Comparative European research has established that public opposition to immigration is widespread and politically important. However, most existing research has suffered from a serious methodological shortcoming: it employs aggregate measures of attitudes to immigrants, which do not distinguish between different migrant groups. This paper corrects this shortcoming by examining disaggregated British attitudes to migration from seven different regions. I find evidence for a consistent hierarchy of preferences between immigrant groups, with white and culturally more proximate immigrant groups less opposed than nonwhite and culturally more distinct immigrants. The differences in attitudes to the various migrant groups are very large, calling into question the reliability of analyses which employ aggregate measures of attitudes to immigration. Both total opposition to migration and discrimination between migrant groups decline during the period examined. This is the result of large generational differences in attitudes to immigrants, which are in turn the consequence of cohort differences in education levels, ethnic diversity and, in particular, value orientations. Younger Britons, who are on average less authoritarian and ethnocentric, oppose immigration less and regard different immigrant groups more equally.

The British National party (BNP) is the most successful extreme right party in Britain's electoral history and is the fastest growing political party in twenty‐first century Britain. This article presents the first ever individual‐level analysis of BNP supporters, utilising a survey data set uniquely compiled for this purpose. We find that support for the BNP is concentrated among older, less educated working‐class men living in the declining industrial towns of the North and Midlands regions. This pattern of support is quite distinct from that which underpinned the last electorally relevant extreme right party in Britain – the National Front (NF) – whose base was young working‐class men in Greater London and the West Midlands. Extreme right voters in contemporary Britain express exceptionally high levels of anxiety about immigration and disaffection with the mainstream political parties. Multi‐level analysis of BNP support shows that the party prospers in areas with low education levels and large Muslim minority populations of Pakistani or African origin. The BNP has succeeded in mobilising a clearly defined support base: middle‐aged working‐class white men anxious about immigration, threatened by local Muslim communities and hostile to the existing political establishment. We conclude by noting that all the factors underpinning the BNP's emergence – high immigration levels, rising perceptions of identity conflict and the declining strength of the cultural and institutional ties binding voters to the main parties – are likely to persist in the coming years. The BNP therefore looks likely to consolidate itself as a persistent feature of the British political landscape.

Existing research on public opinion related to race and immigration politics emphasizes the role of prejudice or bias against minority groups. We argue that the social norm against prejudice, and individual motivations to comply with it, are crucial elements omitted from prior analyses. In contemporary Western societies, most citizens receive strong signals that prejudice is not normatively acceptable. We demonstrate that many majority-group individuals have internalized a motivation to control prejudiced thoughts and actions and that this motivation influences their political behavior in predictable ways. We introduce measures capturing this motivation, develop hypotheses about its influence, and test these hypotheses in three separate experimental and nonexperimental survey studies conducted in Britain and Germany. Our findings support a dual-process model of political behavior suggesting that while many voters harbor negative stereotypes, they also-particularly when certain contextual signals are present-strive to act in accordance with the "better angels of their natures."