ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the local history and set of conditions conducive to the rise of populist nationalism in the post-industrial town of Doncaster, England. Based on ethnography, interviews and archival research, it shows how UK Independence Party (Ukip) supporters, while being negatively affected by deindustrialization and globalization, strived to cope with and give meaning to the changes affecting their lives. Several social actors nostalgically invoked the industrial past to cope with existential insecurity. Some called upon the lost empire, while others turned to exclusionary Englishness as the solution to current hardship and disillusionment. 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 through Brexit. Examining the tensions emerging out of the intersection of various scale-making projects, the chapter 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 can explain the local appeal of populist nationalism.
