"You should go back to where you came from," my daughter was told recently as she played on the climbing frame in our village park.



We moved to a village in west Devon just under a year ago, having previously lived elsewhere in the county. Prior to that we had variously lived in Cambridgeshire and London. My daughter, who is of mixed race, had just experienced being called the P-word for the first time in her 11 years.



"Where do you want me to go – back to mid Devon?" she asked her antagoniser sweetly. "No, back to Spain," he replied.



In the light of this week's British Social Attitudes survey this exchange was remarkably demonstrative – saying as it did, something about the geography of where we now find ourselves living and the educational standard of the young person involved in the incident. For, according to the survey, a whopping 31% of people in the south-west admit to having some level of racial prejudice. The interesting thing being that where the survey identified a significant rise in that trend from 2000 in other parts of the UK, the south-west had gone up a mere 2 percentage points since then. In other words, racism to some degree has always been a feature of the south-west.



This doesn't surprise me. I was brought up in Somerset in the 1970s where I cannot remember there being a single non-white face in my village or large comprehensive school. I moved to Exeter as an adult where in the 1980s it was very unusual to see a black or Asian face. For a complete change of scene I lived for some years in Southall in west London, where, conversely, my white skin and dark blonde hair made me stand out as unusual. In the time I have lived away from the west country, Exeter, certainly, has become more diverse – but rural areas and small market towns are still often completely white.



I can't help but think that it is largely this monoculture that is driving these attitudes. Prejudice tends to spring from fear and ignorance – if you live next door to kind Mrs Ahmed or your kids are best friends with the Kawalskis – it's difficult to remain in either of those states. Earlier this year Muslim communities from Dewsbury visited waterlogged areas of Somerset having raised £16,000 for flood victims. This act helped change many people's perceptions and did a huge amount for race relations.



Muslim communities from Dewsbury delivering donations to flood-hit areas of Somerset. http://www.imws.org.uk Photograph: http://www.imws.org.uk

Interestingly, however, a quick trawl through Google reveals that this story was strangely untouched by the national press. And herein, in my view, lies the biggest part of the problem. The heavy bias in our most popular newspapers towards negative stories, whether about EU immigrants or Muslims – is bound to whip up more fear and prejudice where there is little personal experience to counter it. For example, if you don't know any Muslim people the appalling plight of 200 girls kidnapped by an extremist group in Nigeria may seem typical of people who follow that religion. However, my personal experience is that all the Muslims I know take their children's education – of either sex - extremely seriously. A quick unscientific straw poll in my head of the girls I know personally reveals a much higher proportion from Muslim backgrounds studying medicine and science subjects at university. Extremists are, by their very nature, unrepresentative of the vast majority – yet it is this side of Islam that receives the most coverage.

Back in 2011 the producer of Midsomer Murders, Brian True-May got into a lot of hot water for suggesting that the series wouldn’t work if it was racially diverse: ‘We just don’t have ethnic minorities involved. Because it wouldn’t be the English village with them. It just wouldn’t work,’ he said.

True-May was suspended following the row sparked by his comments (he was later reinstated before deciding to leave the series) – but as a statement of people's perception there was some truth to it. Research by the University of Leicester the same year backed this view up. They found opinions and values that equate the countryside exclusively and unthinkingly with white Englishness were far from uncommon amongst white rural residents.



"The countryside was, for a number of those we spoke to, the ‘last bastion’ of old-fashioned Englishness which needed to be preserved from the encroachment of the ‘evils’ of late modernity. Not only that, this idea of Englishness was essentially monocultural, in all its forms – white, heterosexual, middle-class, conformist, family-orientated, church-going, conservative and ‘safe’," said Jon Garland and Neil Chakraborti who conducted the research.



In the course of their research, the academics were subjected to a barrage of abuse and even death threats from people affronted by findings that all in the countryside may not be green or pleasant. "For many people, notions of Englishness are very much bound up with images of an unspoilt countryside... itself a very nostalgic form of national identity redolent of an England left behind many decades ago," said Garland and Chakraborti. "It also, of course, pre-dates the advent of post-war multiculturalism, and for some white rural residents this is the way that they want it to stay."

I once met a very gentle elderly man on a train on my regular commute to London from Devon. We chatted happily for most of the journey and then discovered that we had both lived near Bedford for a while. He confounded me by saying he had moved to the west country because of the high ethnicity in Bedford. "It's so nice to go to the village pub and everyone's white," he said, "or call a taxi and the driver is English." I was taken aback and crestfallen by his attitude – but unsurprised. He wasn't the first person I had met who had moved to the south-west for the same reasons.



Ukip's gains in the west country last weekend were also of little surprise. But slowly modern Britain – in all its very glorious diversity – will filter even here to Devon. And more exposure can only help attitudes. I always smile when I think of a Polish friend of mine who takes on prejudice here head on. Recently she went into a local delicatessen to buy a bottle of wine. "What food would go well with this bottle," she asked. She felt the shopkeeper was a little unfriendly and offhand. Later in the conversation she offered to bring him back a bottle of finest Wyborowa vodka from Poland. "And what do you eat with that," he asked a little sneeringly. "Smoked sausage, of course," she exclaimed. "We are barbarians."

