You described me as a distinguished comic novelist and then suggested that might be a contradiction in terms.” Ouch! Not so much a literary debate as a white-knuckle ride around the funny but fierce author’s sensibilities. You’ve got to keep your wits about you at Ways With Words. Introducing Lynne Truss and Howard Jacobson as comic novelists at the Dartington Literature Festival, I was immediately assailed by HJ: “I don’t consider myself to be a comic novelist.” “He is the author of seven novels,” I persevered, and heard a distinct hrrumph from the corner. We’re going to have to look at people being proud of being British and white without them necessarily being the enemy.” Shame no one listened to him.To order a copy of ‘The Likes Of Us’ (Granta £12) with free postage and packing, call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897. It listed the various immigrants over the centuries, including Germans, the Dutch, the Flemish, Irish, Afro-Caribbeans, West Africans, Chinese, Cypriots, Vietnamese, Somalians, Ethiopians, Bosnians and Croats, and boasted that “over 100 languages are spoken by our children” The old fella remarks: “They don’t mention us English.

You wouldn’t think we’d ever existed would ya?”A spokesman for a 1997 New Labour-commissioned survey on race is quoted in the book: “I feel ‘multicultural’ wrongly meant non-white culture. Anybody who tried to assert white culture was automatically a member of the BNP That was wrong. The great industrial cities of Manchester, Newcastle, Glasgow, Birmingham and Leeds were sooty certainly, but hardly “little towns”.Collins is at his best when he’s doing what south Londoners have been doing so well for centuries: taunting the middle classes. He tells a story of the woman at a party in the early 1990s who had just moved to Elephant and Castle (one of the advance party of gentrifiers from north of the river) who complained that she couldn’t find any aubergines in the local markets, and that this was a symptom of the “fear of diversity”, declaring finally that the root of the problem was that “the street is very white.” Of course, she meant white working class: “Her multiculturalism made her colourless; her class made her superior.”Not to worry, as the area has changed beyond recognition in the last 10 years, aubergines and halal meat are readily available and most of the white people around there under 65 are middle class.Collins recounts an old timer perusing a glossy brochure extolling the Elephant’s attractions to outsiders. She announced to my mum: ‘I’m telling you now, before you start, if any of your kids lay a finger on mine, I’ll be over here. Mark my words.’” (She had seven kids and they terrorised the street for years.)At the risk of sounding like a chippy northerner, I must point out that this is not really “a biography of the white working class”, but of a south London working-class community.

Collins, in keeping with Londoners of whatever class or ethnicity, assumes that London is the centre of everything and betrays something of a snobbish attitude towards the other end of the country, the actual home of the vast majority of the working class. In one of the rare mentions of its existence, writing about the early part of the last century, he writes of the “sooty little towns of the north”. Collins and his family were greeted by one of their new neighbours after moving in the 1960s to make way for the tower blocks: “A dishevelled nest of hair badly underpinned by kirby grips, and an apron worn like armour. and stair treads held down a strip of linoleum so used, so old, so polished, its pattern had faded into the blur of a bruise.”However, some warts are allowed into this reverie of communal loveliness. Collins’s family had lived in Southwark for generations until they were displaced to Welling and Eltham by the post-war apocalypses that turned it first into a windswept gyratory system overlooked by Stalinist barracks-blocks, then a clearing house for mass immigration and now a place of lattes and loft apartments for media types.The Likes of Us is also an exercise in nostalgia. But why not? Why should the working classes be denied the drug that the middle classes inhale deeply every time they watch Inspector Morse? Some of the best passages here are sharply evocative of what has been lost, what has been erased, both culturally and personally for the author, describing a world of working-class thrift and dignity: “Antimacassars kept the chair-backs clean, rent money was kept in the teapot… They survived on the distant memory of winning one World Cup and two world wars…

All they represent and hold dear was reportedly redundant in modern, multicultural Britain.”Perhaps you can understand now why it is was necessary to call the author a crypto-fascist on Radio Four.The Likes of Us is part personal memoir, part family history, part sociology, part class defence, part coshing of the do-gooding middle classes: a slightly confused mixture but one that on the whole works rather well. Historically, the right harboured desires to keep the white working class below stairs. “There they could use the wrong knives and drop their aitches to their hearts’ content, until trenches needed manning and flags waving in the name of patriotism.” Now, middle-class progressives “who had traditionally come out fighting these underdogs’ corner, or reporting their condition as missionaries or journalists, were keen to silence them, or bury them without an obituary.. They were racist, xenophobic, thick, illiterate, parochial. As Collin dryly notes: “Paradoxically, those notorious for making their feelings known about false convictions had shifted the focus to false acquittals. But for one case only.”He draws a parallel with the panics about “hooligans” in South London from the past, arguing persuasively that in the aftermath of the inquiry, reports on racism had segued into a more general demonisation of the white working class.