It feels to me (born early 60s London) that it's not as widespread or as open - but i do feel that there's a kind of meanness to it now which wasn't so much to the fore then.
I remember seeing fly posters showing black people as muggers and nazi symbol /NFgraffiti often.The National Front / skinheads were marching in London - they were openly racist against black and brown people, they didn't give a fuck about hiding it. But they were generally considered by people who were in the middle - anyone from the upper working class up - to be what everyone called Yobboes (sp?). 'Normal' people generally tutted about it, it was associated with violence and people are generally anti-violence because it's destabilising. So it wasn't necessarily that everyone was all peace and love - they just didn't like yobboes or violence.
I was in two worlds in my twenties - the posh world would happily say 'Lovely guy, but of course, he's a y*d' and Jews weren't allowed in their gentlemen's clubs/stockbroker companies (whatever the word was). I'd been brought up in a literary environment, with the Holocaust discussed often - my idea of what Jewishness was was really informed by the books I read and the films I saw, mostly from New York and the East Coast. Jews were 'cultured' (lol - also racist, looking back) and I was absolutely appalled, but also genuinely astonished, that the English upper classes could be so openly anti-semitic. It's not that I thought everyone felt as I did - I just didn't expect them to not care about looking like bigoted cunts.
In the rapidly gentrifying East London areas that I'm familiar with, there's a really uneasy mixture - very wealthy people living cheek by jowl with, but completely blind to, two communities.
The first is an established but insular immigrant community with values that the wealthy people would be appalled by if they were expressed at one of their dinner parties.
The second is the white working/not-working class, which has partially absorbed some immigration in the sense that women have had kids with men from immigrant communities. Those men may or may not be present in their children's lives, and those children may or may not be acknowledged by the established immigrant community. Either way, the white working class is also fucked off, feels 'left behind', enough to be pretty racist, even if they have or know kids who are mixed race.
It all feels fucked, to be honest. I don't want to be in the gentrified bits, and I don't want to be in the ungentrified bits. I used to yearn for a posh deli where I live - now, to me, it's two sides of the same globalised capitalism coin.
But that's really different from what's going on outside London and other major cities, where some communities have been massively impacted by immigration in its various forms (ie legal, illegal, asylum-based). It's insanity to think that those communities - just as insular in their own way as the London immigrant ones in East London - are not going to notice and push back.
Particularly since there's a really awful paradox in both legal and illegal immigration.The men come first - because they're stronger and if the women came first they would be raped. But those men are men first and foremost, and men rape women. And maybe men who come from conservative cultures believe that women who have agency are fair game, and rape more - maybe not. But single men injected into a new culture are a problem.
Obviously, the rest of the time, white British men are not marching to stop their fellow white British men from raping. If they were, everything would be solved instantly eh.
Of course, white men who do the 'they're raping our women' thing are just angry that someone has stolen their property. They don't give a fuck about raped women. But ... there is a problem when single men are injected into a new culture.
And then, there are the swathes of white english towns that aren't really affected by this in any meaningful sense, but have a general feeling that 'things have gone wrong, these immigrants actively hate us.'
See my earlier post for how we could have insisted on a hierarchy of equality values to present this.