I have argued that new racism and Thatcherite homophobic discourses share a similar spatial structure: they both position the enemy figure, the black immigrant and the dangerous queer, outside the imaginary familial nation. The construction of these outsider figures is performative in the sense that the very frontiers of the ‘threatened’ familial nation are only defined in the context of ‘foreign invasions’. What, then, is the nature of the frontier which divides the ‘outsider’ figures and the familial nation? How can these figures be, at one and the same time, the ‘enemies within’ and the ‘foreign invaders’? How can the familial white Christian nation be simultaneously represented as a precarious space which urgently requires re-fortification and as an a-historical essence to which ‘we’ can always return? Derrida's writings on the ‘infrastructure’ of supplementarity offer many valuable insights for the analysis of the strategic deployment of political frontiers.

The deconstruction of Powellian essentialism

For Powell, English whiteness and foreign blackness are radically different: not only do they belong on opposite sides of the proper national frontier, they also have fundamentally different metaphysical characteristics. English whiteness takes the form of the utterly immutable core of the nation, while foreign blackness operates as a floating corrosive element which threatens to destroy the white English way of life. Powell also distinguished between the British nation and the British Empire in both spatial and metaphysical terms.