Lobby correspondent Nick Assinder visits Barking, where he meets the Lib Dem candidate battling the BNP.
Dominic Carman is a determined man. He is determined to stop the constituency of Barking making history.
In a general election campaign that has already made history and with a result that looks likely to do the same, the Liberal Democrat candidate fears Barking may follow suit by giving the BNP its first MP.
As he campaigned in the open-air market in Barking town centre he declared: "I would not be standing here if it was not for Nick Griffin and the BNP."
And his "default position" to those he canvasses is: "If you don't want to vote for me, please, please do not vote for the BNP."
Carman is the son of famous barrister George Carman QC, and is the unofficial biographer of the BNP and its leader.
So he believes he is well-placed to tell the voters of Barking what this extreme right-wing party is really all about.
Essentially, that is whipping up racial divisions that split communities and, ultimately, can lead to violence on the streets.
The central, and most potent weapon used by Griffin are the concerns - real and imaginary - over immigration and its effect on the constituency.
And, inevitably, Carman can't avoid a reference to what he calls Gordon Brown's "unfortunate mishap" over branding a voter a bigot.
"I don't want to condemn Gordon Brown for what happened the other day, but it was symptomatic of him not listening.
"She was not bigoted, she had a series of concerns. She was not the sort of racist person I have found here on occasions.
"An obvious beneficiary of what happened, the exchange and the subsequent debacle and Gordon Brown's apology and trying to save face, was Nick Griffin of the BNP here.
"He will capitalise on that as it being the political class who don't care, don't listen and condemn people for their legitimate concerns.
"Immigration is a legitimate concern but what Griffin does is to focus the concern into a racist argument."
Even as he spoke, there was one powerful example of those concerns.
As he attempted to persuade one old Labour voter not to go to the BNP, a black woman with two toddlers and a baby in a pram passed by.
"There you are - another three bedroom house," he was told.
There was no way of knowing if the woman was an immigrant or as British as the man complaining.
And there was no way of knowing whether her family situation had ensured she jumped the housing queue. Almost certainly not.
But that isn't the point.
The point is he clearly believed it and, for that moment, the unfortunate passer-by became the focus of the his pent-up frustration over the big issue in this constituency - housing.
It was also, by the way, impossible to tell whether the man was genuinely racist. And that again is the whole point.
"I listen to those people who speak most strongly against immigration and tell me how wonderful the BNP is and I will listen and listen, not criticise, not condemn, not tell them they are bigoted, not tell them they are wrong but try and understand what the causes are underneath," explains Carman.
"More often than not they are not inherently racist, people who just don't like foreigners. There are concerns like housing, a central issue here."
Trying to track down the BNP's candidate to put these arguments to him proves hugely difficult, however.
It has already been pointed out the party is running a near-invisible campaign, relying in occasional, big appearances by their leader.
Griffin may well have engaged in walkabouts in the city centre, but not one of the dozens of voters Carman spoke to said they had seen him during the campaign.
And enquiries to the party received the curt and extraordinary reply: "We do not deal with freelance journalists". Quite what scares them about freelance journalists is anybody's guess.
Labour's Margaret Hodge still believes she can hold onto the seat which she won in 2005 with a majority of close to 9,000, a 13 per cent drop in share of vote over 2001.
But there were just 27 votes between the second-place Tories and the BNP, with just under 5,000 each, with the Lib Dems third just 1,500 votes behind.
In elections like the one we are currently witnessing and with figures like those, that is how history is made - for good or ill.
