EXACTLY how many people were on the now-notorious al Muhajiroun-organised demo in Luton earlier this year, in which a small group of Islamists chanted anti-war slogans at British troops marching through the town? Just a couple of dozen, if memory serves.

Yet the nationwide impact of the protest was out of all proportion to the numbers involved. This is presumably why immigration minister Phil Woolas thinks it is clever politics explicitly to recall the incident when presenting his plans for a points-based citizenship scheme in the media this morning.

In practice, the stipulation will probably be pertinent to just a statistically insignificant handful of the hundreds of thousands of passport applications each year. But that’s not the point. The point is getting headlines such as ‘Immigrants who jeer at British troops in the street to be barred from gaining citizenship’.

New Labour’s tactics to counter the inroads the British National Party is making into sections of its electoral base centre on tacitly conceding the BNP case, and then showcasing policies that seem to respond to BNP voters’ concerns.

Another example is last month’s announcement that councils will be allowed to give more priority to local people in the allocation of social housing, in the hope of undercutting the far right’s attempt to exploit the horrendous shortage of affordable houses for working class people for racist ends.

This despite recent research from the Institute for Public Policy Research, which pretty much debunks the myth that immigrants are favoured over natives in this respect. According to the report, less than 2% of social housing tenants have moved to the UK in the past five years

The obvious question is, will these tactics work. Make no mistake, the BNP builds on real working-class grievances. It is the only political force that consistently courts the white working class and rejects liberal claims that social conflict has disappeared.

There is a major difference between confronting racism and meeting it half way. New Labour may find that fudging the real issues actually boosts the fears on which the BNP thrives.

IT’S NOT that I approve of the game John Denham is trying to play off in trading off class politics against anti-racism, as witnessed by the speech and the statement he yesterday delivered on these topics.

New Labour cannot conceivably take on the British National Party in a game of right populist pass the parcel and emerge victorious, and the communities secretary only demeans himself by blatant flirtation with the tactic.

But if you strip the underlying argument away from the shoddy implied conclusion, Denham makes several points that are patently irrefutable. Class remains the central cleavage in capitalist societies, and much discrimination at first sight based on race really does have more to do with social stratification.

No doubt Lakshmi Mittal or Mohamed al Fayed or Swraj Paul can all point to occasions when they have been treated differentially on account of their skin.

Let me tell you about an acquaintance of mine who teaches philosophy at Oxford University. He habitually wears a suit and tie; indeed, I’ve never seen him wear anything else, even at weekends. Every time he opens his mouth, he reveals himself to be the product of a prominent fee-paying school.

But he is visibly of south Asian origin, and was recently subjected to a shocking string of racist calumny and abuse by a complete stranger, simply for the crime of sharing the same railway carriage.

Nevertheless, the kind of racism faced by wealthy upper and middle class Asians and blacks does not compare with the racism faced by working class Asians and blacks, in every significant area of life from housing to education to the jobs market. Their class interests obviously align them with the white working class.

Sorry, did I say white working class? There are some on the left who would dismiss the very concept as an unnecessary concession to national chauvinism. For a class pour soi in the Marxist sense, such distinctions must be obliterated, surely?

Quite. But such a level of abstraction is indicative of a certain level of detachment from the realities on the ground. In the real live and kicking British working class, self-identification with the designation is surely growing.

With the far left beset by the permanent paralysis of factionalism, the far right has moved onto our turf. According to a poll for Searchlight, 61% of BNP voters fall into the C2DE categories on the standard scale of class, even though this layer constitutes just 45% of the population.

Political common sense over the last two decades has insisted that elections are won and lost in a small number of key marginals, and manifestoes have been geared exclusively to swing voter concerns. Millions of ordinary people have twigged that New Labour has written them off as mere voting fodder with no viable electoral options. They are not too far wrong.

What we are seeing now is a new racism rooted in the collapse of social housing, a racism born of the disappearance of blue collar employment and grassroots trade union organisation, a racism of benefit cuts, a racism centred on the perception that nobody in a position of authority really gives a shit. You might even want to call it a racism of desperation.

But the answer is not – as Denham seems to think – to build up the white working class into a communalist bloc, and then fling them a few chocolate drops by paying special attention to the sectionalist interests.

Labour needs to reconnect with this base by building a politics that appeal concretely to the majority of society that are either wage-earners themselves, or are supported by a wage-earner, or excluded from being a wage-earner by unemployment, illness or age.

While that will necessitate anti-racist measures, ethnicity should be a secondary consideration. The answer to the new racism can only be founded on a new class politics.