ABSTRACT
On the face of it, social classes are of peripheral concern in the letters. Powellites overwhelmingly wrote as a racial, national, white English/British group, which tended to obfuscate class identifiers. This also facilitated the ostracizing of immigrants as an alien “they”, and prevented their labelling as members of an immigrant working class. In their writings, numerous Powellites were very keenly aware of where they resided and how buffered or unprotected they were from the immigrant presence. Two types of complementary discourses may be distinguished. First, middle and upper classes, also folks living in rural areas, acted as vicarious spokespersons for their fellow Britons living in multiracial areas. Second, there were those who lived in urban areas with a large number of immigrants, and who very frequently echoed Powell's words spoken at the beginning of his Walsall speech.
