1Apollo in EssexIf you see me performing in concert, the night will invariably end with a ritual declaration of identity: ''My name is Billy Bragg, I''m from Barking, Essex. Thank you very much. Goodnight.'' Although it''s now over twenty years since I last lived there, I''ve always been conscious of where I come from - happy when my home town does well, disappointed when we let ourselves down, offended when outsiders make disparaging remarks.By identifying myself strongly with Essex, I have sought to counter the negative stereotype that was foisted on the county in the 1980s. ''Essex Man'' was a term invented to demonize the newly affluent white working class, whose predilection for sovereign rings and right-wing Thatcherism made them into folk devils in the eyes of the predominantly middle-class media. Such people did undoubtedly exist, but they lived all over the South-East, fiercely protective of their family and property, dismissive of the Welfare State, and English to the point of belligerence.While everyone in the country saw Essex through the distorted prism of the ''Essex Man'' clicheacute;, declaring that I was from Barking was a reaction to growing up in the suburban obscurity of one of London''s many satellite towns.

In my youth, I longed to come from somewhere glamorous or, better, notorious. As it was, I came from the place most kids come from: Nowheresville.Identifying myself with my home town - to the extent that I gained the nickname ''The Bard of Barking'' - was my way of helping to put the town on the map. After twenty years, however, Barking remained, for most people, little more than another stop along the eastern end of the District Line.Then, seemingly overnight, the town was catapulted to national prominence. The notoriety that I had longed for as a youth had finally arrived in the shape of the British National Party. The most recent manifestation of the British fascist movement, the BNP was founded in 1982 by former National Front leader, John Tyndall. A devout follower of Adolf Hitler, Tyndall once stated that ''Mein Kampf is my Bible.

'' The current leader, Nick Griffin, has sought to obscure the party''s Nazi roots in the hope of gaining greater legitimacy, although he felt confident enough to claim recently in the Mail on Sunday that the gas chambers at Auschwitz were built after the war.In the local council elections in May 2006, the BNP surprised everyone when they won a dozen seats on Barking and Dagenham Council. In terms of national politics, this was meaningless - the BNP won only thirty seats across the country, on a night when over three thousand were up for grabs. On a local scale, however, it was a disaster. The BNP had won handfuls of seats before, mostly in the former mill towns of the North-West, but the result in Barking and Dagenham represented a real breakthrough. The Tories and Liberal Democrats had been decimated and, although Labour held on to thirty-nine seats, for the first time a fascist party had become the official opposition in a council chamber. Within twentyfour hours, headlines began to speak of Barking and Dagenham as the race-hate capital of Britain.I was shocked at the scale of the BNP''s gains.

I''ve been actively opposing racism all my adult life - it was the cause that first politicized me - and the BNP are just the latest manifestation of a neo-Nazi strain that I first encountered in the 1970s in the form of the National Front.Now the fascists had a power base in my home town. And this wasn''t some electoral fluke whereby the two main parties had split and the BNP benefited by scraping in through the middle. They had won in every ward in which they had put up candidates - in fact, of the thirteen BNP candidates who stood, only one had failed to be elected. Had they managed to put up a full slate, they may well have won control of the council.The result was a bombshell. Barking has been under Labour control since the town council was formed in 1931. When the London borough was crea.