Gradually, since then, and probably before, he says, the street he still lives in, the area he grew up in, and the country he was once so proud of has changed 'beyond all recognition' and no one - certainly not anyone from the Labour or Conservative parties - bothered to knock on his door and ask him what he thought about it, or the effect it might be having on his life.
Clive Neal used to vote Tory, but now he informs me, though not in a belligerent way, that 'I will be voting BNP', adding: 'We're losing our sense of what it is to be British and this upsets and frustrates me.'
Does that make him a racist? Mr Neal, a quietly spoken, almost shy man, who lives in the same house on the vast Becontree Estate that he used to share with his parents, insists not.
Farther up the road, single mother Karen Woodward, 39, says she will also be voting BNP. As will the woman, in her late 50s, at the pebble-dash terrace at No50, and the 34-year-old former builder, now registered disabled, at No52 ('I've never voted BNP before, but I'm going to because the country is in a mess').
The grandmother a few doors up? BNP. The middle-aged man at the house with a dodgy extension; BNP. His next-door neighbour; BNP. Two pensioners, behind the blue and brown doors, across the street; both BNP. A third pensioner, male, walking along the pavement. 'Yes,' he would be voting BNP, too.
The underlying electoral statistics confirm the anecdotal evidence.
The BNP is the official opposition on Barking and Dagenham Council after winning 12 of 13 seats it contested in the 2006 local elections, polling more than 40 per cent of the popular vote in six wards. In reality, this means that on every street in Barking (pop: 166,000), there are at least 38 people who in the recent past have voted BNP.
BNP stickers in windows and the Cross of St George, like the one in Clive Neal's garden, have become an intrinsic part of the urban landscape. No longer, it seems, is allegiance to the BNP something to be ashamed of; not here, anyway
This is why Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, is standing for Parliament in Barking. Griffin versus Labour's big hitter Margaret Hodge is one of the key sub-plots of the General Election. It is also a litmus test for our political system, with the MPs' expenses scandal and continued fears over immigration at the very top of the political agenda.
Figures last week revealed that virtually every extra job created under Labour - an extraordinary 98.5 per cent of 1.67 million new posts - has gone to a foreign worker.
It's a gift for Griffin and the British National Party, which is fielding more than 300 candidates nationally; but especially so in Barking. The Ford car factory once employed 50,000. Now it's 2,000. Unemployment is running at about 8 per cent. Decent jobs - any jobs - are scarce
BNP posters promising 'British jobs for British workers' already mock Gordon Brown's use of the same phrase more than two years ago. 'When we say it, we mean it,' the poster declares. Even the BNP, however, couldn't have imagined the chasm between Brown's 'jobs pledge' and Brown's record.
The BNP slogans have been backed up by effective community campaigning: clearing graffiti, picking up litter from parks and streets, even taking old folk to the bingo.
The tactics have convinced many of the white working-class who do not see themselves as racists that the new BNP, epitomised by Cambridge graduate Griffin, has evolved from the football terraces and shed the Third Reich nostalgia of the old National Front from which it emerged in the early Eighties.
These are the uncomfortable facts about the BNP and Barking, as well as other party strongholds like Burnley and Stoke. Behind them lies a story which tells us everything we need to know, if we didn't already, about Nick Griffin's 'reformed' BNP.
Let's begin with immigration, an issue which the major parties - particularly Labour - have singularly failed to address, and which the BNP has ruthlessly and shamelessly exploited in Barking.
Barking, overall, has fewer people from ethnic minority backgrounds than the London average. Around 75 per cent of the 167,000 population are white British, according to an Audit Commission report published in January.
The majority of the non-white community, however, is concentrated on the vast Becontree Estate, where Clive Neal lives.
Over the past ten years, half the council's housing stock - 20,000 properties - were sold under the 'right-to-buy' scheme. These new owner-occupiers subsequently moved out of Barking to places like Basildon, Billericay, and Southend in what became known as the 'white flight'. Many of those who took their place in Becontree were Afro-Caribbeans, mostly from other parts of the capital or other parts of the country.
The transformation of Becontree resulted in a notorious BNP leaflet called 'Africans for Essex'.
The leaflet has been dropping through letter boxes in Becontree over the past few weeks. The leaflet claims that the Government has paid African immigrants up to £50,000 to move to Barking to ensure 'safe Labour majorities in the future'.
In fact, the cash incentive scheme - residents in London boroughs are eligible for grants to buy their own homes to ease the pressure on council waiting lists - is open to everyone, not just immigrants or specifically African immigrants.
Guess how many took advantage of the scheme to move to Barking? Just 39 in the past six years. Of these, six were white, 15 were Asian, 13 were black (African and Caribbean) and five did not have their ethnicity recorded.
Just 39, then, in a total population of 167,000.
Yet many residents in Barking are utterly convinced that the 'Africans for Essex' conspiracy exists. Perhaps this is as much an indictment of the Labour Party, which has encouraged mass immigration to Britain while crushing any honest debate on the subject, as it is of the BNP.
The same might be said of other BNP propaganda portraying Margaret Hodge as a witch-like figure handing out the keys of the few remaining council homes to a queue of stereotyped foreigners in burkhas and turbans carrying suitcases. 'Enjoy Your New Home', Hodge is telling them. Behind her an angry white mob screaming: 'What About Us?'
It's a grotesque caricature, of course. But like all caricatures there is an element of truth in the xenophobic rhetoric. At present, those considered to have the greatest need are automatically able to jump housing lists, meaning new immigrants with children sometimes leapfrog people with longer-standing links to the community who may have been waiting longer.
Margaret Hodge, to her credit, raised this issue in 2007. The response of senior Cabinet members, among them Alan Johnson, now Home Secretary, was that Hodge's legitimate concerns were simply 'grist to the mill of the BNP'.
Three years on, the government has now effectively conceded that Margaret Hodge was right all along. Communities Secretary John Denham has just announced that local authorities should favour the children of long-standing residents when allocating council houses.
Indeed, Margaret Hodge, who became MP for Barking in 1994 and is now Minister at the Department for Media, Culture and Sport, has been the target of what can only be described as an ugly, vicious and highly personal campaign by the BNP.
On the doorstep, the BNP likes to use her maiden name Oppenheimer. Born in Egypt, she came to Britain with her Jewish parents, who were refugees from Nazi-occupied Austria.
Bob Bailey, 44, a former Royal Marine, and leader of the BNP on the local council, denied this when I contacted him this week.
'No, that's not true,' he insisted. 'We don't talk about the Labour Party on the doorstep, everyone knows they are rubbish. We want to talk about what we are doing, not what those clowns are doing.' What about his own description of Hodge as 'Margaret (the Egyptian) Hodge'.
'I don't think so,' he replied, then added: 'but that is where she was born, isn't it?'
In fact, 'The Egyptian' reference is on a BNP website called London Patriot. It was posted on March 3 - by Bob Bailey.
'I've been the subject of criticism and attacks in the Press all my career,' Hodge reveals back at her Whitehall office, off Trafalgar Square.
'But I'm in my 60s now and I have never met any anti-semitism before. My parents were subjected to it. I remember this incident when we were kids, when we had a car accident. My father got out the car to apologise to the other driver, but this man looked at my father and said: "You bloody Jew."
'It stuck in my memory. That is probably the only time I have experienced anti-semitism, until now.'
Margaret Hodge was also accused by Nick Griffin of having a personal financial interest in plans - since cancelled - to build a new prison in the borough. Griffin was later forced to apologise for the lie, which appeared in BNP literature. I learnt of another incident - involving Cllr Bailey - during my inquiries in Barking which is also worth reporting.
It concerned a young black student nurse who was conducting an exit poll for the Labour Party in the 2006 local elections. She should have said 'I'm from Labour', before approaching voters outside, but she forgot. It was an honest mistake.
But Bailey overheard her. He is said to have then told her: 'I know who you are. I've got your phone number.'
The girl burst in to tears. Not long afterwards, a car drove past the polling station with four thugs inside. 'Go home you n*****, one of them shouted at the student.
'Oh, dear, burst into tears,' Cllr Bailey replied sarcastically when the allegation was put to him this week. Did he know about the car-load of racist yobs? 'Don't think so, don't think so. Ask another question. Ask another question.'
Well, there was one. 'Is he a racist pig?' Not my words, but those of an opposition councillor who attacked Bob Bailey in the council chamber for his tirade against Nigerian churches in Barking. (Cllr Bailey is now facing suspension as a councillor.) 'I have been called so many names,' he said, 'It's water off a duck's back.'
Cllr Bailey, who works in security, is part of Nick Griffin's campaign team. The two have been out, side by side, canvassing on the Becontree Estate.
They are, of course, hoping desperately that they can increase the 0.7 per cent of the popular vote gained in the last general election in 2005. While the BNP has become the most successful fascist party in Britain since the Thirties, we should remember that its percentage of the popular vote was minuscule.
But their presence as a rising political force in Barking certainly cannot be denied. Apart from anything, they stand a chance of taking the local council. Those elections are also being held on May 6. Remember, they won 12 out of the 13 seats they contested last time.
This time round they are fielding many more candidates. What if they won? The BNP controlling a £600million budget - it's a sobering thought.
'I think Barking would become a no-go area,' says Hodge. 'People wouldn't buy houses in the borough, and businesses wouldn't want to come and invest here.'
But she adds ominously: 'If we don't really expose them for what they are over the coming weeks and if we don't convince people that Labour can actually respond to people's frustrations and aspirations, we're in danger of the BNP winning.'
Griffin, according to the antifascist organisation Searchlight, is already fighting a losing battle, against the (even) more extreme elements in the BNP.
'The reality is that too many in his party are wedded to the BNP's old street-fighting roots,' said a Searchlight spokesman.
Evidence, if any were needed, is here in the the list of the BNP's prospective parliamentarians. Among them are Martin Wingfield (Workington), jailed after failing to pay a fine imposed for inciting racial hated back in the Eighties; Ian Mellor (North West Leicestershire), fined £400 for carrying an offensive weapon; and Julian Leppert (Chingford and Woodford Green), who drives a car with a number plate that looks like 'Nazi' (NA51).
Not forgetting Mark Collett, 29, who was the BNP's publicity director - until he was arrested a few days ago on suspicion of threatening to kill Griffin.
Griffin is the BNP's Dr Jekyll. But be assured that Mr Hyde is still there behind the scenes - both in his colleagues and in his own poisonous mind.
There is no 'new' BNP. There is only the old one, and it's as loathsome as ever, as those who have been on the receiving end of the party's tactics in Barking know only too well.
Daily Mail
