Death and Nationalism's Moral Imperative: The Battle for Britain, Industry and the ‘Left Behind’

This paper is concerned with how nationalism is convened and condensed in this moment by exploring the function of loss and death and their centrality to nationalism's articulation. The discussion attempts to make sense of how death possesses an ideological currency that wields an alluring quality and equips nationalism with a moral imperative. This focus is stimulated by the abundant rhetoric which draws on real, mythologised and metaphorical deaths, to imply the ‘killing off’ of our communities, our industrial heartlands, our values, our nation, etc., and which has been a perennial feature of English nationalisms but which has intensified since the Brexit campaigns, their enduring legacy and the general move to the right. The racialised dimensions of these arguments are recognised as vital to reveal the close imbrication of the narration of race, class and nation and the various claims made through their articulation with death, including how this underpins who is worth saving and not. Indeed, the key aim of the paper is to demonstrate nationalism's capacity to simultaneously produce the moral imperative for sacrifice for authentic (often white working class) subjects and the brutal abandonment of racialised ‘others’ for the sake of the longevity of the nation. In short, it seeks to better understand how lives are said to matter and not, especially in times of economic hardship. I propose that the integrity of the nation claims to be reliant on the sacrifices of the, implicitly white working-class ‘left behind’ via austerity, Brexit and beyond, but that this is simultaneously contingent on the brutal abandonment of racialised others.