Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rers20
Ethnic and Racial Studies
ISSN: 0141-9870 (Print) 1466-4356 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers20
Racism, Crisis, Brexit
Satnam Virdee & Brendan McGeever
To cite this article: Satnam Virdee & Brendan McGeever (2018) Racism, Crisis, Brexit, Ethnic and
Racial Studies, 41:10, 1802-1819, DOI: 10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa
UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group
Published online: 21 Aug 2017.
Submit your article to this journal
Article views: 18053
View Crossmark data
Citing articles: 2 View citing articles
Racism, Crisis, Brexit
Satnam Virdeea
and Brendan McGeeverb
a
Department of Sociology, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK; b
Department of Pyschosocial
Studies, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK
ABSTRACT
This article offers a conjunctural analysis of the financial and political crisis within
which Brexit occurred with a specific attentiveness to race and racism. Brexit and
its aftermath have been overdetermined by racism, including racist violence. We
suggest that the Leave campaign secured its victory by bringing together two
contradictory but inter-locking visions. The first comprises an imperial longing
to restore Britain’s place in the world as primus inter pares that occludes any
coming to terms with the corrosive legacies of colonial conquest and racist
subjugation. The second takes the form of an insular, Powellite narrative of
island retreat from a “globalizing” world, one that is no longer recognizably
“British”. Further, the article argues that an invisible driver of the Brexit vote
and its racist aftermath has been a politicization of Englishness. We conclude
by outlining some resources of hope that could potentially help to negotiate
the current emergency.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 3 December 2016; Accepted 24 July 2017
KEYWORDS Racism; crisis; Brexit; empire; Englishness; neoliberalism
People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them. (Baldwin 1984, 119)
Introduction
The neoliberal consensus in Europe, crafted over three decades by conservative
and social democratic political parties alike, has been dramatically
unsettled amid the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression
of the 1930s. The resultant imposition of austerity has aggravated existing
social inequalities between classes (Piketty 2014), producing a marked polarization
in politics. And it is the hard right, first and foremost, that has capitalized
on these developments. From Sweden to Switzerland, from Belgium to
© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is properly cited.
CONTACT Satnam Virdee satnam.virdee@glasgow.ac.uk
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES, 2018
VOL. 41, NO. 10, 1802–1819
https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544
Bulgaria, a tide of reactionary populism is sweeping across the European
mainland which demands nothing less than a restoration of a mythical
golden age of sovereign nation-states defined by cultural and racial homogeneity
(Inglehart and Norris 2016).1
Britain has not been inoculated from this economic and political turbulence,
the most striking manifestation of which has been Brexit. On 23 June
2016, Britain voted narrowly to secede from the transnational formation of
the EU by 52–48 per cent. This relatively unexpected victory for Brexit led
many to go in search of possible explanations. Some claimed it was driven
by those same social forces that had voted for the United Kingdom Independence
Party (UKIP) at the 2014 European Parliament elections, that is, “the
vote for Brexit was delivered by the ‘left behind’ … pensioners, low skilled
and less well educated blue-collar workers and citizens who have been
pushed to the margins” (Goodwin and Heath 2016, 13). While exit polls confirmed
that around two-thirds of those who voted in social classes D and E
chose to leave the EU (Ashcroft 2016), we should also note that the proportion
of Leave voters who were of the lowest two social classes was just 24 per cent
(Dorling 2016). Leave voters among the elite and middle classes were crucial
to the final outcome, with almost three in five votes coming from those in
social classes A, B and C1 (Dorling 2016). Additionally, age seems to have
been central to the Brexit vote. While 62 per cent of 25–34 year olds chose
to Remain, 60 per cent of those aged 65 and over voted to Leave. In sum, it
is too simplistic to suggest that Brexit constituted the revolt of the “left
behind”; rather, what needs to be understood is how the campaign to
Leave managed to successfully cohere a significant cross-class coalition of
middle-aged and older men and women.
What often gets elided in discussions of Brexit is the presence of what we
might term “internal others” against whom the nation has often defined itself,
including, most notably, racialized minorities and migrants (see, for example,
Habermas 2016). In this article, we focus on the place of race and racism in the
crisis that led to Brexit. We offer a conjunctural analysis informed by four questions.
First, what do the social and political circumstances resemble if viewed
with a greater attentiveness to questions of race and racism? Second, how did
they arise? Third, what social forces are sustaining them? And, fourth, what
forces are available that could help alter the currently dominant direction of
travel?
We begin by examining the discursive dimensions of the Leave campaign.
We show that the campaign’s narrative was underscored by two contradictory
but inter-locking visions. The first was a deep nostalgia for empire, but one
secured through an occlusion of the underside of the British imperial
project: the corrosive legacies of colonialism and racism, past and present.
The second was a more insular, Powellite narrative of retreating from a globalizing
world that is no longer recognizably “British”. What gave these visions
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1803
such traction, we contend, was that they carefully activated long-standing
racialized structures of feeling about immigration and national belonging.
Having mapped out the core narratives of the Leave campaign, we then
move on to an explanation for why the current crisis in Brexit Britain has
been so overdetermined by racism. We focus, in particular, on the politics
of Englishness.2
As an invisible driver of Brexit, we show how this Englishness
is characterized by two inter-related phenomena. The first is a striking confluence
between English national feeling and the longing for Empire. The ease
with which both nation and empire can sit together, we suggest, is one of
the salient but unspoken dimensions of Brexit and its racist aftermath. We
locate the second characteristic of contemporary manifestations of Englishness
in the structural decline that Britain has undergone during the neoliberal
era. Experiences of downward mobility, alongside the persistence of class injuries,
we contend, have produced a politics of nationalist resentment. Coming
in the wake of a momentous working class defeat, Englishness has been reasserted
through a racializing, insular nationalism, and it found its voice in the
course of Brexit. Finally, we draw this discussion of racism, crisis and Brexit
to a close by outlining some resources of hope that might help us to navigate
the current emergency.
Brexit, racism and the erasure of history
The case for Brexit was built around two distinct organizational formations.
The first, Vote Leave (henceforth VL) – the official referendum campaign in
favour of exiting the EU – was made up in the main of right-wing Conservative
leaders such as Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, Liam Fox and Daniel Hannan as
well as a sprinkling of Labour MPs including Gisela Stuart, Kate Hoey and Frank
Field. Also part of this campaign was the lone UKIP MP, Douglas Carswell. The
second, Leave.EU (henceforth L.EU) – the unofficial referendum campaign in
favour of exiting the EU – was primarily a UKIP-led project founded by
Aaron Banks and Richard Tice and fronted by then UKIP leader Nigel Farage.
A central feature of both campaigns was the emphasis they placed on reinstating
the sovereign will of the British people, exemplified in VL’s campaign
slogan “Let’s take back control”. What such a deceptively simple demand signalled
to the public was the desire of VL advocates to wrest back power from
an EU that in the words of Boris Johnson had become “ever more centralizing,
interfering and anti-democratic … . The independence of this country is being
seriously compromised. It is this fundamental democratic problem – this
erosion of democracy – that brings me into this fight” (Johnson cited in Conservative
Home, May 9, 2016).
Significantly, this message of regaining democratic control over the affairs
of the nation was entwined with a second argument that pointed to the economic
and political returns that would arise from detaching Britain from a
1804 S. VIRDEE AND B. MCGEEVER
trading bloc that was in economic decline. And juxtaposed to the image of EU
decline and over-reach was the portrait of an otherwise recovering capitalist
world economy that Britain would once again re-join as an independent
sovereign state. For VL advocates like Johnson, long-standing ties with kith
and kin from the Old Commonwealth of Canada, Australia and New
Zealand (as well as the US) along with the renewal of one-to-one trading
relationships with India and China – so unforgivably sacrificed by the decision
to join the EU in 1973 (Johnson 2016) – could now be re-established. Some,
like the historian Linda Colley, were quick to draw the inference that this
was nothing less than a vision crafted by, and for, “nostalgics in search of a
lost empire” (Colley cited in The Financial Times, April 22, 2016). And such nostalgia
surfaced in early 2017 following Secretary of State for International
Trade Liam Fox’s plans to boost trade links with African Commonwealth
countries, which Whitehall officials branded as “Empire 2.0” (cited in The
Times, March 6, 2017).
Yet clearly, Britain is not going to constitute a new Empire, no matter how
much the architects of Brexit may wish they were able to. Instead, the work
that empire is doing here is more discrete, and even subliminal. That is to
say: Brexit draws on deep reservoirs of imperial longing in the majority population.
When Prime Minister Theresa May (2016) gave her first speech following
the vote to Leave, she made reference to a “Global Britain” no less than
seventeen times. We contend that the allure of this “Global Britain” acquires
resonance among large swathes of the Eurosceptic population in part
because of its association with Empire 1.0. That is, to speak of a Global
Britain is to not only suggest how great Britain can be in the future, but
also to invoke warm collective memories of a now lost world where Britain
was the global hegemon of the capitalist world economy. It is to remind
that population of those glory days of economic, political and cultural superiority,
where everything from ships to spoons were marked with a Made in
Britain stamp.
Given this, one might have expected some sober deliberation and reckoning
with the underside of the actual British Empire project of yesteryear from
the VL campaigners, perhaps an acknowledgement of the unequal nature of
the colonial relationship based on subjugation and legitimized in the name of
scientific racism. Or even a coming to terms with the scars – both material and
psychic – left on those stigmatized populations over the course of four centuries,
and, of course, how this legacy of Empire continues to shape the uneven
development of global capitalism in the present, forcing parts of these populations
to migrate to western economies as a racialized reserve army of labour
(Virdee 2014). However, hardly a single word has been spoken to this effect.
Instead, the Brexit campaign and the subsequent Global Britain project are
made more alluring precisely through the erasure of the racist underside of
the actual Empire project of yesteryear. By effecting an artificial rupture
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1805
between Britain’s historical past and its possible future, the VL architects circumvent
having to confront the corrosive legacy of colonialism legitimized
in the name of racism (including how it shapes lives into the present). In
doing so, they also make the new project that much more palatable
through an evasion of any discussion of its potential underside. Not only
does this vision of an independent global Britain occlude racism, it also exhibits
an inability to come to terms with the realities of a twenty-first century
global capitalism whose epicentre has shifted decisively towards Asia
(Arrighi 2009). The VL campaign was in many ways, then, an exemplar
episode of postcolonial melancholy (Gilroy 2004) – a narrative crafted by,
and for, those who have still not come to terms with the loss of Empire and
the resulting decline in global prestige suffered by the British state (see also
Ashe 2016).3
Insular nationalism: the Powellitte L.EU campaign
If the VL campaign was led by individuals like Boris Johnson who fantasized
about re-establishing Britain as a global hegemon (i.e. Britain as the best in
the world), many of the key leaders of L.EU articulated a narrative of British
nationalism that was more insular and Powellite in tone (i.e. Britain for the
British). At the centre of this perspective were concerns around immigration.
According to Nigel Farage – the figurehead of L.EU – the EU had done great
harm to Britain by facilitating uncontrolled immigration: “Open-door
migration has suppressed wages in the unskilled labour market, meant that
living standards have failed and that life has become a lot tougher for so
many in our country” (Farage cited in The Express, June 21, 2016).
This construction of the migrant as economic threat to the domestic
working class was married to a second set of representations that understood
the migrant as security threat to the British population. This latter construction
comprised three distinct elements. First, the terrorist attacks in France and
Belgium and the onset of the migration to Europe of displaced Syrians and
others escaping war in 2015 and 2016 were purposely linked by Farage to
make the argument that the “EU’s open borders make us less safe” (Farage
cited in The Express, April 22, 2016). This sleight of hand then allowed him
to suggest that by getting “our borders back, our democracy back” through
exiting the EU we could also restrict the entry of such “undesirables” and
make Britain safe again. The second element integral to this construction of
migrant as security threat was that leaving the EU would effectively prevent
refugees from seeking sanctuary in Britain since it would no longer be party
to EU diktat. This argument was made most powerfully in the lead-in to the
June 23 vote L.EU’s “Breaking Point” poster, which pictured Middle Eastern
refugees queuing at Europe’s borders. The subheading read: “We must
break free of the EU and take back control.” This was a message of “island
1806 S. VIRDEE AND B. MCGEEVER
retreat” (Winter 2016): if Britons voted leave, they could successfully keep such
people from entering the country. And third, when recently arrived migrants
were alleged to have committed a series of sexual assaults in Germany – a
country which accepted almost a million refugees in 2015 – L.EU campaigners
contributed to a moral panic that understood refugees as ‘sexual predators’,
reinforcing the message that remaining in the EU would place British
women at risk.
Such representations and narratives acquired traction in everyday life
because they dovetailed so neatly with long-standing repertoires of negatively
evaluated representations accompanying the on-going racialization of
the figure of the Muslim (Meer 2012). That is, while many believed the
focus of the UKIP-inspired Brexiteer’s ire was mainly white Europeans from
the mainland undercutting British workers, it was clear to many within that
formation itself that breaking with the EU and “taking back control of our
borders” also represented an important opportunity to limit the numbers of
Muslims entering Britain, Muslims whose culture many of them believed
was incompatible with being British. Until the launch of the “Breaking
Point” poster, many in the commentariat failed to appreciate the full toxicity
of the L.EU campaign theme of controlling immigration, in part because they
appeared to take at face value the careful avoidance of the language of race
by L.EU advocates. As a result, it sometimes appeared that their suggestion to
control borders was simply a pragmatic response to growing economic and
political insecurity.
But the central mechanism through which the L.EU campaign succeeded in
side-stepping media accusations of racism was by detaching their antimigrant
narrative from the history of immigration to Britain, and particularly
its racialized reception. Throughout the course of the twentieth century,
from the arrival of Jewish migrants from the Tsarist Empire to the migration
of Caribbean and Asian migrants, there has always been a sustained crossclass
coalition of social forces opposed to their presence in Britain (Solomos
2003). Ideologically, this opposition was cohered and mobilized through narrations
of the nation that effectively made such groups incompatible with
membership of the state on the grounds that they were not Christian (in
the case of Jews) or not white (in the case of Asians and Caribbeans)
(Virdee 2014).
However, Leave campaigners understood – in the way that much of the
liberal media did not – that because this history of immigration to Britain
had been so thoroughly racialized over time, a reservoir of latent racism
could be activated through the production of appropriately coded language
about immigration. That is, one could obey the formal rules of post-racial
thinking (Lentin 2016) while at the same time signalling to your intended
public that the Brexit project was precisely about keeping the nation Christian
and white. That is why those regimes of representation that portrayed
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1807
migrants as the bearers of alien customs and practices were sufficient to place
them beyond the boundary of what it meant to be British. In these neoracisms,
culture takes the place of pseudo-biology, but secures the same
intended outcome of generating public support for the permanent exclusion
of migrants from membership of the imagined national community.
It is important to remember that these twin and inter-locking racializing
visions of Empire and insular nationalism derived their political power by
being situated within a broader narrative that postulated the Leave campaigners
as the last authentic representatives of the British people. EU
migration, said Farage, might benefit those sections of “the establishment”
with their “cheaper nannies and chauffeurs, but it isn’t in the best interests
of ordinary British workers” (Farage cited in The Express, April 22, 2016).
According to this vision, to support exit from the EU, to pull up the drawbridge
on migration, was actually to be a democrat, a democrat that wished to
restore the right of British people to determine their own destiny. This is
what was signified by the demand to “take our country back”.
Making sense of Brexit
If confirmation were needed that the case for Brexit was intimately bound up
with questions of race, it was to be found in the wave of racist hate unleashed
against migrants as well as the long-established black and brown British.
Komaromi (2016) found that more than 6,000 racist hate crimes were reported
to the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) in the four weeks after the referendum
result was declared. Incidents ranged from physical assault and property
damage to verbal abuse. One individual recalled being referred to as
“dirty paki scum” and taunted about how “pakis need to be rounded up
and shot”. A Sikh radiographer recounted how a patient asked “shouldn’t
you be on a plane back to Pakistan.? We voted you out.” In 51 per cent of
the incidents, perpetrators referred specifically to the referendum in their
abuse, with the most commonly involved phrases including “Go Home”
(seventy-four stories), “Leave” (eighty stories), “fuck off” (forty-five stories).
These were followed up by statements such as “we voted you out”, “we’re
out of the EU now, we can get rid of your lot”, “when are you going
home?”, “shouldn’t you be packing your bags?” And then, in August 2016,
six teenage boys were arrested in Harlow, Essex, for a brutal street attack
on an eastern European migrant after he was heard speaking Polish in the
street. The man subsequently died. What is striking about this wave of
racist violence was the way its perpetrators made little attempt to distinguish
between black and brown citizens and white European migrants – in their
eyes, they were all outsiders.
How could it come to pass that the first formal break from the thirty-year
neoliberal consensus in Britain was marbled through with such racism and
1808 S. VIRDEE AND B. MCGEEVER
violence? How was such a political terrain crafted that saw a majority of the
British population vote for Brexit visions that were stained through with a
desire to recover former glories associated with Empire, on the one hand,
and the promise to pull up the proverbial drawbridge in order to drastically
reduce migration on the other?
By disaggregating the vote for Brexit across the four nations, it quickly
becomes apparent how uneven support for it was. In particular, support
was markedly higher in Wales (52.5 per cent) and England (53.4 per cent)
than in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where Remain had majorities of 62
and 55.8 per cent, respectively (BBC 2016). A comprehensive analysis of the
place of racism in the Brexit vote across Britain would have to account for
the specificities of the relationship between race and nation in each of
these four contexts, and such an analysis lies beyond the scope of this
paper (though for a brief overview, see McGeever 2015). In the remainder
of this article, we want to place particular emphasis on England and the
politics of Englishness, and suggest that they form a crucial (though not
all-encompassing) insight into what happened on June 23, 2016 and its aftermath.
Eighty-seven per cent of Leave votes were cast in England, and as such
there is a compelling case to centre the English story in Brexit. Further, 79 per
cent of those who identify as “English not British” voted Leave as did 66 per
cent of those who identified as “more English than British” (Ashcroft 2016).
We contend that the Brexit vote in England cannot be understood without
accounting for the invisible driver of Englishness. This particular vision of
Englishness, we suggest, is characterized by two inter-related phenomena.
First, the ease with which it can sit within a deep-rooted nostalgia for the
British imperial project, and second, its articulation of a new politics of
resentment underscored by structural decline and class decomposition.
Both these arguments require explication.
Englishness: empire, decline and class decomposition
The relationship between race and nation in England is intimately bound up
with Empire. The colonization of a quarter of the world fostered a long lasting,
expansionist worldview among the ruling elites in Britain. This had its own
“blowback” at home through the consolidation of a colonial racism that
came to define British politics. Crucially, this racism was further secured
through working class incorporation into the imperial nation through the
representative structures of the British state, including the Labour Party.
Though a British-wide development, this colonial racism had a very specific
and deep-rooted impact on the formation of English nationalism and
English national identity (Hall 2000; Kumar 2003; MacPhee and Poddar
2007). Englishness was arguably submerged within the British imperial
project during the era of expansion in the eighteenth and nineteenth
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1809
centuries, so close was their historical association. As Perry Anderson once
provocatively put it, the imperial moment “saturated” England in a “matrix
it has retained to this day”. The “motifs of Empire” swept across English
society, Anderson argued, and “set” its “ideological horizons” (1964, 34–35).
The racializing capacities of Englishness were further developed in the
moment of decolonization: the arrival of migrants from India and the Caribbean
was marked by a re-imagining of the nation in which both England
and Britain were defined by a shared cross-class allegiance to whiteness
(Knowles 2008; Tyler 2012; Virdee 2014). It was in this vortex that English
nationalism derived the dimensions and referents that would define it in
the decades to come, and they have come into view in the blowback of
Brexit and its racializing consequences.
However, racism in post-Brexit England has its moorings not just in the
“aching loss” of Empire (Gilroy 2004, 95), but also the structural decline that
Britain has undergone since the late 1970s and the onset of neoliberalism.
The politics of Englishness today asserts itself against a backdrop of Britain’s
comparatively marginal position in the world economy. Moreover, the
defeat of the social movements in the 1980s and the accompanying delegitimizing
of socialist politics have left a working class profoundly disaggregated
by region, nation and ethnicity. In this sense, it is the transformations of the
1980s rather than the austerity programmes since 2008 that bear heaviest
on our present moment (Davies 2016).
Significantly, the period of working class defeat under the Conservatives
led by Thatcher was accompanied by the loss of alternative class frames of
resistance, including those that re-imagined the working class as multiethnic.
Although the organizations of the working class and the left more generally
have a long history of imbrication in the politics of racism in England,
these organizations have, at the same time, provided limited but nevertheless
important cultures of solidarity that have in turn played a key role in re-imagining
black and brown migrants (and their British-born descendants) as part
of the working class (Virdee 2014). Under Conservative rule, the politics of
class and the language of solidarity that had underpinned working class politics
were significantly weakened. The historic settlement of post-1945 Britain
that labour, to a limited degree, was to be protected from capital was reversed
(Hall 1987, 17). These defeats in turn profoundly diminished those countercurrents
of anti-racist class politics, including those aligned to the politics of
blackness (Shukra 1998).
In recent years, therefore, the prospect (and reality) of downward mobility
has produced class injuries and collective experiences that have been recast
through the politics of ressentiment (Ware 2008). Whereas thirty-five years
ago labour and anti-racist movements could meaningfully intervene, today
the realignment of British politics has (in England, at least) left the terrain
wide-open to the right, ranging from the neoliberal mainstream to its far-
1810 S. VIRDEE AND B. MCGEEVER
right outriders. In this context, decline, though necessarily a multi-ethnic
process, is experienced in a racialized frame and is increasingly responded
to by some sections of the working class through the politics of resentful
English nationalism (Fenton 2012). The realignment of politics to the right
has therefore created an environment in which racism can be more readily
articulated since it resonates with the cultural and political logic of our time.
This racializing nationalism has borne a particularly defensive character
since the 2008 crisis. It is defined not by imperial prowess or superiority,
but by a deep sense of loss of prestige; a retreat from the damaging impact
of a globalized world that is no longer recognizable, no longer “British”. The
decline of empire, then, has not led to the overcoming of the English imperial
complex, but its retraction into a defensive exclusionary imaginary: we are
under siege, it is time to pull up the drawbridge. As we have identified
above, this was one of the defining features in the discursive architecture of
the Leave campaign (L.EU). As Hall once put it, “Englishness has always
carried a racial signature” (Hall 2000, 109). We are hearing its familiar refrains
in these crisis-ridden post-Brexit times.
These new coordinates of Englishness are evident not just in the language
of the Leave campaign, but in large-scale survey data that show the extent to
which the main drivers of political Englishness are Euroscepticism and
concern about “immigration” (Wyn Jones et al. 2013, 22, 26; Jeffery et al.
2016). Indeed, it is the racialized question of “immigration” that is arguably
now defining the conversation around Englishness. In the 1980s and 1990s,
public concern about “immigration” remained relatively low, with no more
than 10 per cent of the population seeing it as a key issue during this
period. Since 2000, however, the hardening of attitudes has seen that figure
rise dramatically to 30–40 per cent (Duffy and Frere-Smith 2014, 8), such
that by 2006 “race and immigration” were recorded as the most important
issues facing the country (CRE 2006, 5). The toxicity of the EU Referendum
has deepened these trends, and brought us to what we would now define
as a state of emergency. Racism has become normalized in both elite political
discourse and practice and everyday life, dramatically diminishing the spaces
for Britain’s racialized minorities to breathe and live life free from hate.
This is the context in which an emboldened racist nationalist right has
emerged. The inter-locking features of racialized nationalism, anti-immigrant
sentiment and Euroscepticism – identifiable across the whole of Europe
(Condor and Fenton 2012, 386) – have particular resonance in England. The
unprecedented electoral breakthrough of UKIP in the 2015 General Election
shows that English nationalism now provides a dominant framing for this
racism. Although ostensibly a Unionist party, the UKIP project has been predicated
on a distinct politicization of Englishness (Hayton 2016). This is reflected
not only in the composition of the UKIP vote (more than 90 per cent of the
party’s 3.8 million votes in 2015 were cast in England), but in recent attitudinal
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1811
studies of those voters, who strongly identify as English rather than British
(Wyn Jones et al. 2012, 33; Hayton 2016, 406). In 2015, the party was able
to gain traction by tapping into a sedimented racist nationalist populism
that has been a feature of the English social formation for a number of
decades. Such racism gains traction not simply through the circulation of
racist ideas within mainstream political discourse, but because such ideas
have been part of the lived habitus of the English social formation for so
long. The racialized codes of belonging that have come to shape dominant
understandings of Englishness over the past century have always been met
with contestation by emergent currents of anti-racism (Virdee 2014; Ashe,
Virdee, and Brown 2016), but they continue to assert themselves in the
popular imaginary. Unlike the anti-racist left, politicians such as former UKIP
leader Nigel Farage have very little work to do: he can parachute into a constituency
and let racism do its work, since he is able to draw not just on the
“mainstream political consensus”, but on active and long-standing forms of
consciousness. Their trace and resonance is to be found in “popular inventories”
(Hall 1979, 20), and the racist Right know exactly where to look. And
in Brexit Britain, they keep returning for more.
Racism, crisis and the “political mainstream”
The racism of Brexit Britain, however, does not begin and end with UKIP
(whose vote has since declined following a hard-right turn by the Conservatives
in 2017). Despite elite hand-wringing and moral opprobrium levelled
at the racist violence that followed Brexit, it is difficult to make sense of
how the racially charged Leave campaigns could have succeeded without
also naming Labour and Conservative complicity in manufacturing the
social and political conditions for this momentous decision. While Brexit
added an accelerant on those conditions and allowed racism to flourish, it
did not create them. Instead, they were birthed under the tenure of New
Labour. The riots in the Northern English mill towns during the summer of
2001 combined with the rapidly changing geo-political situation in the aftermath
of 9/11 and the war in Iraq were formative moments in the consolidation
of a new racialized enemy within – “the Muslim” (Kundnani 2007). Significantly,
some of the dominant components of this modality of racism draw
with increasing regularity on feminist and gay discourses of liberation – suitably
de-fanged and shorn of their emancipatory potential. The effect has been
to increasingly legitimize claims that “Muslim culture” and the Muslim presence
more generally were in some sense incompatible with modern British
values of tolerance and diversity. As a result, femonationalist and homonationalist
ways of thinking aided the consolidation of a new consensus on race and
difference (see, for example, Puar 2007; Farris 2017) in which anti-Muslim
racism formed an intrinsic justification for the Labour and subsequently
1812 S. VIRDEE AND B. MCGEEVER
Conservative elite turn away from multiculturalism, and towards an assimilatory
nationalism (Back et al. 2002). Indeed, multiculturalism itself – denoting
state recognition of cultural and ethnic diversity within a nation-state – has
been alleged to perpetuate feelings of separation and racial division (David
Cameron cited in The Independent, February 4, 2011).
And then, when the British economy spiralled into depression as part of the
global economic collapse of 2008, New Labour remained resolutely committed
to the neoliberal settlement and steadfastly refused to budge from
stringent austerity. Alongside this, the Labour administration increasingly
entwined the continuing and very real pain suffered by its working class constituency
(ranging from wage freezes to the cutting back of welfare benefits)
to questions of immigration. Then Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown, for
example, proposed reducing the numbers of migrants amid the economic
crisis and resulting austerity with his deployment of what was hitherto a
slogan of the far-right by promising to train “British workers for British jobs”
(Brown cited in The Telegraph, June 6, 2007). Unconvinced of New Labour’s
fealty to limit immigration, the public turned instead to a Tory-Liberal coalition
government which accepted the premise of the Brown argument and promised
to reduce migration to the tens of thousands from its current levels of
300,000 per year.
After Brown’s demise in 2010, the then incoming Labour leader Ed Miliband
continued the downward spiral of racializing national politics with his
attempts to consolidate an anti-migrant working class vote through his
embrace of the tenets of Blue Labour. Blue Labour’s intellectual founders
such as Maurice Glasman spoke of the “paradoxes of Labour’s tradition”
arguing that it needed to “address the crisis of its political philosophy and
to recover its historic sense of purpose” by “rebuilding a strong and enduring
relationship with the people” (Glasman et al. 2011, 9–11). And this was to be
achieved through a re-emphasis on Labour’s socially conservative roots and
an approach that emphasized concern for “family, faith, and flag” (Sandbrook
cited in The New Statesmen, April 7, 2011). While this is certainly one side of the
story of the Labour movement, it neglects to mention its more emancipatory
underside that helped make Labour more attentive to concerns around race
(Virdee 2014) and gender (Moore 2011). Additionally, what Blue Labour supporters
fail to recognize is the increasingly multi-ethnic nature of the contemporary
English working class and how their rhetoric is likely to only appeal to
certain categories of workers, particularly those most concerned about questions
of race, immigration and Europe. Such an approach culminated in the
course of the 2015 general election campaign, where New Labour had as
one of its five election pledges a commitment to control immigration, and
had the confidence to sell mugs which invited us to vote for them because
of such a pledge (see Bush in The New Statesman, March 28, 2015).
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1813
However, by then Labour was already lagging in the slipstream of a racializing
narrative defined increasingly by the so-called establishment outriders
of UKIP whose leader Nigel Farage claimed, openly, that “the white working
class was in danger of becoming an underclass” because of immigration
(Farage cited in The Daily Mail, April 2, 2014).
Across the political spectrum from New Labour to Conservative, a powerful
narrative has become dominant which understands that the principal losers
from globalization, and particularly migration, were a social category referred
to as the “white working class” (May 2016). And this message has been amplified
over and over again by the right-wing press who deploy this category for
their own instrumental ends, particularly for eroding support for multiculturalism
(Runnymede Trust 2009). As a result, the white working class – a descriptive
and analytic category whose origins lay in social science research – has
over the course of this decade-long crisis been brought to life as a collective
social force in the Thompsonian sense (1991), such that some working class
men and women now understand and make sense of the real economic
pain they suffer through such a racialized frame of white working class victimhood
(Ware 2008).
This construction of the white working class has led to a number of deleterious
developments in the field of politics. First, it has helped cohere and
then shift those parts of the working class most enamoured of such an identification
into the camp of the anti-immigrant right, that is, they have come to
invest politically in understanding themselves (i.e. the white working class) as
the main victims of globalization. Second, by juxtaposing the category white
working class to immigrant, such a narrative not only privileged one stratum
of Britain’s working class over the other on the grounds of citizenship, it also
erased those parts of the working class who were black and brown Britons.
And through this sleight of hand, the lived experiences of those whose economic
austerity was overlain by race and gender discrimination were simply
elided (Emejulu and Bassel 2015) and closed off from public scrutiny and
debate. Third, and related, this had the effect of further dividing the multiethnic
working class on racial lines, and in doing so submerged those other
explanations for working class pain – the austerity imposed by Labour and
Conservative elites alike. This has helped neuter (but not rule out) the possibility
of a united working class challenge to neoliberal rule.
Conclusion
Williams (1989, 118) once remarked that “[t]o be truly radical is to make hope
possible, rather than despair convincing”. Where, then, might we locate the
resources of hope today? Alongside the mapping of the powerful structuring
force of racism within the English working class, Virdee (2014) has recently
drawn our attention to how, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth
1814 S. VIRDEE AND B. MCGEEVER
centuries, including most recently in the 1970s and 1980s, there were periods
of multi-ethnic class solidarity when parts of the English working class collectively
suppressed expressions of racism and, on occasion, actively rejected it
altogether. However, the current conjuncture is distinguished from that of
the 1970s and 1980s by the disappearance of the working class subject as a
collective social force accompanied by the hollowing out of a socialist
culture, growing class disidentification (Skeggs 1997), and the decline of the
labour and anti-racist movements more generally (Virdee 2015). Potential collective
agents against racism in Britain today are not easily identifiable, but a
tentative portrait of possibilities can nevertheless be sketched.
We write these words in the aftermath of the June 2017 General Election
result which saw the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn secure 40 per cent of
the vote – the highest Labour vote since Tony Blair won office in 1997, and
the biggest increase since the Attlee government of 1945. This represents a
further unsettling of the neoliberal consensus, but in contradistinction to
Brexit, it has been crafted on a left terrain. Labour’s manifesto – For the
Many, Not the Few (2017) – not only set out a vision of opposition to austerity,
it also struck a defiantly optimistic tone, of how to do politics differently. What
was striking about its discourse was the ways in which it tried to alter the
terms of debate by positing collectivism over individualism, of state regulation
and intervention in the market, and a more expansive vision of class that
encompassed black and brown British working people as well as those
defined as white. At the same time, we are cognizant of the limits of
Corbynism. Debates around immigration and antisemitism, for example, are
far from resolved. Moreover, the re-emergence of this more solidaristic form
of politics must combine more thoroughly with those social groups concerned
with overcoming the structuring force of racism if they are to avoid the
tendency to reduce inequalities arising from racism to those of class.
We believe there are grounds for optimism. Deposited within sections of
the black and brown populations of England are memories of collective resistance.
From the workplace strikes against discrimination led by the Indian
Workers Association to the black struggles against state and street racism
(Sivanandan 1982), it was autonomous collective action that helped turn
the tide against such sustained exclusion and violence. And just like then,
any push back against the exclusionary narrowing of Englishness today will
more than likely involve those who directly incur the injuries of racism. The
emergence of anti-racist movements including Black Lives Matter UK,
Rhodes Must Fall, certain Decolonial initiatives and the formation of refugee
support networks hint at the possibility that we may be entering a new
period of sustained collective action against racist discrimination, as well as
class inequalities.
In a more everyday sense, there is also hope to be found in the very fact of
contemporary multi-ethnic life in Britain. We are, to put it simply, much more
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1815
entangled in each other’s lives than was once the case. For example, nearly one
in ten people in England and Wales are involved in so-called mixed relationships,
and nearly half of these are with someone from the majority “white”
population (ONS 2011). The retreat of collectivism that has come to define
the neoliberal era has also been accompanied by the emergence of an everyday
multicultural reality, particularly among younger generations. Those who are
under thirty-five grew up in the slipstream of the anti-racist struggles of the
1970s and 1980s. They encountered a Britain transformed by the very real
gains of the anti-racist movement that preceded them (equality provisions at
work, multicultural education in schools, an established anti-racist civic culture
and so on). However much of these gains are being rolled back by the austerity
programme of recent years, their imprint is traceable in the ease with which
many young people handle the lived realities of multi-ethnic life in Britain,
especially urban England where the vast majority of Britain’s minority populations
live. In this sense, the anti-racist victories of the past have their returns
in the present, even though the political conjuncture is markedly different.
Gilroy has written confidently about how the “convivial metropolitan cultures
of the country’s young people” may serve as a “bulwark against the
machinations of racial politics” (2004, 131–132). Additionally, in his study of
South London, Back found that young whites vacated both whiteness and
Englishness on account of the inability of these identifiers to speak to the
multi-ethnicity that is forged at the everyday level (1996, 134–138). He also
found that young black youths were “preparing the social ground where a
reworked aesthetic of Englishness can exist free of racially exclusive terms
of reference” (1996, 159). These observations led Back to optimistically
predict a future in which racialized Englishness would no longer be tenable
and would be rendered “almost meaningless” by such emergent new multiculture
(1996, 250).
Some qualifications, however, need to be registered to these important
insights. First, the racialized politics of English nationalism appear to be
gaining ground in precisely those areas of England where there are relatively
low levels of migration and less evidence of the kind of multiculture that
Gilroy and Back describe (Dodds 2015). There are questions, then, about the
representativeness of London as a case study for anti-racist resources of
hope. Second, as a phenomenon that can be traced back to the 1990s, the
multicultural sensibility that both Back and Gilroy speak to has not yet been
tested, in a political sense. It is not clear then how durable the lived multiculture
produced in the aftermath of the anti-racism of the 1970s and 1980s will
prove to be, particularly in a juncture where the racist right are in the ascendency
and the infrastructure of anti-racist resistance appears hollowed out
and in long-term retreat.
There are resources of hope, but time is running out – we are at five
minutes to midnight.
1816 S. VIRDEE AND B. MCGEEVER
Notes
1. The cases of Greece, Spain, Portugal and arguably Scotland are in this sense
exceptions in an otherwise rightward drift of politics in Europe.
2. The ways in which the crisis has unfolded in Scotland and how this intersects
with questions of race and racism will be traced in a forthcoming article by
the authors.
3. Such wilful ignorance on the part of the VL campaign not only occluded racism,
but another dimension of the Empire story: namely, the wave of decolonial
revolt that systematically dismantled the British Empire piece by piece in the
name of democracy and freedom, such that between 1945 and 1965 the
number of people under British colonial rule fell from 700 million to 5 million
(Virdee 2014).
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the three referees as well as Matt Dawson, David Featherstone,
David Feldman, Bridget Fowler, Emma Jackson, Gareth Mulvey and Helge Petersen for
their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
We are grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Centre on
Dynamics of Ethnicity [award number ES/K002198/1] for supporting this research.
References
Anderson, P. 1964. “Origins of the Present Crisis.” New Left Review 1 (23): 26–53.
Arrighi, G. 2009. Adam Smith in Beijing. London: Verso.
Ashcroft, M. 2016. “How the United Kingdom Voted on Thursday … and Why.” http://
lordashcroftpolls.com/2016/06/how-the-united-kingdom-voted-and-why/.
Ashe, S. 2016. “UKIP, Brexit and Postcolonial Melancholy.” Discover Society, Issue 33, June.
http://discoversociety.org/2016/06/01/ukip-brexit-and-postcolonial-melancholy/.
Ashe, S., S. Virdee, and L. Brown. 2016. “Striking Back Against Racist Violence in the East
End of London, 1968–1970.” Race and Class 58 (1): 34–54.
Back, L. 1996. New Ethnicities and Urban Culture: Racisms and Multiculture in Young Lives.
London: UCL Press.
Back, L., M. Keith, A. Khan, K. Shukra, and J. Solomos. 2002. “New Labour’s White Heart:
Politics, Multiculturalism and the Return of Assimilation.” The Political Quarterly 73
(4): 445–454.
Baldwin, J. 1984. Notes of a Native Son. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
BBC. 2016. “EU Referendum Results.” Accessed December 2, 2016. http://www.bbc.co.
uk/news/politics/eu_referendum/results.
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1817
Bush, S. 2015. “Labour’s Anti-immigrant Mug: The Worst Part Is, It Isn’t a Gaffe.” New
Statesmen, March 28. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/03/labours-
anti-immigrant-mug-worst-part-it-isnt-gaffe.
Commission for Racial Equality. 2006. Race Relations 2006: A Research Study. London:
CRE.
Condor, S., and S. Fenton. 2012. “Thinking Across Domains: Class, Nation and Racism in
England and Britain.” Ethnicities 12 (4): 385–393.
Davies, W. 2016. Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit. The Brexit Crisis: A Verso Report.
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2352-the-brexit-crisis.
Dodds, L. 2015. “Mapped: Where Is UKIP’s Support Strongest? Where There Are No
Immigrants.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/ukip/11539388/Mapped
where-is-Ukips-support-strongest-Where-there-are-no-immigrants.html.
Dorling, D. 2016. “Brexit: The Decision of a Divided Country.” British Medical Journal 354.
Duffy, B., and T. Frere-Smith. 2014. Perception and Reality. Public Attitudes to
Immigration. London: IPSOS-MORI Social Research Institute.
Emejulu, A., and L. Bassel. 2015. “Minority Women, Austerity and Activism.” Race & Class
57 (2): 86–95.
Farris, S. 2017. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Fenton, S. 2012. “Resentment, Class and Social Sentiments about the Nation: The Ethnic
Majority in England.” Ethnicities 12 (4): 465–483.
Gilroy, P. 2004. After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? London: Routledge.
Glasman, M., J. Rutherford, M. Stears, and S. White, eds. 2011. “The Labour Tradition and
the Politics of Paradox.” Soundings.org.uk, 9–11.
Goodwin, M., and O. Heath. 2016. “The 2016 Referendum, Brexit and the Left
Behind: An Aggregate-level Analysis of the Result.” The Political Quarterly 87 (3):
323–332.
Habermas, J. 2016. “Core Europe to the Rescue: A Conversation with Jürgen Habermas
about Brexit and the EU Crisis.” Social Europe. https://www.socialeurope.eu/2016/07/
core-europe-to-the-rescue/.
Hall, S. 1979. “The Great Moving Right Show.” Marxism Today, January.
Hall, S. 1987. “Gramsci and Us.” Marxism Today, June.
Hall, S. 2000. “Interview.” In Rethinking British Decline, edited by R. English and M. Kenny,
106–116. London: Macmillan Press.
Hayton, R. 2016. “The UK Independence Party and the Politics of Englishness.” Political
Studies Review 14 (3): 400–410.
Inglehart, R., and P. Norris. 2016. Trump, Brexit and the Rise of Populism. Working Paper
Series 26. Boston, MA: Harvard Kennedy School.
Jeffery, C., A. Henderson, R. Scully, and R. Wyn Jones. 2016. “England’s Dissatisfactions
and the Conservative Dilemma.” Political Studies Review 14 (3): 335–348.
Johnson, B. 2016. “Boris Johnson’s Speech on the EU Referendum: Full Text.”
Conservative Home, May 9. http://www.conservativehome.com/parliament/2016/
05/boris-johnsons-speech-on-the-eu-referendum-full-text.html.
Knowles, C. 2008. “The Landscape of Post-imperial Whiteness in Rural Britain.” Ethnic
and Racial Studies 31 (1): 167–184.
Komaromi, P. 2016. Post-referendum Racism and Xenophobia: The Role of Social Media
Activism in Challenging the Normalisation of Xeno-racist Narratives. http://www.irr.
org.uk/news/post-referendum-racism-and-the-importance-of-social-activism/.
Kumar, K. 2003. The Making of English National Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
1818 S. VIRDEE AND B. MCGEEVER
Kundnani, A. 2007. The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain. London: Pluto
Press.
Lentin, A. 2016. “Racism in Public or Public Racism: Doing Anti-racism in ‘Post-racial’
Times.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 39 (1): 33–48.
MacPhee, G., and P. Poddar. 2007. Empire and After: Englishness in Postcolonial
Perspective. New York: Berghahn Books.
May, T. 2016. “Statement from the New Prime Minister Theresa May.” Prime Minister’s
Office, July 13. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/statement-from-the-
new-prime-minister-theresa-may.
McGeever, B. 2015. “Nationalism and Anti-racist Strategy after the 2015 General
Election.” New Left Project. http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_
comments/nationalism_and_antiracist_strategy_after_the_2015_general_election.
Meer, N. 2012. “Racialization and Religion: Race, Culture and Difference in the Study of
Antisemitism and Islamophobia.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 36 (3): 1–14.
Moore, S. 2011. New Trade Union Activism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Office for National Statistics. 2011. 2011 Census Analysis: What Does the 2011 Census Tell
Us about Inter-ethnic Relationships? http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationand
community/birthsdeathsandmarriages/marriagecohabitationandcivilpartnerships/
articles/whatdoesthe2011censustellusaboutinte rethnicrelationships/2014-07-03.
Piketty, T. 2014. Capital in the 21st Century. Boston, MA: Harvard University Press.
Puar, J. 2007. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Runnymede Trust. 2009. Who Cares about the White Working Class? London:
Runnymede Trust.
Shukra, K. 1998. The Changing Pattern of Black Politics in Britain. London: Pluto Press.
Sivanandan, A. 1982. A Different Hunger. London: Pluto Press.
Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable. London: Sage.
Solomos, J. 2003. Race and Racism in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Thompson, E. P. 1991. The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin.
Tyler, K. 2012. Whiteness, Class and the Legacies of Empire: On Home Ground. London:
Palgrave.
Virdee, S. 2014. Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Virdee, S. 2015. “Anti-racism, Working Class Formation and the Significance of the
Racialized Outsider.” New Left Project. http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/
site/article_comments/anti_racism_workingclass_formation_and_the_significance_
of_the_racialized.
Ware, V. 2008. “Towards a Sociology of Resentment: A Debate on Class and Whiteness.”
Sociological Research Online 13 (5). http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/9.html.
Williams, R. 1989. Resources of Hope. London: Verso.
Winter, A. 2016. “Island Retreat: ‘On Hate, Violence and the Murder of Jo Cox’.” Open
Democracy, June 20, 2016. https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/aaron-winter/
island-retreat-on-hate-violence-and-murder-of-jo-cox.
Wyn Jones, R., G. Lodge, A. Henderson, and D. Wincott. 2012. The Dog that Finally
Barked: England as an Emerging Political Community. London: Institute for Public
Policy Research.
Wyn Jones, R., G. Lodge, C. Jeffrey, G. Gottfried, R. Scully, A. Henderson, and D. Wincott.
2013. England and Its Two Unions: The Anatomy of a Nation and Its Discontents.
London: Institute for Public Policy Research.
ETHNIC AND RACIAL STUDIES 1819