The New Minority: Anti-Immigration Politics Among White Working Class Communities in East London

Explorations of social and political marginalization have focused on populations characterized by their externality. This study seeks to complicate such ideas by considering the self-understandings and anti-immigration politics of white working class communities in Barking and Dagenham, East London. While white working class individuals---particularly those from post-industrial England---have been conventionally portrayed as some of the most "authentic" British citizens, there is now a pervasive sense of disorientation from the increasingly diverse, cosmopolitan mainstream. Moreover, severe inequalities have belied their historical and rhetorical centrality. Barking and Dagenham features some of the lowest average household incomes and highest unemployment among London's boroughs, and there is increasing evidence of citizens' political disaffection. Resource-based understandings of political behavior hypothesize a correlation between these attributes. However, Barking and Dagenham's white working class communities display a variety of political behavior that questions the veracity of this argument. This paper uses an ethnography to reconsider their political culture and better understand its connection to transformations in white working class conceptions of their identity and social position vis-a-vis immigrants.