While traditional nationalism transcends class, the vast majority of our EDL contacts are from the old Labour heartlands, the former industrial working-class regions once feared by the establishment as seedbeds of socialism. Although most have been disengaged from the political system for a very long time, a significant number acknowledged a familial connection to the Labour Party or the trade union movement. Their parents or grandparents tended to be Labour voters, and some of our key contacts talked in detail about the involvement of their fathers in once powerful trade unions that won significant concessions from industry bosses and advanced the lifestyles of working men and women substantially during the middle third of the 20th century. It would be wrong to assume that most of these men were once working-class Tories.

From where we sit as academics, on our comfortable ledge as surplus wage workers in the educational bureaucracy, reasonably well paid to do little more than reproduce a humanitarian worldview by levering its carefully selected cultural issues and approved post-political solutions to the top of the agenda, ‘the left’ might appear to be alive and in rude health. Enriched and enlivened by its new focus on cultural diversity rather than the dour and intractable neoliberal economy, to some it might even appear stronger than ever, about to regroup itself into a truly potent force and once more become the agent of history. However, for many of the old working class, especially those who occupy the old Labour heartlands, ‘the left’ today is totally irrelevant. It can no longer effect real change, and it can no longer be considered a substantive force in the world. It appears only as an optical illusion visible from all angles but their own, like an image on an old lenticular novelty card.

Before the left disappeared from the residual group’s perspective, it would seem that, generally speaking, at a fundamental level the English middle class and working class understood it as two very different things. A minority of the waged workers who identified with the old working class and belonged to its various communities for generations were socialists or communists, but the majority belonged to two main groups.