Anecdotal evidence and some police figures suggest
there's been a huge rise in cases of racist abuse
in the wake of the UK's referendum vote.
- I'm born and bred here. I was ******* born here.
- Well speak proper English then!
- I've been here longer than you have.
- .... you dirty little immigrant.
There's a very strong view, which you see in the newspapers
about, the racism is mainly due to people in left-behind
communities who feel marginalised,
who feel disadvantaged,
and therefore it's a problem of people without resources.
For us, it's too simple to say that
racism is a product of class divisions,
and it's people who are more working class who are racist.
We think it's also to do with fractures
within more privileged groups
And really, we need to understand
what's happening at the top of a society
to understand how these politics are being shaped-up.
Researching racism is a difficult thing to do, because
people often don't own up to it if they are racist.
You know, the famous thing about: 'I'm not racist, but...'
And so, it's very difficult to know how
much racism there really is as a society.
We used a source called
'The National Child Development Survey'
which was a very famous British survey.
They asked questions like: 'I don't mind
having a racial minority as a neighbour' –
'Strongly Agree', 'Agree', 'Disagree'.
What we found was, only a very small proportion of
British people gave a very strong, overt, racist response.
But, if you look in the middle,
i.e., they don't necessarily say "I don't care at all –
I'm happy to have an ethnic minority",
but they give some kind of ambivalent response, that's
a higher proportion that fit into that category.
We shouldn't exaggerate the amount
of overt, explicit racism in Britain.
But, there is a substantial proportion who have
elements that might possibly be mobilised
towards a more racist view, if the circumstances allow it.
So the worry is, I think, that we're
seeing racism on the rise, now.
And that's very much to do with
the way inequality's working
and the way in which certain interest groups
are manipulating people's views.
Leaders of the Brexit campaign have engendered
an atmosphere where some people believe
it is open season now for racism and xenophobia.
It is often assumed that if you're nationalistic, it means
you're allied to a kind of xenophobic agenda.
Again, our research shows it's more complex than that.
So, you know, the majority of people in Britain using these survey sources
were patriotic to some degree or other.
However, what we found was people who
were are the bottom end of society
who were not advantaged, who were not well-off,
their vision of nationalism was often quite personal,
it was often quite evocative.
It was about things like:
"I've been brought up in this country",
"all my experiences have been in this country",
"my family were raised in this country",
and that's very different from more elite people,
who would often combine a nationalist view
with a sense of "Britain is Best".
"We are the best country in the world."
The fragments are from the pro-colonial classic poem 
about Burma called 'Mandalay', by Rudyard Kipling.
'The wind is in the palm trees, temple bells they say...'
- You're on mic.
- Oh yeah.
It's that more imperial view which I think is more likely
to lead to racism and forms of exclusion.
I've been interested in this argument that
rather than seeing a simple 'elite',
of people who are privileged in general,
we can decompose different kinds of ways
in which people can be advantaged.
And, following the famous French
sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu,
sort of see a big difference between
people with 'economic capital',
i.e., lots of money, lots of property, savings,
versus those with 'cultural capital' – people with
cultural resources, well-qualified, good educations,
often working in top professions
– now sometimes, they overlap.
I think this is quite a powerful way of looking at the elite groups.
So, you can find people who often are not
particularly interested in culture or arts,
don't necessarily read very much,
but have had successful careers,
often quite effective careers,
and, they're the ones who have more economic capital.
These are the ones in our research who proved to be
more attracted to a kind of imperial vision of Britishness.
Whereas those with more cultural capital
are more aware of issues of racism,
they're more keen on a multicultural agenda,
much more concerned about equality and diversity.
And really, what you get playing out here is a bit
of an argument between these two elite wings.
This is not just about Britain – if you think about
what's happening with Donald Trump in the US,
you see there a very clear fracture between the liberal
elite, versus sort of Donald Trump economic elite.
As the wealthy have got more wealthy, we're actually 
seeing a growing fracture between different elite groups.
And those fractures are driving a
lot of the politics of our time today.
For almost two hours, both sides grappled with
questions in front of an audience of 6000 people,
on the issues of immigration, the economy,
and sovereignty.
What we argue is that there's different
kinds of nationalist identities.
And actually they're quite different
but, can they become allied,
and they can become most effectively allied when there
is an external body you can both pitch against.
So, what happened in the case of Brexit I think was
this sense of Europe became this 'bête noire',
this obvious, terrible thing.
Which, the English in particular identified against.
That allowed both the more imperial nationalists and
the more everyday nationalists to find common cause.
I don't think that alliance will stay for a long
time, inevitably. I think it's a short term thing.
Once Britain becomes independent again
– fully independent of Europe –
I think the differences between those two visions
of Englishness will reassert themselves.
And so I suspect we're going to find more conflict
and more tension between those idioms again.
