ABSTRACT
The article explores the local history and set of conditions central for the rise of “coal nationalism” in the post-industrial town of Doncaster. Based on ethnography, interviews and archival research, the essay shows how Doncastrians were not merely victimized by the effects of neoliberal restructuring programmes and deindustrialization, but strived to cope with and give meaning to the changes affecting their lives. In the space left by the dissolution of industrialism, new competing scale-making projects over meaning, memory and future played out. Several social actors nostalgically invoked the industrial past to cope with existential insecurity. Some called upon the lost empire or the EU, while others turned to exclusionary Englishness as the solution to current hardship and grievances. United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip), strategically locating their annual conference in 2015 in the white-majority working-class town, tapped into local anxieties and disillusionment, promising to secure future and security for British nationals in the extractive industries. Examining the tensions emerging out of the intersection of various scale-making projects, the essay suggests that the rising appeal of English nationalism cannot be reduced to neoliberal restructuring, nor just the legacies of industrialism, nor to the passage of transition or global migration. It is all of these, which in turn constitute the Ukip code.
