beckham as Posh Spice is a heroine to that world for a bunch of contradictory reasons.

So’s Jade. Sure, she appalled us with her playground bullying of Shilpa Shetty. But the outrage was much overblown. We never really considered her to be racist – any more than we really think Prince Harry is anything other than a loose-mouthed and inconsiderate twit.

She’s been wonderfully described by Julie Burchill in the Sun as being, “born to Dickensian deprivation — junkie dad who hid guns under her cot, abusive one-armed mum for whom she was the principle carer ever since childhood. She had very little education and has spent her life trying to make something of herself against all odds.”

It’s an extreme version of a common story. Millions of families hold very dear the mantra of giving kids “the start in life I never had”. They often get it wrong and way too many Brits think it’s about money rather than spelling. But Jade’s ahead here: she’s framing her ambition for her kids in educational terms. She wants them to rise above the ignorance that made her famous.

We should acknowledge that too many others with her start in life wallow “happily” without ambition in their own mess. They invest in failure, and Jade doesn’t.

And she can thank goodness she’s got Max Clifford in her corner. Talking of Clifford’s role in the Jade Goody affair, CIPR President Kevin Taylor has commented:

Of course I, and many others, would dispute that Clifford works in PR at all – he certainly doesn’t work in the same PR land that I inhabit.  To my mind, Clifford is a publicist and that is very different.

Well, to my mind Max Clifford is the ultimate PR man’s PR. Sure, he seemingly inhabits the lower end of the market. But so what?

Edward Bernays in his 1952 classic book Public Relations loving describes our industry’s modern origins in the hands of circus promoters such as Phineas T Barnum. His favorourite saying was “there’s a sucker born every minute”. A fact he backed by promoting an old Negro “slave” by the name of Joice Heth. Her claim to fame – said Barnum – was to have nursed George Washington one hundred years before (making her around 160 years old). He also promoted Tom Thumb, the dwarf, and Jenny Lind “The Swedish Nightingale” and a Cardiff Giant. That was the Greatest Show on Earth back in 1871.

The show goes on today. We all play a part – so please cut the snobbery. After all, two of the more “respectable” leaders of the UK’s PR industry are themselves former tabloid editors – Tony Hall and David Yelland. We all fish in the same pond of life.

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The BBC’s Imogen Foulkes in Geneva reported that the police did not supply any public information about the attack until after the case was reported in the Brazilian media. Instead, she said, the police called for patience while they investigated the incident. But the tone of the report suggests criticism of the authorities.

The story was irresitable in a way, and maybe even important. As the BBC says of the “SVP” marked on the woman’s body:

Swiss People’s Party – whose name in German is “Schweizerische Volkspartei” (SVP) – is renowned for its anti-immigration stance, and has been accused of racism during political campaigns.

It is claimed the letters SVP stand for “Schweizerische Volkspartei”

Its poster during the 2007 general election, showing white sheep kicking a black sheep out of Switzerland, caused international outrage.

However the party has always denied any connection with neo-Nazis, our correspondent adds.

Actually, nobody in Switzerland has ever seriously linked the SVP to neo-Nazi skinheads, racist violence or anything like it. Engraving its name on people’s bodies is not the kind of thing it goes in for.

Brazil’s President said, “faced with such violence against Brazilians abroad one could not keep silent.” Brazil’s minister of human rights Paulo Vannuchi was quoted in O-Globo, the nation’s leading newspaper, saying:

That crime has brought back the horror of the Holocaust.

The Swiss envoy in Brazil has been called to the foreign office to account for what happened. O-Globo reported how government sources called for an independent public inquiry supervised by the United Nation’s High Commissioner of Human Rights.

The BBC implies that the Swiss police were remiss in not trumpeting this attack from the rooftops. But it may be that they had reason to be more circumspect than the BBC or Brazilian media and politicians.

The Swiss police have no idea where the photographs of Paula Oliveira – the 26-year-old lawyer at the centre of this – came from. They are not the ones the police took. That made them suspicious because since the incident she has been in police and medical custody. Medical checks have confirmed the woman was not pregnant at all.

One wonders why the BBC went so big so fast with this story when the facts were unclear and in doubt from the every beginning? Not least because the attack supposedly took place during a busy time at the station for a period of ten minutes with no witness reports. In contrast, the restraint shown by the Swiss media has been praised by the police.

Do I detect BBC Swiss-bashing? Or is this some weird fall-out from the Jean Charles de Menezes case, which was all over the British media on the same day?

Certainly, the later BBC report that expressed doubts over the claim was late – the Swiss media reported the glaring inconsistencies in the woman’s claims from the off. Even the tabloid Blick was much more measured than the BBC.

Forensic experts have concluded that this was a case of self-harm.

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When my blood’s up, I have to remind myself to be pro-British and not anti-German. Germany’s at least as nice a place as Switzerland or my own beloved England. Indeed, after reading English news of late, Continental virtues (Swiss, German or any other) can seem quite worthwhile.

Anyway, I’m richly varied. I once fell into the folly of being far left. My reasoning of thirty years ago flooded back to me after seeing news of England’s shame in the form of the BNP – neatly put in perspective by David Aaronovitch. I’m from Dagenham and Romford, white heartland of NF and BNP lumpens. I opposed them in my youth when I used to push fruit & veg barrows on Wentworth Street and Romford markets. My mates were a mixed crowd, and a target of hate. I still despise neo-fascists today. And I do mean “despise”: a sort of visceral loathing that isn’t polite.

And there’s the point: I want to stop the BNP, but my hating them doesn’t help me or hurt them. Time to move on.

But I couldn’t resist sharing this Ian Dury classic. It’s a white and indigenous ditty, by chance. It’s somehow the best of patriotism without the worst. The words and humour of Ian Dury’s Blockheads helped define the spirit of my East End gang. While we were all in Victoria Park on 30th April 1978 to hear Tom Robinson, The Clash, Steel Pulse and others say no to racism, Ian Dury was our local hero, not them. So, for all my Dagenham-mates against the BNP, here goes Ian Dury:

There are jewels in the crown of England’s glory (England’s glory)
And every jewel shines a thousand ways

Frankie Howerd, Noël Coward and garden gnomes
Frankie Vaughan, Kenneth Horne, Sherlock Holmes
Monty, Biggles and Old King Cole
In the pink or on the dole
Oliver Twist and Long John Silver
Captain Cook and Nelly Dean
Enid Blyton, Gilbert Harding
Malcolm Sargeant, Graham Greene (Graham Greene)

All the jewels in the crown of England’s glory (England’s glory)
Too numerous to mention, but a few (but a few)
And every one could tell a different story (different story)
And show old England’s glory something new

Nice bit of kipper and Jack the Ripper and Upton Park
Gracie, Cilla, Maxie Miller, Petula Clark
Winkles, Woodbines, Walnut Whips
Vera Lynn and Stafford Cripps
Lady Chatterley, Muffin the Mule
Winston Churchill, Robin Hood
Beatrix Potter, Baden-Powell
Beecham’s powders, Yorkshire pud (Yorkshire pud)

Billy Bunter, Jane Austen
Ray Ellington, George Formby
Billy Fury, Little Titch
Uncle Mac, Mr. Pastry and all
Uncle Mac, Mr. Pastry and all

All the jewels in the crown of England’s glory (England’s glory)
Too numerous to mention, but a few (but a few)
And every one could tell a different story (different story)
And show old England’s glory something new

Somerset Maugham, top of the form and the Boys’ Brigade (England’s glory)
Mortimer Wheeler, Christine Keeler and the Board of Trade (England’s glory)
Henry Cooper, Mighty Strangler, England’s labour (England’s glory)
Standard Vanguard, spotted dick, England’s workers (England’s glory)

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