INTRODUCTION

In the last two chapters I paid attention to how Enoch Powell and the social conservatives that followed him expunged organized labour from their narrations of the English genus. For Powell and others, labour’s cooperative spirit had proved corrupt when it had lodged itself in the national compact and compromised its self-help principle to the lure of welfare dependency. Margaret Thatcher identified Edmund Burke’s “little platoons” in property owners; and Tony Blair largely accorded to this vision, adding responsible residential associations. But by the end of New Labour’s tenure, the “white working class” had returned to elite discourse in the form of a maligned constituency deserving of some kind of social justice. This present chapter makes three passes through the philosophies, party politics and rhetorics which provided for their return. In doing so, the chapter seeks to make the case that the politics of the 2016 EU referendum were deeply entangled in the historical rise and fall – and rise again – of the “white working class” as a deserving constituency.

In the first part of the chapter I explore the emergence of Red Tory and Blue Labour, both philosophical responses to the perceived failures of New Labour. The Red Tory position sought to re affiliate labour’s cooperative spirit to conservative understandings of orderly independence. The Blue Labour position sought to re affiliate the conservative character with labour’s cooperative spirit. In doing so, however, both political philosophies made claims to an English genus that distinguished itself through its tradition of orderly independence. Accordingly, within the logic of both philosophies is an identification of non-white immigration as a destabilizing and divisive influence on the relationship between indigenous working and governing classes. The first part of the chapter therefore examines how the deserving working class returned, in political philosophy, but as a re-racialized constituency.

In the second part of the chapter I turn to Labour and Conservative genealogies of Euroscepticism. Consolidating in the 1960s, Labour’s Eurosceptical tradition mounted a defence of the working class, but in a wider political context where such a defence supported the integrity of the national compact and its informal colour bars.