Enoch powell's speech about immigration (1968) What do the words "white working class" conjure in your mind? Knives, binge drinking, fecklessness, hoodies, slags, yobs, povvoes? That would about cover it. Why do we allow ourselves, even in the privacy of our own heads, to wield such hateful terms towards this particular minority group? The BBC's new White Season which began last Friday is unlikely to provide any answers. It lacks a polemic in defence of the white working class. It is a defence long overdue. My father worked in a greengrocers' shop for 35 years; my mother was a housewife before she committed suicide in 1987. They were both lifelong Labour voters. My mother hanged herself in the house she lived in all her life, in Southall, west London, a town that had changed beyond all recognition. It is today the least white place in the whole of Britain. She wrote in her suicide note: "I hate Southall, I feel so alone." In case anyone dare accuse her of any racism, she may have hated Southall, but my mother was incapable of hating people. She worked in the last years of her life as a dinner lady in an all-Asian school and was much loved. But she was lost. Her world had disappeared....