ABSTRACT
In line with global trends, England in recent years has seen the emergence of a number of far-right and right-wing populist parties and movements on and offline, representing both enduring and emergent discursive regimes of racism and nationalism. In this chapter we identify the key themes that have been viewed by the scholarship as animating the contemporary politics of white resentment in England in order to consider the mutual imbrications of racism and nationalism and their shifting modes of articulation since the turn of the century. We demonstrate how both racism and nationalism operate through processes of ‘othering’ that necessarily rest upon particular modes of exclusion and inferiorization. ‘Muslims’ and ‘migrants’ emerge as central ‘objects’ of this, presented as threats to the economic, political and cultural integrity of the nation. These groups are seen as abetted by a liberal political elite unwilling to protect the ‘indigenous’ population. This national ‘subject’ is articulated through reference to notions of white victimhood and marginalization, racialized conceptions of the working class, and the invocation of a nostalgic and defensive English nationalism. The recovery of a white English national identity can be seen as indicative of a renewed assertion of racialized discourses of belonging and indigeneity.
