Anders Lustgarten

That dynamic fuels his artistic endeavours and the response he seeks too.

"Most people who go to the theatre are sort of beyond salvation," he declares. "A lot of them are annoying middle-class wankers who don't want to work.

"If you're going to come and see one of my plays you have to be prepared to work, get stuck in, taken aback, rethink things - not come out thinking, 'oh that was nice, a good bit of entertainment.'"

The son of a Quaker Greenham veteran and a former Labour Party loyalist who got disillusioned around the time Kinnock was booting out Militant, Lustgarten emphasises that he hasn't got time for '70s agitprop either.

"Caricaturing your opponent, while reiterating the virtues of what you are doing - that is worse than useless because it is not going to get anybody to think about anything," he rails.

His latest play A Day At The Racists at the Finborough fringe theatre in London certainly provides food for thought, hinging as it does on a provocative hypothesis.

It revolves around mixed-race BNP candidate Hafsana Begum - or Gina White as she calls herself - whose aim is to convert former Labour Party stalwart Pete Case to the party's cause. Without giving too much of the story away, this involves council housing - or rather the lack of it.

Pete, a disillusioned ex-Dagenham car plant shop steward who lacks "transferable skills," has scraped by doing odd painting and decorating jobs since being laid off by Ford.

The 50-something Cockney, played convincingly by an energetic Julian Littman, has all the best lines, not least when, patronised by the local new Labour MP and goaded on by White, he tears into new Labour.

"We made the Labour Party, do you know what I mean? Froze our bollocks off on picket lines, went on strike and lived off fresh air and fuck all for six months at a time.

"And now we've turned to dust in their eyes, ain't we? We're the fucking problem now: chav scum, Asbo meat. A source of laughter. Prime time TV entertainment.

"I hate them for it. I bloody hate them for it."

Such bitter sentiments reflect the partly analytical, partly hypothetical intent of the play, Lustgarten explains.

"It hypothesises the rise of a sort of Asian Hirsi Ali in this country," he says, "in which the BNP manage to pick up a mixed- race candidate, a credible voice that seems to embody the parties 'modernised' principles and what many voters feel viscerally."

It's a telling parallel: Hirsi Ali, a Dutch citizen of Somali origin, won a seat in the Dutch parliament on the back of a highly emotive, personalised and slick "liberal" anti-Islam campaign.

She is an ally of Geert Wilders, whose populist anti-EU, anti-Islam but ostensibly non-racist message has just gone down so well with Dutch voters in The Hague and Almere.

But Lustgarten is not scared of the BNP. "What they want is impossible," he declares "They're never going to turn the clock back and kick all the 'non-whites' out."

What would be really scary, he suggests, is an avowedly tolerant right-wing nationalism which professes not to be racist but is merely "concerned" about the state of the nation.

He is clear that a populist critique of capitalism, allied to a sense of "OK, we might not like some of you but if you play by our rules, if you're English first and foremost, assimilate our superior culture and reject this mongrelising multiculturalism, you can stick around," is a real threat.

In the play Pete Case eventually agrees to become White's campaign manager and swiftly proceeds to win local support for the BNP by straightforward campaigning on estates where, he says, "no party's been in 20 years - too scary, lifts are fucked, no-one fancies the smell of piss in their clothes afterwards."

He gets his hands dirty on community clean-up days, picking up litter while patiently listening to concerns on doorsteps.

This, Lustgarten argues, is one example of how the BNP is filling "old" Labour's role.

"The rise of the BNP is almost entirely down to the abandonment of the working class by new Labour," he contends.

The government has presided over the wholesale privatisation of the public sphere, "while throwing more and more people into deprived communities which are already victims of decades of underinvestment."

But Lustgarten doesn't let the industrial wing of the labour movement off the hook either, insisting that unions must make up for lost time.

They should not just campaign against the BNP but throw their human and financial weight behind popular, effective, grass-roots campaigns in the wider community for council housing, better schools, new and improved sports and social facilities, he believes.

In an explosive moment, the play also references the dockers who marched for Enoch Powell's "If they're black, send 'em back" policy in the '60s and Lustgarten recalls how in the past, some unions were actively opposed to immigration, and opposed women entering the workforce.

"Traditionally many unions were primarily focused on getting a bigger slice of the pie for the white working man and not much else," he observes, caricaturing that narrow, economistic agenda as typical of the "keep outsiders away so we can have more on our patch" mentality.

It was in evidence last year during the unofficial strikes at Lindsey oil refinery, when the stale old "British jobs for British workers" slogan was temporarily taken up by some strikers.

He argues that this insular position continues to hamper trade unionism and hence socialism by smothering "a wider conception of radical social transformation."

Lustgarten doesn't claim to have any easy answers and it is evident he wants his play to engage rather than hector working people.

He intends to take A Day At the Racists "beyond London to Bolton and Burnley and Accrington, to working men's clubs up and down the land because in most of the major theatres I don't get feel a vibe in the room, a sense that I'm speaking to the people I need to be speaking too," he explains.

Lustgarten is excited at the prospect of doing one night in the Barking theatre which is in the same building as BNP leader Nick Griffin's HQ. "That's going to be fucking mental, quite dangerous - and a lot of fun," he says with an impish grin.

A Day At The Racists runs at the Finborough Theatre, London until March 27. Box office: (0844) 847-1652