A cultural movement is happening within liberal opinion. It no longer greets immigrants with open arms. They are welcome – but with tighter conditions, aimed at encouraging, even mandating, integration. The old, cross-party order that strove to see immigration “not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance” – in the words of the late Roy Jenkins, a Labour home secretary in the mid-1960s – has been diluted. All these orotund concepts – assimilation, cultural diversity and mutual tolerance – are now in contest. The growing opposition, especially among Labour’s key working and lower middle class supporters, to the huge surge that saw some 1m people given legal residence in the UK in the past decade, according to endlessly contested government figures, is too great to ignore.

This political shift has now spilled into Britain’s most important cultural institution, the BBC. There have been straws in a rising wind: a BBC conference on impartiality organised for senior executives in October 2006 included an auto-criticism of its own liberal elitism; the following month Peter Horrocks, head of BBC News, gave a speech in Oxford calling for a more “radical impartiality” than a balancing of centre-left and centre-right views, an impartiality which would include more interviews with leaders of the British National Party; and last May an edition of Panorama on racial tensions in Blackburn showed that whites, too, could be victims of racial discrimination.

Now comes a larger revision: a “White” season of programmes, stretching across the next two weeks on BBC2, which includes Last Orders, a lyrical evocation of a dying working men’s club; Rivers of Blood, a sympathetic analysis of Enoch Powell’s speech of 40 years ago, prophesying violent ethnic conflict; All White in Barking, an account of the high-immigration east London suburb, whose central character, Dave, a BNP activist, is evenly portrayed; and The Poles are Coming, a vision of Peterborough as a city that has become semi-Polish, or “swamped” as some of its older citizens see it. Any one of these programmes would probably not have been aired three years ago. They would certainly not have been combined in a season the existence of which is at least a partial “sorry not to have paid you more attention” gesture.

Richard Klein, the initiator and commissioning editor for the series, says: “I feel the white working class has been ignored by the political classes. They feel the pressure of ‘political correctness’ – and the BBC has been one of these pressures. The way in which they see the world may come across as extremist but that’s not how they see it. This season was in part an attempt to revolt, to say, ‘Why don’t we discuss this?’ I think there has been a loss of nerve in the past to grapple with challenging issues”.

I ask Klein why the White season programmes focus so insistently on immigration and race, as if this were the only issue of concern to the white working class. “There’s a lot of stuff about immigration and race because that’s been the visible change,” says Klein. “In the past five to 10 years, under this government, there’s been a step change and the people who have suffered most have been the white working class. They often see the Labour party as the party which has betrayed them. You can see a grassroots withdrawal from the Labour party.” The BBC has often been accused of making implicit criticisms of government. This is the first time I have heard a senior executive do so from the point of view of a working class aggrieved by mass immigration.

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In All White in Barking, Dave ends up moving out to Canvey Island off the coast of Essex. “It’s all your own people there,” he says. Filmed staring out to sea and asked what would happen if mass immigration came to Canvey Island, he says, with a short laugh, that he would walk into the waves. But this reaction is not allowed to be the programme’s last words. That comes from a reunion of Auschwitz survivors in London. One of them, Monty, a Barking resident in his 80s, lives with a Ugandan woman, Betty, half his age, whom he takes with him to the reunion. Some of the attendees are shown as doubtful about this alliance; others as embarrassed. But one, when the issue of racism is introduced, says: “No, no, no. Especially those of us who have suffered so much. We shouldn’t even think of these things.”

In a modest terraced house in Barking I discuss the issues raised in that and the other films with the senior people in the local BNP. The party, whose council representation jumped from nothing to 12 in the last election, is now the official opposition. I meet Richard Barnbrook, leader of the BNP group on the council; Robert Bailey, its deputy leader; and Lawrence Rustem, a councillor. The house is marked by two flags, a Union Jack and an English St George’s Cross. Barnbrook, 47, had been an artist, completed his education in the US, was a lecturer and is now more or less a full-time political activist. He is engaged to Simone Clarke, the former prima ballerina of the English National Ballet, whose BNP membership was made public last year. (She rings while we are talking: his mobile’s ring tone is “Jerusalem”.) Bailey, also a graduate, was in the Royal Marines for 18 years; Rustem is half-Turkish. When Barnbrook mentions that, Bailey chips in that “one of our councillors – not in Barking – is Jewish”. So, I ask, you are not anti-Semitic? “Not at all,” says Bailey.

Like many of those interviewed on a number of White season shows, the three men are emphatic that they and their party are not racist; they believe themselves mislabelled by a liberal elite minority because of political correctness rather than objective judgement. They tell several stories of first- and second-generation immigrants who have pledged their support. Barnbrook says he had run through BNP policies for a Muslim of Pakistani descent at the polling booth, to be greeted with increasingly vocal agreement and a pledge to vote for him – an exchange, he says, recorded by a BBC reporter who did not then broadcast it. I mention that the film about Barking features one of their members, Dave Winter, whose grandson is half-Nigerian, and who is shown playing with and embracing him. He is also shown at a BNP street stall, being asked questions by the film’s director. Winter becomes embarrassed and asks that the questions about race end. In the background is Rustem. In our discussion, he says Winter was being set up, that the filmmaker had an agenda. “Independent filmmakers”, says Bailey, “aren’t really independent. They’re making films for the BBC and they know what the BBC wants. They want to call us racists and extremists”.

We talk of Rivers of Blood, in which extensive quotations from the Powell speech are used, and sympathetic comment is included. Frank Field, an MP and former Labour minister, says, “There was a conspiracy of silence [on immigration]. Neither side, left or right, wanted to discuss the issue.” Simon Heffer, a conservative columnist and Powell’s biographer , says had Powell lived to witness the July 2005 bombs in London, he “would have seen this as what he was warning about”.

I say to the BNP men that the BBC has taken at least part of their point: that is, that there has been a silence, that the BBC has contributed to it and that the corporation wished to give a voice to the concerns of the kind of people who voted BNP. They refuse to accept that a broadcaster for which they express deep contempt could do such a thing. “It won’t give a voice to the BNP, will it?” asks Barnbrook. “When is Nick Griffin [the BNP chairman] going on Question Time?” says Bailey. “He’s a much better speaker than Powell.”

Their testimony, like that of many of those who appear in the series, is a narrative of communities disrupted and divided, a chafing against the strictures of an intolerant liberalism, a decline of working-class culture.

The latter theme is dominant in the one fictional piece in the season, White Girl, a play by Abi Morgan that tells the story of Leah, an 11-year-old whose mother has taken her and her two younger half-siblings away from an abusive husband to live in a largely Muslim part of (an unidentified) Bradford. Leah is, after initial hostility, drawn to Islam. Her mother Debbie, also at first horrified, comes (partially) to accept it – ridding herself finally of her pursuing husband by saying, three times, “I divorce you” – which she has been told is the Islamic way of separation (though, as she has not been told, is reserved for men). Morgan tells me that she has seen Muslims demonstrating a “metronome of faith” – by which she means that “there was a regularity to their lives and customs of families who went to the mosque ... this is about a British underclass. It’s about poverty, and disintegration.”

The season’s outstanding programme – if one can compare very different (and impressive) styles of filmmaking round a roughly common theme – is the documentaryLast Orders, set again, this time explicitly, in Bradford. The filmmaker Henry Singer, an American who has lived in Britain for some years, discovers in the Wibsey Working Men’s Club a kind of parable – of a way of life where men work in industrial jobs, go home, have a bite to eat, then go out and drink with their friends in their clubs. It was one of the clichés of British life that the upper classes had their clubs, in London’s St James’s, and the working class theirs – and that both organised their social life, networks of connections and drinking within them. The former remain in vigorous health; the latter is now in decay.

Singer, who spent many months of constant visits, has produced a threnody to the culture he discovered and, to his surprise, grew to near love – of men (and women, now) for whom the club was friendship, entertainment, succour and debating parlour. One section of the film shows the funeral of a lifelong member, of whom his daughter says, “His life was the RAF, his family and the club.” It also shows long meetings called to discuss the deteriorating state of the finances. The personality who emerges most strongly is the club’s former assistant secretary, Graham Anderson, a man in his late 50s, thoughtful, melancholy, occasionally irascible – he erupts in rage at a fellow member who criticises politicians and says he never votes. “What right have you to speak if you don’t fookin’ vote!” he shouts. Towards the end of the film, Anderson is shown putting his head in his hands, and saying, “I wish I could be happy again” – a kind of statement, you are made to feel, for his community.

All the club’s members are white: and several are shown saying things of the order of “it’s like Bradford isn’t your own city any more”; “my view was, live and let live for everybody – but I’ve changed my mind”; “you can’t get into your own hospitals”. Anderson is shown dissociating himself from any racism: “The majority of people are incredibly fair and just,” he says, “it’s just that they’ve been forgotten for so long. There’s no fairness. A lot of people feel the same way. I’m not a racist but I do think that the ethnic communities seem to be favoured a lot more than the indigenous people like in Wibsey.”

I went to see Anderson in Wibsey one evening last week – as it turned out, just before he was removed from his position after a vote of no confidence from members concerned that nothing was being done about the club’s decline. He had been welcoming when I made the arrangement – and was so when I arrived, at about 5pm, to the low, pebble-dashed club, a 15-minute car journey from the city centre, tucked behind a pub called the Market Tavern, full of mainly young men. The warmth of his welcome was in part because, as he says immediately, “I have had a drink.”

Throughout our talk, he speaks with some difficulty. He is most coherent when I press him on the issue of immigration and race (he did not bring it up). “It’s nothing to do with that,” he says repeatedly. “I don’t care about any of that. People here don’t care,” he says, his arm sweeping across a largely empty bar. “It’s just ... the people in power ... don’t know us any more. They didn’t know what they were doing. What were ... they doing?” About what, I ask. “About anything ... to do ... with us,” he says. After a while, he shows me round: apart from the bar, where we sit, there is a lounge with a vast flat-screen TV; a snooker hall; and a large hall-cum-theatre, with a little stage at one end. “Sunday’s the best night here, and we have entertainment,” he says. “I would like to say a hundred people were here but mostly it’s ... about 30.”

Back in the bar, the one other drinker comes over and asks Anderson, “What do I call the lass at the bar.” “Sharna,” he says irritably. “Shanana?” says the man. “Sharna, Sharna!” says Anderson. “Is that a Pakistani name?” “Yes, she’s half-Pakistani,” says Anderson, turning away. The other man and Sharna, who is – in contrast to her surroundings – merry and friendly, then begin an animated conversation, which on the man’s side is mainly punctuated with “in my time” or “time was when” or “it’s all gone now”.

As this extraordinary collection of programmes shows – many white, lower class British also feel “it” – however they define a better past – is all gone and feel it their birthright to say so. And the BBC is giving them a voice: a tectonic shift.

The White season begins on BBC2 on Friday with ‘Last Orders’ and runs until March 14

John Lloyd is the FT’s TV columnist