LONDON -- As predicted, the Labour Party won the June general election, giving Tony Blair a second term as prime minister. This is bad news for the media monster which, as we all know, has a voracious appetite but nonetheless a fastidious and restricted diet: sleaze, scandal, violence, betrayal. A large part of the energy of Labour goes into brushing away the sticky fingers of these media stories from its sober skirts. So if it won't provide the stories, who will?

Somehow, the things that matter are not treated as political stories, in the sense that parties and Parliament exchange hostile, angry words about them. In the old cotton towns of Lancashire in northwest England, Asian and white youth and police have been hurling more than hostile words.

The violence doesn't fit the familiar patterns of black youth fighting the police with local white people mere bystanders to the archetypal conflict of 20th century urban life. Here, the large Asian population, drawn from Pakistan and India in the 1950s to run the old cotton and wool mills for wages the white workers could not stomach, had always been thought of as a placid, law-abiding, humble people.

The dramatic change is not in numbers, although the proportion of Asians in the towns is large enough now to comprise a majority in many quarters of the old towns. It is political. It has been obvious for years that the children of Pakistani immigrants are not following the patterns laid down for them by parents who feared they and their culture would be destroyed by Englishness.

It had been thought that the religious and family customs of Asian, especially Muslim, households were somehow immune to the "modernism" with which young black people so identified. But this is 2001, and young Asians want to go shopping, dancing and drinking like any other teenager. They don't want to withdraw, like their grandparents; they want to run things their way.

This is something that their parents, police and local white people don't like. The latter had gotten used to immigrants, especially Asians, as humble if not obsequious, as knowing their place, as taking what was offered, which meant the worst housing and worst jobs. Such a change of demeanor and of expectation, that meant the young Asians became "foreign intruders" all over again. But these "foreign intruders" were born and bred in England, have rights and know they have rights.

Into this uneasy, classic mix of poor towns with poor housing and high unemployment, came the British National Party, now Britain's largest racist party. It won over one sixth of the votes in several Lancashire constituencies, doing better than the Conservatives in many industrial towns. The BNP took the lead in voicing white disquiet, which is largely expressed as a sense of being neglected, used, taken for granted. Putting up with things quietly, easy-going social democracy, doesn't work if you're poor.

But the fact that little of this grievance, from both Asian and white people, makes it onto the political agenda allows British public opinion to meander peacefully along, as though nothing is untoward in New Labour Britain.

Labour has tacked its ideological colors, both in this and the previous election, to the mast of "community." If this means anything, then we have to turn to the American "communitarian" Amitai Etzioni.

At its most radical and persuasive, his community idea sees the role of the state limited to infrastructure and enabling procedures; the leadership comes from the community, and "social entrepreneurs" are the agents of change. But this is where people outside Labour balk. For the most profound conflicts seem to happen inside the community -- witness Lancashire -- and unless each community is going to split itself into smaller and smaller fractions of same-type people, there is no single community leadership.

And if communities only work if they are made up of a small fraction of same-type people, that merely institutionalizes social division. Either way, it is nothing to do with democracy or the power to direct public money and energy to where it is most needed.

It is along this route, of using the state as the key agent of change, that other critics are coming from the left. Within hours of the election victory, several contenders were walking gingerly into the ring, announcing their challenge to Labour.

These include most of the trade unions, especially Unison, now Britain's biggest union and comprised largely of public-service workers. And apart from the usual suspects (usually ex-Cold War socialists for whom anything short of full-blooded opposition to capitalism is a betrayal) there is now also a growing camp of liberal socialists who have declared their die-hard hostility to Labour.

But this discontent, this opposition on the left is, at the moment, only loosely stuck together by being anti-Blair. There is no alternative strategy to combine the discontent and unease that Labour provokes. This is the unhappy, pro tem, triumph of liberal capitalism to which, as all in the developed world keep intoning, there is no alternative. Without a convincing alternative there is apathy. And this was the other big story, the one that dominated the election campaign and the election results: the refusal of almost half the population to vote.