The shock Brexit result highlighted a worrying trend: underemployed white men and women who have seen their standard of living fall, their communities disintegrate and their sense of value, function and inclusion diminish, desperately want a mainstream political party to defend their interests. However, no such party exists. These men and women cannot connect their declining fortunes and growing frustrations to their true cause. Instead, immigrants are scapegoated and groups like the English Defence League (EDL) emerge.
This book is the first to offer an accessible and uncompromising look at the EDL. It aims to alter thinking about working-class politics and the rise of right-wing nationalism in the de-industrialised and decaying towns and cities of England. The rise of the right among the working class, the authors claim, is inextricably connected to the withdrawal of the political left from traditional working-class communities, and the left’s refusal to advance the economic interests of those who have suffered most from neoliberal economic restructuring. Incisive, contentious and boundary-breaking, it uses the voices of men and women who now support far-right political groups to address the total failure of mainstream parliamentary politics and the rising tide of frustration, resentment and anger.
Table of Content
Introduction;
Dead Politics;
The Fickle Parent;
Redundant;
The Hated Centre;
The Scapegoat;
Mourning and Melancholia in the EDL;
Conclusion: Begin from the Beginning;
Postscript – Brexit.
About the author
Dr James Treadwell is Professor of Criminology at Staffordshire University and has also worked at the University of Birmingham, and University of Leicester. Previously he worked for the crime reduction charity NACRO, and as a Probation Officer in the West Midlands. He undertakes ethnographic and qualitative research for crime and criminal justice related projects, including studies of the English Defence League, and the August 2011 English Riots.
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