Everything in black and white

This is a quite remarkable book. Badly written, devoid of anything even vaguely approaching a methodology, patronising, hideously mistaken on almost every page — and yet it does, inadvertently, answer the very question posed in its introduction: why are certain sections of the white working class so angry about immigration and Islam?

The author is a Taiwanese journalist from the metropolitan liberal left. Her MO is to venture — ‘bravely’, we are informed — into quite the most ghastly areas where working-class people live in their decrepit social housing, with their beer and their tracksuits. Her purpose is to find ‘racists’ and inquire as to why they are ‘racist’. And yet she is utterly incurious and dismissive about their explanations. She believes that they have anti-immigration views because they have been fed a diet of nasty racist propaganda by the mainstream media — the right-wing press (which means for Hsiao-Hung Pai, pretty much every daily newspaper except maybe the Guardian, on a good day).