The Ealing Southall by-election was a brilliant example of many things – the Tories’ derisory attempt to appropriate the ethnic vote and the Brown bounce are two that delight me as a Labour Party member. As a blogger, I also noted the way that the campaign spewed out on the internet via Facebook et al. And as a sociologist and Ealing Southall resident, the campaign got me thinking about the representations and realities of suburbia.

Ten years ago I was asked to contributed a chapter on “the Asian vote” for a book on the future of Blairism reviewed here. My conclusions were that Asians had always been overwhelmingly pro-Labour despite some very small ‘c’ conservative cultural values. Ealing Southall is a good example; solidly sticking with Labour in 83 and 87 when the white working class of the south had deserted the People’s Party. Geographically it’s not the inner city, though, demographically it’s young and in terms of housing tenure highly owner occupied. My chapter listed ‘Asian values’: small business, private property, education and said that the New Labour identification with professionals had tapped into a vein of Asian embourgeoisement.

For me the main thing that the last ten years shows is the unravelling of “Asian” as a descriptive label. My 1997 chapter predicted that this “monolithic bloc term” would break down as differences would appear in the eyes of the host communities. What was unforseeable then was how 9/11 and 7/7 would herald the emergence of a political version of Islam. Muslims are clearly, the media discourse dictates, “out there”, although not everywhere.

The Southall end of Ealing Southall is Punjabi Sikh in terms of settlement as witnessed in the Gurdwaras and turbans worn by – mostly older – men. Indeed there was a blog campaign to elect a “visible turbanned sikh MP”. Yet the constituency is hugely diverse. Southall’s streets of ethnic commerce are being joined by Somali shops and restaurants lately as this new group expands. At the eastern edge of the constituency the £2million houses of leafy Ealing Common are predominantly populated by long-established white middle class. In between there are all sorts of folk – including even some Muslims like me. It was imaginative of the Labour party to think of having a Muslim women’s coffee morning throughout the campaign at a party member’s house (mine actually), because press commentary about the constituency was about male Sikh infighting. A constructive debate went on with Tessa Jowell chairing and doing a fair amount of listening.

We have always associated suburbia with uniformity and drabness. It’s continually been a close bedfellow to middle England; a land of twitching net curtains and relative calm. The 1975 book “London in the Country: the Growth of Suburbia” by Guy R. Williams brings to mind the suburban ideal “rus in urbe”. The traditional name to give your suburban pile “Dunroamin” implies that a suburban retreat follows wild years of an unsettled existence. Yet wonder around any London borough and transient people will be there be they students or homeless. Southall’s sometimes chronically congested streets make it far from tranquil. On festivals like Vaisakhi or Diwali the main Broadway is a riot of colour. The flash cars (often booming out loud bhangra music) and the jewellery sloshing around mean that there is also has some serious wealth here.

Just after 7/7 the Daily Mail had a headline “Suicide Bombers Came from the Suburbs”. This highlights how suburbia has changed from the traditional “Terry and June” stereotypes. Outward drift means that suburban inhabitants are now the (all too often silent) majority so it’s time to take suburban areas seriously; politically and culturally and stop the sneering that metropolitan sophisticates have engaged in. For all their urban posturing punk and Britpop also hailed from the ’burbs.

It was good to see Labour members from all over flood into Ealing Southall to help deliver an excellent result. Hopefully the area’s place in their cultural cartography is established now so that this is no longer a forgotten corner of London. Even if not all suburbs are rioting they still display a greater degree of heterogeneity than one might assume. Go seek!