Canvassing in the Handsworth area of Birmingham back in 1983, I was flummoxed by one voter. She stood before her considerable house in an area that had once been firmly middle-class. Now the villas around her had been converted into bedsits, and the locality had become scruffy and run-down. She was, apparently, now the only white resident in the street. She asked me when she had ever been given the chance to vote for or against Britain’s becoming multiracial. Since I could not answer that, she wanted to know why she should vote at all.

She could be dismissed as a racist, and I do not deny that she may well have been. But that would not invalidate her point. The biggest single change in postwar Britain is the transformation in who the British are.....

Immigration, the taboo word that will cost Cameron dear | Michael Portillo - Times Online

This is quite an interesting article. For one I never knew Thatcher got in on a anti immigration ticket. She effectively pulled the rug from under the National Front.