Introduction

Blue plaques have mostly been serving as props to what Michael Billig has termed “banal nationalism”. The January 2018 suggestion that Enoch Powell ought to get a blue plaque in Wolverhampton is unmistakably one such time. The commemorative/celebratory binary at the heart of the blue plaque polemic is a memorial straightjacket urging Britons to remember Powell as either a hero or villain and then take the risk of being dismissed either as a “racist” by some or a “liberal do-gooder” by others. The mythified ethnos that native Britons are summoned to identify with at the exclusion of New Commonwealth immigrants is made up of a portion of the working class and of many middle-class folks. The elements are mostly drawn from the works of political scientists or sociologists, such as Barr, C. R. Kaltwasser, P. Lucardie, B. Moffit, C. Mudde and P. Taggart, all of whom deal primarily with European, North or South American populisms.