The nationalist element of Brexit populism had an entrenched ethnocentric character that was capable of breaking out in the in the form of racism. By 2016 overt racism had become taboo in public, but Brexitspeak had the linguistic means to dog whistle it. The new racism also enlarged the sense of ‘racism’ to cover refugee migrants entering the UK who were not dark-skinned. The sources of racism in the UK are diverse and subject to debate. In this chapter the focus is on the likely impact of racist demagoguery in generating and sustaining long-term racist attitudes. The example of Enoch Powell and his ‘rivers of blood’ speech is scrutinised in detail. But Powellism persisted well beyond the 1960s and 1970s: twenty years on it motivated the murder of Stephen Lawrence. In the age of the internet, Powell was a legitimising icon among neo-Nazi networks and appeared in website videos quoting and visualising his notorious speech. But veneration of Powell also remained apparent among right-wing Conservative politicians, activists and writers, and in their networking with ultra-right individuals.

Britain’s narrowing horizons carried all manner of implications for its constituent ‘four nations’ — none more crucial than a heightened awareness of their separate existence. The Kenyan Asians crisis of 1967-8 was a particularly resonant moment, at once highlighting the no-man’s land occupied by holders of UK passports issued overseas, while subtly magnifying the finer distinctions between England and Britain on the home front. The sudden urge to close the perceived ‘loophole’ of a liberal, capacious, expansive Britishness prompted a resignification of the category of Englishness in a newly circumscribed nation. It was an ingenious, if largely unselfconscious means of discounting the bona fides of those Asian families who ‘beat the ban’ in March 1968, while avoiding the overt stigma of ‘racialism’. In this way, the looser, empire-derived affinities of Britishness could be downgraded without relinquishing the badge of ethnicity available only to the ‘true-born’. But repatriating the frontiers of nationhood in this way raised implicit questions about what ultimately bound the constituent parts of the Union together — questions that would become increasingly explicit as the shared global projections of Greater Britain receded into the past.

In Chapter 4 we tell the story of how identity conflicts were first mobilised into electoral politics during the first wave of migration to Britain after the Second World War. This period of British history is rarely mentioned in conjunction with our decision to leave the EU in 2016, but it is critical for understanding more recent identity conflicts. The first wave of sustained mass migration was the first demonstration of the disruptive power of such conflicts, producing a wave of ethnocentric voter mobilisation which upended political competition and has continued to reverberate in debates over multiculturalism, discrimination and identity ever since. The new political conflicts generated more recently by another surge in immigration have interacted with, and sometimes reinforced, these older divisions. The paths followed by Labour and the Conservatives on such issues were first traced out in this period, with Labour establishing themselves as defenders of ethnic minorities, and the Conservative choosing to mobilise anti-immigrant sentiments in the white majority. We cannot understand the identity conflicts mobilised by Cameron, May and Farage without first understanding the era of Heath, Powell and Thatcher.