A Radical’s Elegy for England: Darcus Howe and the White Tribe

Dog-races, football pools, Woolworth’s, the pictures, Gracie Fields, Wall’s ice cream, potato crisps, Celanese stockings, dart-boards, pin-tables, cigarettes, cups of tea, and Saturday evenings in the four ale bar.[1]

This rapid-fire enumeration of distinctive features of Englishness, one of George Orwell’s recurring party-tricks, seems today a tall order. What is it to be English? Those like Tory MP Robert Jenrick rely on inane tautologies: English identity is simply English ‘history and culture’, no elaboration needed.[2] Others, such as podcaster Konstantin Kisin, appeal to broader ‘British values’—freedom of expression, women’s rights, equitable treatment of minorities, and the like.[3] These abstract principles, largely indistinguishable from the liberal ideals of, say, France or Germany, prove in turn an easy target for those further right, for whom Englishness can only be grasped as a racial category.[4] Indeed, Kisin himself seems to have had a change of heart in this regard, rebuffing ex-Spectator editor Fraser Nelson’s insistence that Rishi Sunak is English on the grounds that the former PM is a ‘brown Hindu’.[5]

In their strident delineation of who is and is not English, these civic and ethnic nationalisms reveal an insecurity about the possibility of a positive account of Englishness in the manner of Orwell or his contemporaries.[6] Today’s talking heads offer an essentially apophatic definition of Englishness, approaching it through what it is not. Instead of naming features of a shared and self-evident cultural repository, they focus on those—migrants, criminals, Muslims—who allegedly fail to make the cut. This negative definition easily slides into a political programme: simply remove all offending groups and the mythic unity will return as if by magic. On the shortest-sighted model of this chronology, it is only the increased migration under recent governments, catalysed by the concurrent excesses of ‘woke’ theory, which has consigned English identity to oblivion.

Talk of a ‘crisis of Englishness’ is, however, far from new. Casting our eyes for the moment only as far back as the turn of the millennium, when the threats of Scottish and Welsh devolution loomed large, we find a glut of books and television series taking the nation’s vital signs. In the manner of an anatomical dissection, Albion’s dismembered parts—the countryside, grammar schools, aristocracy, or Anglican church—are hoisted aloft for a rapt audience. Roger Scruton, in the introduction to his England: An Elegy (2000), joins over a dozen authors pacing round England’s grave.[7] The tenor of such works varies, from the cosmopolitan excitement of Andrew Marr’s The Day Britain Died (2000) to the all-encompassing despair of Peter Hitchens’s The Abolition of Britain (1999). Yet we owe the most interesting artefact of this media explosion to someone born not in Old England but in Trinidad, and who is not generally judged a fusty reactionary.

Darcus Howe arrived in England in 1961, soon pivoting from legal study to journalism and political activism, becoming a member of the British Black Panthers and long-standing editor of Race Today. He rose to prominence in 1970 as one of the ‘Mangrove Nine’, arrested, tried, and acquitted for protesting against police raids at The Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill, a legal proceeding which saw the Metropolitan Police formally admit to racist behaviour. Seven years later, as his biographers Paul Bunce and Robin Field recount, he was again arrested and tried without charge. Whilst pointedly celebrating African Liberation Day rather than the Silver Jubilee, he had performed a citizen’s arrest on a police officer who was shouting racist abuse and locked him up in a basement.[8]

Howe’s radicalism can then hardly be questioned, and one might be forgiven for expecting him to condemn Englishness entirely, as a malignant discourse of chauvinism and racial superiority. This was the tack taken by the so-called Parekh report, published in 2000 by the Runnymede Trust under the title ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain’.[9] But Howe has a habit of surprising, especially in his later career as a broadcaster. For his first documentary on the topic, 1988’s England, My England, Howe personally selected arch-conservative Peregrine Worsthorne to be his co-presenter.[10] Later, in the 2004 production Who You Callin’ a Nigger?, he focused on violent tensions between ethnic minority populations—a controversial topic, and one which might seem to provide grist to the mill of those opposed to migration and multiculturalism. His relationship to England and Englishness was fiercely dialectical. As he put it:

Although I spent part of my life in a struggle against England it was, I now know, also a personal and political struggle for England. My life has been largely spent in trying to help force an often reluctant and purblind England to be true to the benign ‘Motherland’ of my parents’ vision.[11]

It is this dual perspective which makes Howe’s three-part television series White Tribe (2000), freely available at the time of writing on Channel 4’s website, such compelling viewing.[12] In an inversion of the colonial travelogue or ethnography, Howe roams the highlands and lowlands of England, interrogating those he finds about their self-conception, their shared rituals and practices. White Tribe is grounded in the belief that English identity both exists—or at least existed in recent memory, for Howe can fondly recall it from the 1960s—and is, when expressed without prejudice, essentially good. Its interviewees might be arranged in a simple matrix: they are either possessed of a meaningful, historically and geographically informed sense of identity or not; and they are either racist or not. He sets off with optimism.

*

From the outset, the former criterion seems in distinctly short supply. The first episode opens with Howe quizzing bemused pedestrians about the content of white culture. He is met with a mixture of genuine befuddlement—‘I haven’t got a clue really’—and pessimistic historicization: ‘We set the standards for the rest of the world. Well, we used to’. But this is nothing to be gloated over, for Howe knows well the unstable mixture of melancholy and agitation which results from such loss of self. ‘Until I made this journey’, he reflects, ‘I thought white people were certain of themselves and knew who they were’. No, ‘these are people who are in a crisis. Something is finished, there’s nothing in its place’.

In Howe’s Brixton neighbourhood, this sense of an ending is illustrated by way of contrast. On one side of the street presides a church, that bastion of Englishness, whose flock now consists almost entirely of immigrants. On the other swells a nightclub peopled until the early hours by partying whites, whom Howe, dipping into the register of social conservatism, disdains as ‘hedonistic in behaviour, licentious’. This opening juxtaposition is reprised as Howe speaks to Simon, a young white man living in majority-Asian Southall. Simon’s minority status invites the question of identity more pressingly than elsewhere, but it is not answered convincingly; he unfavourably compares a white population which takes little pride in their Christian religion with the Sikh community seen celebrating a festival in the streets. Blame for this inertia is placed not on migrants, or even on mass migration as a phenomenon, but on the enervating effects of consumer capitalism: ‘you buy an Easter egg, it’s done’. The Sikhs, whom Howe agrees are ‘full of certainty, full of bounce and colour’, represent a source of both envy and potential inspiration, an instructive case for a population losing its global self-evidence.

In Newcastle, listless ennui makes way for pandemonic intensity. Howe encounters a group of football fans, again branded ‘licentious’, pasty faces swarming the camera as they gyrate their bodies and swig from cans of lager. There is, he admits, a ‘carnival spirit’ at play, but with a crucial proviso. ‘We had something to celebrate: freedom from slavery’, whilst this is merely a ‘celebration of nothingness’, grounded in no deeper cultural convictions than football and beer. Casting aspersions on the authentic Englishness of football may seem implausible, though here too Howe is echoing nineteenth-century critiques of the sport which condemned its violent disorder, sensationalistic media coverage, and increasing professionalization as betrayals of the properly English value of ‘fair play’, thought to be embodied by cricket. Most everything now deemed archetypally English has previously been presented as its mortal enemy.

But the important point is a socioeconomic one. This hedonistic furore may, Howe speculates, be all that remains of white working class culture ‘when you take the work away’, replacing the heavy industry of shipbuilding and coalmining with a night-time economy of bars and clubs.[13] A yet more dystopian confirmation of this thesis is found at a post-industrial estate in Grangetown, North Yorkshire. As the steelworks have closed down, a mass of unemployed remain, ensnared by crime or drugs and surveilled all the while by omnipresent cameras. No Englishness survives in this ghetto, no past or future, only a terminal, degrading present.

Who is to blame for this? For Howe, the culprits are clear: all those proponents of Thatcherite neoliberalism whose destructive war against trade unions and old industry saw the replacement of working class English culture with foreign capital. Quite by chance, at a Conservative party annual dinner in Skegness, he runs into a chief architect of this transformation, Norman Tebbit, delivering a speech on—what else?—the fate of Englishness under the threat of devolution. Laconic as ever, Howe points out the hypocrisy in mourning, just when it becomes politically expedient, a ‘little England which he himself wiped out’.

His verbal joust with Tebbit returns us to the question of who exactly can be classed as English. Tebbit’s line is unwavering, and he insists to Howe that ‘clearly you’re not English, but you are British’, despite recognizing that on this logic the Union’s disintegration would leave Howe and millions of others in no man’s land.[14] The former Conservative Party Chairman’s argument is not just echoed by Kisin nowadays, but also—more uncomfortably—by the Parekh report, in which Englishness is deemed an inappropriate identification for ethnic minorities in Britain, too laden with ‘systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations’. Better, the report suggests, to describe oneself as British, though even this is ‘not ideal’.[15] From today’s vantage point, such reasoning seems worryingly at risk of appropriation by ethnonationalists—‘see, they don’t want to integrate anyway’. Howe wisely takes a more strident strategy, not ceding language but claiming it for himself. He bluntly maintains that being English would be ‘no problem with me’, a perfectly coherent position provided one views identity in terms of cultural consciousness rather than unflexing bloodline.

Ironically, Howe’s desire to be English sets him apart from a substantial segment of his interviewees, whose primary wish seems to be to divest themselves from their own Englishness. Birmingham is becoming a ‘Yankee town’, its inhabitants enjoying basketball and barbecue food in vast shopping centres. Globalization has killed the old high street and installed in its place a never-ending strip mall. Through it roams ‘Thatcher’s working class’, linked by nothing but the relentless desire to exercise their consumer choice. In the bourgeois Cotswolds, ‘the England that I dreamt about in Trinidad’, Howe uncovers a virulent strain of Francophilia. Participants at a wine-tasting see their spiritual home over the Channel, promising a therapeutic journey into the past since, as one tippler avers, ‘France now seems to be as England was in 1955’. One can just as easily imagine Howe prowling Brick Lane, interrogating diners about whether they prefer curry to pie and mash. Viewed cynically, multiculturalism’s appeal is revealed as merely a chance for the bland British middle classes to liven themselves up a little, experimenting with new colours and flavours.

Echoes of more distant regions reverberate in Yorkshire’s Todmorden, where the cotton industry has been phased out in favour of health food shops replete with advertisements for holistic medicine, reflexology, shiatsu, aromatherapy, and the like. A castle in the area is now inhabited by some forty Buddhists living in a community of meditation. Evoking Slavoj Žižek’s concept of ‘Western Buddhism’—the optimal ideological fetish with which to claim inner peace whilst participating in a frenetic neoliberal capitalism—Howe elegantly observes that ‘the mills have gone to the far east and the far east has come to the castle’.[16] So inspiring for early 2000s authors like Zadie Smith, all this anarchic play of hybrid identities seems to make him distinctly uneasy.

Howe has some strange bedfellows in this suspicion. In White Tribe’s second episode, focused on those self-avowedly proud to be English, he speaks to adherents of an orthodox church modelled on the pre-1066 Anglo-Saxon population. For one gentleman, who advocates for a distinctly English parliament, the ‘coming of the Normans was something like the arrival of the Nazis and Pol Pot combined’. Yet he is not, he claims, opposed to diversity—on the contrary, this is a struggle ‘against the monoculture of globalism’, epitomized by ‘McDonald’s and Coca Cola’. This logic, whereby the false difference of consumerist globalization represents an annihilation of true ethnic difference, is—as Miri Davidson has shown—often found on the far right as a tactical appropriation of the language of left-wing decolonial theory.[17] Does Englishness deserve protection as an indigenous identity?

Howe is unconvinced. For one, asserting identity’s immutability would deny the possibility of meaningful acculturation to which his own life is a testament. Despite a period of fascination with his Afro-Caribbean heritage, during which he took on an African name, he is forced to admit that he is ‘more English than [he] could ever be African’. Not only is the idea that the saints of pre-Norman religion could provide a meaningful identity after the turn of the millennium far from credible, England is a ‘mongrel nation’ of irreversibly mixed genealogies. Should Tebbit, who recalls that his family came over from the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, be excluded from Englishness just as firmly as Howe? Belonging, on these grounds, is either a milestone which can never be reached or one which falls victim to precisely the arbitrary flexibility its proponents are trying to evade.

Defences of ‘cultural relativism’ or the ‘right to difference’ stop short of overt racism. Not everyone Howe speaks to is so subtle. Playing bingo with retired workers in Todmorden, he is initially enchanted. ‘Full of confidence and dignity’, this is ‘the last of the good England, the best of it’. Yet this sentimentality soon evaporates when one, speaking to a cameraman, proclaims the white English a ‘superior race’. Nor can Howe be accused of oversensitivity to minor slights or jibes. Indeed, he perhaps unexpectedly defends the existence of comedian Bernard Manning’s controversial Embassy Club, its humour a kind of racial war of all against all, himself stifling a chuckle at more than a few wisecracks. Learning that Manning’s son would soon take over, with a plan to turn the venue into an ‘alternative comedy club catering for the metropolitan elite’, Howe confesses that he doesn’t want to see ‘another bit of traditional English culture wiped out by political correctness’.

If racially provocative humour, provided it is doled out equally, can form a healthy part of English identity, the line must be drawn at genuine hatred, the ‘mark of the beast’. This Howe encounters in both Dover and on a deprived housing estate in Oldham. His excursion to the south coast could easily have been filmed in 2025: fuelled by the tabloid press, locals fear an onslaught of swarthy, moustachioed, Eastern European interlopers arriving in lorries by night with vast wads of notes, bringing disease, muggings, and disorder. The Folkestone Road, their alleged stomping ground, is deemed a ‘no-go area’, though Howe merrily parades up and down the street and—not for lack of trying—can find no migrants there. All he manages to stump up are three mild-mannered students sitting in a local park, teenage refugees from Kosovo who politely deny having harassed any local residents. The point is not that the number of asylum seekers crossing the channel—still a central preoccupation for Fleet Street and Whitehall alike—has not increased, nor that such migration is entirely without issue. Rather, these parallels serve as a reminder that the underside of arguments against the mass movement of the 2010s and 2020s, their nostalgic projection of a prelapsarian utopia free of worries about violence, instability, or social disintegration, would hardly have been recognized as such by the inhabitants of those past times.

This case is made particularly effectively by Geoffrey Pearson in his Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears.[18] Published in 1983, Pearson’s book sought to throw into question the dominant narrative that a ‘permissive revolution’ in the prior two decades had precipitated an unprecedented decline in public morals, an explosion of disorder and criminality ending centuries of peaceable stability. As Pearson shows, this supposed stability, a substantial part of the ‘British way of life’, would have been news to earlier commentators, who complained of a similar malaise not only ‘before the war’ (so often a nostalgia-infused hinterland) but back well into the eighteenth century and beyond. The 1950s Teddy Boy, Victorian garrotter, and unruly Georgian apprentice step into line as earlier incarnations of the violent, ‘invading’ migrant nowadays. Of course, the existence of prior moral panics does not automatically invalidate contemporary ones. But, given its apparent survival across more than 300 years of crisis, one suspects that the British (or English) ‘way of life’ is either considerably stronger than generally thought or in many instances just a rhetorical tool whose chief utility consists in providing an ahistoric, idealized foil to the undesirable present.[19]

In Oldham, an equal sense of crisis prevails. Residents are convinced they have been made ‘second class citizens’, viewing themselves as ‘ethnic minorities’ on an estate where ninety percent of inhabitants are white and only a tiny fraction Asian. Support for the National Front and ‘Third Position’ is widespread, and a ‘racial war’ eagerly awaited. This is hatred in its most insidious form, and Howe is utterly horrified. But as unpleasant as such exchanges are, they are nonetheless instructive. For one, they reveal the emptiness of the residents’ identifications. As White Tribe’s producer Narinder Minhas reflected:

I wanted to see whether it was possible for people in places like Oldham to be white and proud but not racist—after all, it is possible for me to be Asian and proud, and for Darcus to be black and proud. But sadly, there is a thin line between English nationalism and racism. People struggle to describe their Englishness in positive terms. They often resort to negatives. Uncertain of themselves, they attack others.[20]

A strong identity is a tolerant one, uncowed by the presence of the Other. Not here: overflowing aggression plasters over an Englishness almost wholly denuded of content. A similar tension characterizes the imperatives they seek to place on recent immigrants. Where one resident complains that their Asian neighbours rarely speak English, another insists that the estate must remain wholly ethnically English in makeup. Are migrants expected to integrate—‘into what?’, Howe might ask—or to segregate? Whilst seamless integration is often touted as the apotheosis of the migrant experience, this has not always been the case. Consider the verdict delivered by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson in 1964:

The ordinary white citizen generally accepts his place in society and makes no attempt to gate crash places where he would not only feel out of place but is clearly unwelcome. Not all immigrants have the ability to do this and for the most part they are hypersensitive over race and colour.[21]

Is this not inviting precisely the ghettoization deemed nowadays the worst possible result of migration? The twin anxieties of contamination, disrupting a prearranged social order, and isolation, refusing to enter into it, place the new arrival on the horns of a dilemma. Those migrants on that estate in Oldham, never seen but much discussed, were only those most violently impaled. Howe, for his part, strove always to escape this contradiction, advocating an ‘integration on our terms’. In this way, he asserted the right to self-definition against a presumptuous, paternalistic rhetoric which framed integration as the continuation of Britain’s imperial ‘civilizing mission’.[22]

After so many failures and false starts, one wonders whether Howe will award anyone with the stamp of true Englishness. But we are in luck; there is a winner after all and her name is Mary, a member of the long-standing landed gentry in Tynedale. Joining Mary on a fox hunt, Howe is enraptured—finally, people who know who they are! This enthusiasm would hardly be surprising for a conservative like Scruton,[23] but in the case of an urban radical like Howe it surely is. And yet much connects the unlikely pair. For one, their sense that any moral objection to animal suffering is outweighed by the value of tradition. Then there is the family model Mary espouses, according to which everyone should be ‘within striking distance’, rooted rather than scattered. But their closest affinity is a shared love for butter, which ‘Blair and his olive oil crew’, as Howe puts it, are trying to sacrifice at the altar of ‘health and safety’. Butter is one symbol for identity, resisting the corrosive torrent of post-industrial capitalism. The hunt is another. Howe praises the tender detail with which it is organized, the historical care and attention to ritual which has gone into every aspect. Yet this care exists alongside the spontaneity of birthright; it is somehow unthinking, automatic, and thus—unlike so much else he has seen—wholly authentic: English.

*

Soon enough, the olive oil brigade had its way. Fox hunting was outlawed in England and Wales in 2004. Howe’s view of the Blairite project remained dim in the extreme. Interviewed the same year, he offered a Janus-faced view of the prior four decades:

The England that I came to was the England of the patrician Tory. There was a consensus between the Tories and the working classes that was rooted, in my view, in the war, when the courage of the working classes had been immense. Margaret Thatcher wiped that away. She destroyed the working classes at their best and most powerful, and all we’re left with is office boys and girls. Mrs Thatcher worked in an office with a few people. So did Tony Blair. If you work in a factory, you work with thousands of people. If you are one of the landed gentry or you own a business, you are responsible for masses of people. Mrs Thatcher and Blair know nothing about anything. Blair never met anybody, never travelled anywhere before he started travelling as Prime Minister. And now these people are in charge.[24]

If 1941’s The Lion and the Unicorn was, as his wife Eileen Blair suggested, Orwell’s answer to the question of ‘how to be a socialist whilst Tory’, White Tribe plays a similar role for Howe.[25] But whilst one is an exhortation, a stoking of the fires, the other is an elegy oscillating between tragedy and farce, its lone positive note resounding like a trip to see the last of an endangered species behind bars at the zoo. Howe plays a man out of time, a belated modernist—a belated Englishman—finding everywhere he goes a nation which cannot live up to the promised ideal of his childhood in Trinidad.

In this he is far removed from today’s left-liberal discourses around race and identity. There is nothing ‘woke’ here, no call for allyship, recognition, or education. Howe endorses the idea that one could (and perhaps even should) be ‘proud to be white’, albeit lamenting that in practice this is often accompanied by execrable racism. Yet there is also little impression given that this prejudice might be the expression, product, or engine of any systemic privilege, buttressed and emboldened by structural advantages. Rather, a desperate, last-ditch racism appears all that a beleaguered white working class has left, having been gutted by the ‘office workers’ Thatcher and Blair—another incarnation of the ‘professional managerial class’ often blamed for an occlusion of class politics by identitarian struggles. On this framing, it is easy to see Howe’s potential allure for the populist right or the anti-woke, workerist left. This has been the fate of his lifelong friend and mentor CLR James, held up in the pages of UnHerd and Spiked as the ultimate Marxist opponent of identity politics, a staunch admirer of ‘Western civ’ for whom issues of race never outflanked those of class.[26]

It is nonetheless hard to imagine the political right of the 2020s taking much joy from a viewing of White Tribe. For one, there is a pointed historical rejoinder: any collapse of English identity must be traced back far further than the so-called ‘Boriswave’, as young rightists have taken to dubbing the surge in immigration after 2021.[27] It is surprising to recall that, just before the turn of the millennium, German political sociologist Christian Joppke was able to describe Britain as a would-be ‘zero-immigration country’.[28] So perhaps we have Blair to blame for opening the floodgates and drowning Englishness alive. But the buck does not stop there. If Thatcher succeeded in harnessing the anxieties of the petty bourgeoisie—her ‘nation of shopkeepers’—and turning them against spectres of crime, disorder, and unfairness, an approach aped to great effect by Reform UK’s Nigel Farage,[29] Howe sees the disaster beneath. This frenzy of negative identification gave cover to the erosion of the industrial working classes’ communal traditions and the elevation across society of empty ‘consumer choice’ to the primary vessel of identity and freedom. It is hard to see how the comparatively tiny population of migrants in Britain at that time can be blamed for this.

One could go yet further back. Take the reactionary modernists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from DH Lawrence and WB Yeats to Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, all labouring under a pervasive Nietzschean influence.[30] The contemporary far right often borrows from this discourse, rehashing its prognoses of decadence and degeneration, its mourning of a martial valour and nobility ostensibly replaced by mediocre equality. Yet this inevitably remains a partial ventriloquism. For earlier elitists, the great antagonist is not the migrant but the masses: the vast industrial proletariat unmoored by capitalism and progressively given political voice by democracy. It is not that these thinkers never applied a racial lens—quite the opposite—but the idea that shared English birth could meaningfully smooth over the immense hierarchical divisions within the population would have been ludicrous to them. Thus the proletariat was itself racialized, its emergence experienced as the mass immigration of an alien species whose proliferation and empowerment would, if unchecked, destroy the very possibility of culture. On this token, the masses are scarcely human, let alone ‘English’.

Clearly, Howe’s pessimistic threnody in White Tribe cannot be placed in this tradition. The man was, after all, a socialist, a ‘black Leveller’,[31] for whom the working classes had a heroic, liberatory role to play in history. Yet his account of Englishness as a cultural repository of traditions, rituals, and relics, something embodied and lived out rather than innately but accidentally possessed, and therefore wholly at risk of historicization, is distinctly modernist in character. With it comes an implicit riposte to nationalists of every stripe: merely claiming fealty to Englishness or ‘Western civilization’ is not enough—you need to prove it.

Such a challenge is now provocative in its untimeliness. Populism has come to dominate in politics over recent decades, playing off a supposedly organic whole tied inextricably together by nationhood or race against malicious forces: shadowy international ‘elites’ in league with racial or sexual minorities. Riotous, miscegenating ‘chavs’ à la Little Britain have been replaced in public discourse by a downtrodden but dignified and ethnically specific ‘white working class’. For this mass politics to succeed electorally, conditions for in-group belonging must be as inflexible as they are minimal; the focus should always be on the barbarians at the gates. Whether those in the citadel can figure out who they are is less certain—their interest lies in deferring this reckoning.

An early scene in White Tribe is illustrative. We find Howe interviewing clubbers in his Brixton neighbourhood. Under pressure, one reveller essays the idea that he is English simply because he and his parents were born in England. What is presented by Howe as an impotent cop-out has become in contemporary politics a rallying cry of generational birthright. Now, it may be an explanation for citizenship, but the incidental fact of where one was born hardly implies active belonging to culture or identity. Likewise, a piece of paper showing one’s genetic lineage is in itself just another arbitrary and worthless tautology, which tells us next to nothing about people’s ideals and behaviours. For those on the new right, however, it is the be-all and end-all of identitarian thinking, in turn forming the bedrock of their proposed immigration policies. They recurringly note, as in a recent article in the Pimlico Journal, that if following the discourse of ‘British values’ one is ‘logically forced to deny that the vast majority of British people born prior to the ’70s’ are British, and to ‘disclaim many contemporary people we intuitively know’ are British, giving the example of members of the far-right British National Party.[32] For one, such a framing drastically diverges from the historical tradition of conservative cultural pessimism, which liked nothing more than denying Britishness to those it found wanting—usually the white working class masses whose identity we are here expected to ‘intuitively’ recognize.[33] But there is another, more pressing, question: even if we leave these endogenous differences to one side, why exactly should one care about shared ethnic status?

At risk of yet again vindicating Godwin’s law, let us compare—as a paradigmatic case of racial identification—Nazi Germany. Genocidal and scientifically absurd though it was, Nazi race science and its predecessors at the very least strove to be convincing. It constructed a continuum of Germanic culture stretching back through millennia and taking in a dazzling variety of influences, from Teutonic tribes to ancient Greece, Nordic territories to the Roman Empire. It established revitalizing rituals in the present, whether so-called Thingspiele or sporting celebrations of the body and physical prowess, epitomized by Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 Olympia. And it anchored all this within a teleological model of history which predicted the Aryan race to emerge necessarily victorious over its despised antagonist, establishing a ‘thousand year Reich’. This is, perhaps, an extreme example, but it demonstrates well the central point: that race or nationality alone, bereft of any positive cultural or historical buttresses, is but an empty shell.

We have seen the clearest example of this already, in Jenrick’s mealy-mouthed evasions. It is likewise telling that, on the page of Reform UK’s manifesto titled ‘Reform is Needed to Defend and Promote British Culture, Identity and Values’, the lone bullet point which could be seen as identifying any affirmative feature of Britishness is that which proposes to make St George’s and St David’s Days public holidays. The rest of the recommendations are purely critical: ‘reject’ the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation; ‘oppose’ cashless society; ‘scrap’ DEI and the BBC licence fee; ‘stop’ de-banking, cancel culture, ‘left wing hate mobs’, and ‘political bias in public institutions’.[34] We are, it seems, expected to believe that British culture and identity will simply spring back into existence once these pernicious influences are removed, a reassuring deus ex machina.

Others veer into absurdity or kitsch when attempting to answer the question of what cultural identity they are promoting or defending. Carl Benjamin, a right-wing influencer better known as ‘Sargon of Akkad’, has gushed on social media: ‘This is what the world looked like before mass immigration […] People were just allowed to be themselves, and they did fun, wholesome things for their own sake’.[35] The stimulus? A music video from 2001 of American rock band Alien Ant Farm performing their song ‘Smooth Criminal’. Remarkable for its bizarrely twee sentimentality, the post is also a good illustration of the USA’s outsized influence on contemporary discourses of identity. If Englishness is evaporating, hope is placed in the broad tent of ‘whiteness’ or ‘white culture’, deemed more likely to survive the much-lamented ravages of wokeness and neoliberalism. Alongside endless posts of Gothic cathedrals and marble statues, impressive enough but decontextualized online into empty simulacra, we are presented as zeniths of ‘white culture’ professional figure skating[36] and celebrity conductor André Rieu.[37] Such posts are perhaps easy targets, though, as Sam Adler-Bell has outlined, this mood of vague yet aggressive nostalgia is constitutive of the entire Trumpian project.[38]

With notable exceptions—we hear increasing talk of ‘Anglofuturism’, a fusionist combination of technological progress with traditionalist aesthetics, drawing on historian Alan Macfarlane to paint the Englishman as the economic individualist par excellence[39]—this applies to the UK as well. It is not, however, a cause for relief. On the contrary, as Theodor Adorno observed in the wake of Nazism, ‘it is very often the case that convictions and ideologies take on their demonic, their genuinely destructive character, precisely when the objective situation has deprived them of substance’.[40] Where the reliable commonplaces of pre-1945 English culture have been uprooted, populists have turned to a fetishized concept of racial identity aimed at plastering over this sense of loss and quelling an incumbent nihilism. Yet we need be neither as distrusting of identity as, for example, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, for whom identification of any kind seems a sure path to fascism,[41] nor as utterly pessimistic about Englishness as Howe, nor again as militantly but superficially fixated on it as the new right. It need not—indeed, it should not—form the basis of our politics. That it is no longer wholly ‘automatic’ does not mean it cannot be cultivated; that this process is challenging is no excuse to scapegoat others for one’s own failure. After all, there is no right to identity, though it can be a privilege.

---

Jack Graveney

Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review, German Life and Letters, Epoché Magazine, The Oxonian Review, CJLPA, and the Cambridge Review of Books. Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA.

---

[1] Orwell quoted in Ben Clarke, ‘Orwell and Englishness’ (2006) The Review of English Studies 57(228) 103.

[2] ‘Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick says ‘woke culture’ threatens ‘English identity’’ (YouTube, 20 September 2024) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-xovmIxyg> accessed 15 March 2025.

[3] See the attached video at Richard Tice MP, ‘Superb by @KonstantinKisin on British values. If you don’t like them or accept them, please do enjoy living somewhere else, because you would not then be welcome here’ (X, 19 December 2024) <https://x.com/TiceRichard/status/1869695514268336189> accessed 15 March 2025.

[4] See eg Harrison Pitt, ‘Diversity, Not Multiculturalism, Is the Problem’ (The European Conservative, 6 April 2024) <https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/diversity-not-multiculturalism-is-the-problem/> accessed 15 March 2025.

[5] See ‘Konstantin Kisin Says Rishi Sunak Isn’t English’ (YouTube, 20 February 2025) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_P9IMe5vw> accessed 15 March 2025.

[6] Compare Jenrick’s reticence with TS Eliot’s summation of English culture, quoted in Clarke (n 1) 90: ‘It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list’. Can he any longer?

[7] Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (Pimlico 2000) viii-ix.

[8] Robin Bunce and Paul Field, ‘Jubilee 1977’ (2022) 44(11) LRB <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n11/robin-bunce-and-paul-field/jubilee-1977> accessed 15 March 2025.

[9] See The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. The Parekh Report (Profile Books 2000).

[10] Robin Bunce and Paul Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography (Bloomsbury 2015) 243-4.

[11] Quoted in ibid 2.

[12] At <https://www.channel4.com/programmes/white-tribe/on-demand/26974-001> accessed 15 March 2025.

[13] The work of photographer Martin Parr traces a similar trajectory—compare The Non-Conformists (Aperture 2013), black and white photographs from the 1970s of traditional and religious life in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, with The Last Resort (Dewi Lewis Publishers 2009), 1980s colour snaps of Merseyside’s working-class seaside resort New Brighton. What distinguishes Parr from Howe is that the former has since managed to find great joy and beauty in postmodern kitsch and consumerism, albeit without entirely dispelling the suspicion of an underlying mockery.

[14] Here, a yet stronger standard is applied than the infamous ‘Tebbit test’, which required of immigrants support for the English cricket team to qualify as sufficiently integrated.

[15] Quoted in Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Multiculturalism and the new face of Britain’ (2003) <https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/fortier-multiculturalism.pdf> accessed 15 March 2025.

[16] Slavoj Žižek, ‘From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism’ (Cabinet, Spring 2001) <https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/zizek.php> accessed 15 March 2025.

[17] Miri Davidson, ‘Sea and Earth’ (NLR Sidecar, 4 April 2024) <https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sea-and-earth> accessed 15 March 2025. Compare in a similar vein ‘Great Replacement’ theorist Renaud Camus’s denial that he is a ‘nationalist’, drawing on Orwell’s distinction in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945) between patriotism—a wholly defensive posture, believed deeply but without any wish to ‘convert’ others—and the aggressive imperialism of nationalism, as embodied by Nazism. See Renaud Camus, ‘May be the word “nationalist” does not have exactly the same meaning in French and English. In French a Nationalist is somebody who thinks that his nation is the most important thing in his life, who cherishes the army and everything national, who thinks his country is better than all the other countries, etc. That is not at all my case […]’ (X, 18 April 2025) <https://x.com/RenaudCamus/status/1913326907246231593> accessed 14 October 2025; Renaud Camus, ‘Voilà. Thank you, Sir.’ (X, 19 April 2025) <https://x.com/RenaudCamus/status/1913501782967230720> accessed 14 October 2025.

[18] Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears (Macmillan 1983).

[19] Nor is Howe innocent in this respect, given his nostalgic contrasting of the atomized capitalist structures at the turn of the millennium with supposedly tighter-knit local communities in the 1960s. See Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England (Oxford University Press 2023) for a possible corrective.

[20] Narinder Minhas, ‘Look on the white side’ Guardian (London, 10 January 2000) <https://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/jan/10/channel4.broadcasting> accessed 17 March 2025.

[21] Quoted in Camilla Schofield, ‘In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men’s Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England’ (2023) 34(3) Twentieth Century British History 534. Compare Mary Ellen Chase’s 1937 suggestion that the ‘Englishman has no objection to foreigners’ provided that ‘they remain what they are and do not attempt any approximation to him’—quoted in Clarke (n 1) 95.

[22] Bunce and Field (n 10) viii-ix.

[23] See Roger Scruton, On Hunting: A Short Polemic (Yellow Jersey 1998).

[24] ‘Let’s Be Reasonable’ (2004) 27(9) Third Way 18-9 or at <https://highprofiles.info/interview/darcus-howe/> accessed 17 March 2025.

[25] Quoted in Gustav Jönsson, ‘George Orwell Was a Temperamental Conservative and Ideological Radical’ (Jacobin, 22 October 2023) <https://jacobin.com/2023/10/george-orwell-class-britain-spanish-civil-war-nineteen-eighty-four> accessed 17 March 2025. For an equally evocative duality, consider Howe’s modification of CLR James’s statement that ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian’ to ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian and he lives in Britain’—quoted in Bunce and Field (n 10) 1.

[26] Benjamin Schwarz, ‘Marxists against wokeness’ (Spiked, 28 September 2018) <https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/09/28/marxists-against-wokeness/> accessed 20 March 2025; Ralph Leonard, ‘CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics’ (UnHerd, 11 October 2018) <https://unherd.com/2018/10/clr-james-rejected-posturing-identity-politics/> accessed 20 March 2025.

[27] See Rachel Cunliffe, ‘The “Boriswave” problem’ (New Statesman, 11 February 2025) <https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/02/the-boriswave-problem> accessed 20 March 2025.

[28] Christian Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Britain (Oxford University Press 1999) 100.

[29] See Dan Evans, ‘Reform won’t save Britain’ (UnHerd, 19 March 2025) <https://unherd.com/2025/03/reform-wont-save-britain/> accessed 20 March 2025.

[30] See John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (Faber & Faber 1992).

[31] Bunce and Field (n 10) 5.

[32] Rhodes Napier, ‘No to Fraser Nelson, no to Steve Laws: towards a “third way” on British national identity’ (Pimlico Journal, 25 March 2025) <https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/no-to-fraser-nelson-no-to-steve-laws> accessed 5 April 2025

[33] See Carey (n 30) and especially Pearson (n 18) for countless examples of this.

[34] Reform UK, ‘Our Contract with You’ (Reform UK Policy Documents, 2024) 22 <https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachments/original/1718625371/Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf?1718625371> accessed 25 March 2025.

[35] Carl Benjamin, ‘This is what the world looked like before mass immigration, widespread racial and gendered guilt activism, and before bankers had totally screwed the economy for their own gain. People were just allowed to be themselves, and they did fun, wholesome things for their own sake’ (X, 20 January 2024) <https://x.com/Sargon_of_Akkad/status/1748688352365228139> accessed 25 March 2025. The video is now missing as the initial poster’s account has been suspended, but the replies make the content clear enough, and a screenshot of the original can be provided on request.

[36] ‘E’ [Elijah Schaffer], ‘White culture is beautiful. This is what they hate. Save it at all costs’ (X, 24 December 2024) <https://x.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1871377665166569937> accessed 25 March 2025.

[37] ‘The General’, ‘White Culture’ (X, 3 November 2024) <https://x.com/1776General_/status/1853100332768714923> accessed 25 March 2025. Now, there is nothing wrong with André Rieu—my grandparents watched his New Year’s concerts on TV with enthusiasm—but there is no small irony in presenting such a middlebrow, commercial endeavour as a cultural climax. As one X user commented, himself seemingly a proud neo-reactionary: ‘This is not white culture. This is Andre [sic] Rieu, he presents a bastardized kitsch variant of classical music to tasteless boomers. Idiot’.

[38] Sam Adler-Bell, ‘The Music Man: Trump’s kitschy nostalgia is the point’ (Intelligencer, 20 October 2024) <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-town-hall-dj-set-was-perfect-for-his-nostalgic-fans.html> accessed 25 March 2025.

[39] See Aris Roussinos, ‘Could Anglofuturism liberate Britain?’ (UnHerd, 25 January 2025) <https://unherd.com/2025/01/could-anglofuturism-liberate-britain/> accessed 4 April 2025; Lucien Chardon, ‘Why post-liberalism failed’ (Pimlico Journal, 18 March 2025) <https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/why-post-liberalism-failed> accessed 4 April 2025; Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: Family, Property and Social Transition (Basil Blackwell 1979).

[40] Quoted in Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael C Williams, ‘From critique to reaction: The new right, critical theory and international relations’ (2022) 18(1) Journal of International Political Theory 37.

[41] See Franco Berardi, ‘The obsession with identity fascism’ <https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo3.htm> accessed 4 April 2025; Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso 2015).