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Abstract

This article examines the “Left Behind” as a temporal construct and its political uses. In the UK, the “Left Behind” is predominantly discussed as a group of people sharing a similar geographical locale, White identity, and deprivation. Political parties and commentators have been integral to constructing this White class as a deserving poor and voting bloc, who have not reaped the benefits of economic development. Instead of assessing the empirical validity of the “Left Behind” as a socio-economic category, this article explores how the politics associated with this construct is orchestrated by varied temporal frames. The first section draws upon François Hartog's notion of presentism and Hakki Taş's theorisation of populist temporal narratives to explore how the “Left Behind” is shaped as an object of moral and economic debt, with their prospects threatened by immigrants. The second section explores how Global Britain narratives shape the “Left Behind” as subjects of majority histories. In doing so, it also demonstrates how these imagined figures are cast as subjects who lag behind the demands of late capitalism. The article concludes by reaffirming how presentism is central to the making of the “Left Behind” as a governmental problematic.

Keywords

Left Behind chronopolitics presentism British politics

Introduction

Rob Ford and Matthew Goodwin's book Revolt on the Right (2014) characterised a particular type of British voter as the ‘left behind’. They described this figure as ‘grey hair[ed], blue collar, White face: The left behind voters only UKIP understands’ (Goodwin and Ford, 2014). This term then gained broad media currency in the aftermath of the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. The “Left Behind” resonates with earlier terms such as the ‘silent majority’, popularised by former US President Richard Nixon in the 1970s, and England's eroded ‘Red Wall’ (a lurch to the right or disengagement from electoral politics within historically Labour-voting areas in the North and Midlands). The “Left Behind” is often invoked to refer to a section of British working class or unemployed populations who ‘are united by a general sense of insecurity, pessimism and marginalization’ (Bromley-Davenport et al., 2019: 799). Brexiteer politicians claim this disquiet has been caused by a globalisation that has ridden roughshod over traditional working class communities (Ford and Goodwin, 2014). Though not always explicit, the category also evokes the figure of a White working class British citizen pitted against a metropolitan multi-racial elite (Ford and Goodwin, 2014).

The “Left Behind” is a symptom of identity politics that segments British working-class populations along regional and racial lines. In a connected vein, victimhood and resentment become framed in binary terms of national/EU interest and natives/immigrants; ‘take back control’ became the slogan for redressing a perceived lost sovereignty and economic insecurity. Unlike Goodwin and Ford, who used the term to refer to a particular collective with an objective existence independent from political discourse, we examine how the “Left Behind” is crafted as an imagined community to license populist agendas. The making of the “Left Behind” constituency has been subject to critical reflection. For example, Danny Dorling (2018) resituates the Brexit debate in its broader historical context of decades of neoliberalism that widened gaps between rich and poor, with this development being disavowed when working-class precarity is blamed upon immigrants and the EU. Similarly, John Clarke (2023: 58–59) notes the shaping of ‘Brexit populism’ through conservative discourses of ‘strivers’ and ‘shirkers’, the individualisation of economic resilience, and the redirection of causes for eroded public services upon migrants. This populism mobilises disaffected populations whose redemption is said to lie in Brexit – as opposed to overturning the neoliberal and far right successes in developing austerity and a racially segmented working class (Clarke, 2023: 54–60). The populist construction of the “Left Behind” works to obscure this historical context, instead making the injustice of working-class inequalities an issue of the deserving/undeserving poor (Shilliam 2018). The racialised construction of this binary reconstitutes earlier colonial lines of who qualifies as the rightful working class of Britain, which is no longer imperial in scale but instead refracted via the nationalist frame of Brexit discourse (Shilliam, 2018). The discourse around the “Left Behind” exists within a longer history of British politics whereby a supposedly past-achieved identity is depicted as an object of historical continuity, yet under threat from unwanted social change (Bartscherer 2022).

This article refines our understanding of how the “Left Behind” – as an imaginary – is made through a politics of time. Temporality acquires meaning via narratives that order their relationship with one another to shape, as well as conjoin, possibilities for action and affect. Different ways of defining and linking past, present and future enable political ideologies to advance their exigencies (Gokmenoglu, 2022). Thus, temporality works to organise and legitimise the meaning of stability and change; figures concerned with public life define a scope of what can be made present or hoped for as a viable future aspiration (Gokmenoglu, 2022). Chronopolitics plays a central role in this process. Chronopolitics can be understood in terms of the relationship between ‘kairos’ (a qualitative and demarcated ordering of time that is given social significance in terms of its novelty or interruption to an existing state of affairs) and ‘chronos’ (a natural linear or cyclical understanding of time) (Hutchings, 2008: 154). The mutual constitution of kairos and chronos is ordered inter alia through a statist discourse that authorises a citizen's emergence in politics (e.g., when voting takes place) and qualification for politics (e.g., time-stamped residency requirements for the right to vote) (Cohen, 2018). There is not simply one extant and coherent temporal order that legitimates and naturalises political life. On the contrary, tensions between who and what counts as a political subject ferment through multiple, and at times clashing, temporalities. For the purposes of this article, the term ‘chronopolitics’ helps convey different ways of regimenting a past, present and future – along with how these ordered perceptions bring forth governed subjects and agendas into existence (Mills, 2020: 3). Our concern is not to discuss all manifestations of chronopolitics. Rather, we focus upon presentism as one configuration of the politics of time that shapes the “Left Behind”. Accounting for how the “Left Behind” is structured through that temporality moves beyond ascertaining the truth or history of the “Left Behind” as a social category. This article reveals less acknowledged ways that conformity to, or dissonance with, a singular shared national time is orchestrated to shape the “Left Behind” as a subject whose plight requires redress. It documents how temporality is being settled to resolve antagonisms of class, race and generation – as well as contradictions of Britain's current place in the world as a postcolonial and post-Brexit nation.

First, the article makes use of François Hartog's theories of ‘presentism’ (2016) and Hakki Taş's theorisation of the mobilisation of time within populist narratives (2022) to examine the construction of the “Left Behind”. In doing so, it reveals how the past is generated to shut down debates about rising inequality, particularly in relation to the current conditions of the welfare state. Second, the article demonstrates how presentism operates through the rhetoric of Global Britain. The Global Britain agenda was promoted by British politicians to frame post-Brexit trade relations and national prosperity. The integration of the “Left Behind” within Global Britain discourse reveals how this figure is made to reaffirm what Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000: 100) theorised as ‘majority’ history. The Global Britain narrative also simultaneously incorporates aspects of ‘minority history’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 100) by pitting citizens (descending) from ‘New Commonwealth’ countries against those from the European Union. This highlights how the dominantly imagined White and native “Left Behind” are cast in an ambivalent position as regards the national imaginary. Lastly, the article emphasises how the “Left Behind” is an important figure for nationalist chronopolitics. Contesting dominant ways of framing a politics of time, which produces the “Left Behind”, remains an important prism for struggles against inequality.

Justifying and enduring inequality

In Regimes of Historicity (2016), Hartog developed an anthropological conception of how societies relate to the past, present and future. Hartog argued that the contemporary period has been marked by a problematisation of a modern historicity, which espouses linear and discontinuous progress. Societies have shifted from being future-oriented to being presentist (2016). ‘Presentism’ refers to the present extending into both the future and the past (Tamm and Olivier, 2019: 8), instead of the past and future being perceived as fundamentally different from the present. Hartog characterises this condition as follows:

as if the present, that of finance capitalism, the revolution in information, globalization, yet also the current crisis had absorbed in itself the categories . . . of the past and future. It is as if, having become its own self-enclosed horizon, it has transformed itself into a perpetual present. (Hartog, 2016 cited in Holden, 2019: 388).

Presentism also involves an inability to establish modern historical time because it is predicated on a fundamental discontinuity between past, present and future. As a result, the past becomes emptied of meaning (Hartog, 2016: 1235). The future does not disappear. Yet instead of a field of unprecedented and creative possibilities, it is seen as ‘opaque and threatening’ (Hartog, 2016: 196). Presentism involves an uncoupling of what Reinhardt Koselleck termed ‘spaces of experience’ and ‘horizons of expectations’ (Holden, 2019: 388).

Writing in the 1990s, Hartog was responding to the ascendance of neoliberal globalisation, what he saw as the ‘age of commemoration’, and the now-infamous declaration that history had ended. For Hartog, central to presentism's inability to distinguish between present and past was an obsession with memorialisation and the preservation of heritage, along with claims for this heritage as a basis for identity (Lorenz, 2019: 24). As the past is no longer distinct from the present, it becomes treated as a resource to be instrumentalised by the present; its content and meaning become transformed into an object that lacks autonomy. What counts as a past worth speaking or writing about therefore depends on how it can be used to validate present political claims. While Hartog was responding to an earlier political moment, we nonetheless find the tendencies of presentism he identified being mobilised through right-wing populist politics. We acknowledge critiques of Hartog's conception of presentism as potentially nostalgic for a modern linear and progressive time), as well as the limits of modern conceptions of history (when defined as distance from the present) (Lorenz, 2019). This article does not call for a return to modernist conceptions of progress as a response to right-wing populism. As outlined below, we see right-wing populist politics as both symptomatic and productive of impasses identified by Hartog. A presentist configuration of chronopolitics is revealed whereby relations between past, present, and future are ordered in ways that construct a populist public.

Taş's (2022) application of presentism to populism helps make sense of the mainstream political response to the current conditions in the UK. Before making this explicit, it is worth outlining how the UK, at the time of writing, is undergoing a period of economic strife. Public services are in a dire state. Waiting lists for hospital appointments with the National Health Service (NHS) have surpassed record highs for the past 2 years (Kirk et al., 2022). A quarter of local authorities in England have cut their emergency services for families in crisis (Merrick, 2022). This is compounded by labour shortages, which have been exacerbated by the Brexit vote (Campbell, 2022), as well as the continued legacy of over ten years of austerity cuts (Irving, 2020). Inflation is at a 40-year high (Bancroft, 2022) and wages are not keeping pace, meaning that many people must work at second jobs to make ends meet (Otte, 2022). This moment is also marked by increasingly harsh rhetoric on immigration. The current government is also attempting to put into place cruel and potentially unlawful migration policies, including the infamous proposals to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda (particularly targeting those who have crossed the English Channel in unauthorised small boats). Criticism of these plans from the Official Opposition has been rather muted; condemnation has largely materialised along operational and financial lines, rather than on moral grounds (Huck, 2022). Although liberalising immigration could be a potential solution to the labour shortages mentioned earlier, Labour Party leader Keir Starmer vilified immigrants as ‘cheap labour’: Part of a ‘low pay’ model of exploitation that is positioned as a threat to the development of local skilled workers (Elgot, 2022). Elsewhere, Starmer also stated that the NHS was ‘recruiting too many people from overseas’ (Elgot, 2022).

This situation can be interpreted in terms of two impasses, connected to what Clarke has termed an ‘accumulation of problems’ (despite dominant attempts to manage or mitigate them) (2023: 59). Firstly, where the welfare state no longer performs certain basic functions for sustaining life (with responsibility shifted onto charities, mutual aid and the family). Yet resources still exist for punitive and carceral purposes such as detention and deportation, particularly for those who are framed as Others. The second impasse is around an anti-immigrant consensus within official political discourses: Where all immigrants are ‘cheap labour’ (despite the social value of their work) and it is deemed politically unpopular or even toxic to publicly defend migrants’ rights, or to call for immigration restrictions to be eased. In Empire's Endgame, Bhattacharyya et al. have explored these impasses in relation to the past and current function of the British welfare state. In contrast to the paternalism of the post-war welfare state, present-day state paternalism is cruel, operating as ‘a racial project, one in which ‘the loss of access to public goods is a loss of the wages of Whiteness (Bhattacharyya et al., 2021: 110–112). Gurminder Bhambra (2022) makes a slightly different argument about the racialisation of the British welfare state. According to Bhambra (2022), the British welfare state was financed through extracting surpluses and taxation revenues from the colonies while redistributing resources within the UK. Questions around who contributes to the welfare state and who is entitled to benefit reflect the persistence of national and racialising narratives, which are underscored by an inability to come to terms with its imperial legacy. It is within this context that we need to understand Starmer's comments about migrant workers: a long-upheld myth of a national welfare state and territorialised workforce, which denies its dependence upon (post-)imperial circuits. These unresolved questions about nation, race and the welfare state become further politicised within a context of austerity and neoliberal privatisation that has normalised dysfunctional under-investment in public services and labour welfare.

Presentism can be used as an analytical lens to help understand these conditions. Firstly, the present and future are shorn of their potential as horizons for radical change. This presentism conditions dominant terms for discussing the world of work, immigration and the twentieth-century welfare state. This takes place in the context of neoliberal dysfunction and cruelty, as highlighted by the authors of Empire's Endgame. We are urged to expect a very limited capacity and scope of the state for preventing extreme relative poverty and destitution. Citizens are instead interpellated as subjects who need the government to adopt punitive measures against dangerous Others. Conditions of inequality are perceived as unchanging and unchangeable because there is no alternative. We should acknowledge that presentism is primarily a strategy of larger political parties who claim to speak for the nation in a majoritarian sense. In doing so, they mobilise and consolidate a national past. In their narrow focus on electoral politics and distance from social movements, they also are not well placed to undertake a critical interrogation of the past, present or future. However, smaller parties also operate within the media and political climate outlined above, and therefore are not entirely immune from such tendencies. We also see presentism is primarily an English phenomenon, in part because of the greater stakes for English nationalism in appealing to the past in relation to legacies of global dominance.

Right-wing populist politics – of which the “Left Behind” frequently serves as protagonist – mobilises temporal politics in ways that fit with the theorisations of Hartog and Taş. Jan-Werner Müller (2016) has characterised populism as the construction of an exclusionary ‘pure public’ and the perceived role of politicians as directly representing the volonté générale of this public, to the exclusion of everyone else. Taş (2022) argues that right-wing populism operates through narratives that adhere to the dynamics of presentism as theorised by Hartog. It operates through affective regulation: time is set, segmented, phased, and filled with various emotions remains a crucial aspect of the resilience of such populisms (Skonieczny, 2018). The populist temporality essentially rests on the Manichean distinction between inherently good people (nation) and inherently evil people (adversaries). It circulates and mobilises ‘love of the insider, fear of the outsider, and anger against corrupt elites’ – all associated with specific events in national time (Levinger, 2017 cited in Taş, 2022: 130–131). Within the context of right-wing populist politics, the past becomes central to the construction of ‘an imagined past in which a morally impeccable, unified population resides’ is central to right-wing populist politics (Taggart, 2000 cited in Taş, 2022, 131). A glorified past ‘holds the nation together and allows citizens to keep their heads up’ (Taş, 2022, 131). The present functions as a crisis that could either lead to an apocalyptic future (national decline, loss of identity, social breakdown), or a utopian one, as the ‘rightful destiny of the virtuous nation’ (Taş, 2022, 133). Therefore, the past and the future become subordinate to the present, functioning as ‘heritage’ and ‘destiny’ (Taş, 2022, 131). The present neoliberal dysfunction (as outlined above) lends itself easily to interpretations of the present as crisis.

As previously mentioned, populist politics transforms time to produce narratives about publics. This can be illustrated through two dominant stories that often circulate in the British media. The first focuses on hardship as character-building and as experienced primarily by older generations. For example, the conservative commentator and former politician Edwina Currie declared that younger people were lucky because her generation did not have central heating; she suggested putting tinfoil behind radiators (O’Grady, 2022). Starmer himself observed that the late Queen Elizabeth II ‘would urge us to turn our collar up and face the storm’ (Hancox 2022) despite the fact that – as a member of the monarchy – she would never have to worry about keeping warm. Both Currie and Starmer's comments can be understood as mobilising the past to elide economic inequalities within generations and between them. Starmer's comments create an equivalence between the Royal Family and those who cannot afford to heat their homes through evoking the stoicism associated with older generations, thereby pre-empting observations about class inequality. Currie's comments displace class onto generation, by implying that young people are spoilt and privileged, and older people are more authentically working-class due to past experiences of hardship. Such comments fail to identify the disproportionate effects of privatisation and austerity on younger generations. The conviction that suffering builds character is also connected to national identity (for example the British stereotype of the stiff upper lip), all of which are perceived as under threat. The past, an ‘authentic’ British character, and national identity become entwined, echoing Taş’s comments about ‘heritage’ and ‘destiny’ (Taş, 2022: 131).

The second dominant narrative frames the past in terms of a coherent national identity that has been destabilised by immigration. This narrative is consistent with populist constructions of the past inhabited by a pure public (Taggart cited in Taş, 2022: 31). It underpins Starmer's comments about the NHS recruiting too many people from overseas. This is despite the fact that the NHS and many other public services involved migrant labour from Europe and the Commonwealth from their inception, in response to labour shortages in the aftermath of the Second World War. These evocations of the past rehearse old xenophobic assumptions about jobs performed by migrant workers being exploitative and jobs for British workers being decent and stable (Anderson, 2013: 191). The past evoked by this rhetoric is imbued with ‘Post-Fordist affect’ (Muehlebach and Shosha 2012), defined as a longing for Fordism which encompasses male industrial labour; a patriarchal family wage; traditional gender roles; heteronormative conceptions of the family; the post-war welfare state; and a benign nation-state (which in the British context, also meant a benign British empire). Because the present lacks many of these qualities, it represents generalised decline, and evidence that British society has taken the wrong directions. This facilitates populist chronopolitical framings of the present as crisis and the future as threatening further decline. Starmer's comments position the past (and those values and people associated with it – particularly the “Left Behind”) within a narrative of moral redemption and social justice (Shilliam 2020). As Robbie Shilliam notes, the ‘White working class’ (who are often made synonymous with the “Left Behind”) are seen as worthy of redemption – based upon criteria of whiteness (as the rightful inheritors of British society) and ‘ordinariness’ (Shilliam, 2020: 227). Shilliam argues that this ‘ordinariness’ stands for what is seen as a uniquely English predilection for corporatist, localist and patriarchal values, in contrast to more radical aspects of working class history (Shilliam, 2020: 225). Moral redemption for the “Left Behind” is therefore ‘a moral economy wedded to the defence of the political order’ (Shilliam, 2020: 236).

While the examples described above do not explicitly name the Left Behind, they are the implied protagonists of such narratives. The Currie quote imagines the “Left Behind” as older generations who grew up without central heating. Starmer's comments imply that the “Left Behind” are victims of poor working conditions and an eroded national identity caused by migrant labour. The “Left Behind” also functions as implied audience for such emotionally charged rhetoric and redemption narratives: they are meant to relate to the older generations who have grown up without central heating, and to resent the young people who could not imagine living without it; they are meant to identify with the stoicism of the late Queen and to ignore the privileges of inherited wealth at a time of widening inequality. Furthermore, “Left Behind” politics rests upon a perceived moral obligation towards those who have lived this (imagined stable and homogeneous) past, and are therefore viewed as representative of the quintessential British national public with this temporal positioning staked as grounds for legitimising their redemption (Shilliam, 2020).

These narratives of the past – host to virtuous identities, character-building suffering, and a stable homogeneous national identity – involve aspects of presentism. In turn, the past is made to lack autonomy from the present. The past is reduced to heritage and contemporary national identity. This discourse works to dismiss the distinctive experiences of younger generations. It is used to pre-empt discussions of inequality or economic divisions within generations, and undermine possibilities of solidarity based on shared material conditions across generational and racial lines. This configuration of presentism does not offer resources for challenging current neoliberal ideology or policy.

The Global Britain solution

A British past becomes a source for principles and policies to co-constitute and act upon a deserving/underserving working class. The former pole of this binary was shaped through the figure of “Left Behind”. The “Left Behind” was advanced by mainstream political parties to create the working class as a specific generational, racial, and cultural constituency. The attempt to create this White working class voting bloc, particularly in the north of England, was part of an effort to explain rising economic inequalities as caused by a so-called undeserving poor (comprised of migrants and racially othered British citizens). As previously discussed, chronopolitics underpinned that position. Specifically, a presentist temporality intervened to shape a political imaginary whereby the current socio-economic situation is devoid of possibilities for radical change. Past and future become reduced to present-day tales of a declining national people. That narrative is shaped through mainstream party-political constructions of the “Left Behind” as victims of globalisation. David Goodhart crystalises this narrative when presenting globalisation as steered by mobile elite cosmopolitans at the expense of traditional working class communities (with the latter defined by successive generational presence and a British identification that is deemed under threat by migration) (Goodhart, 2013). Aside from recapitulating a racialised notion of the working class, this depiction neither historicises the impact of neoliberalism nor acknowledges the racialised underpinnings of dominant British identity-migration discourse (Rogaly, 2019). Nevertheless, the depiction of globalisation unmoored from popular control has been a vital trope for reorganising both their meanings. The following focuses on one way that globalisation is fashioned into a potential solution for the “Left Behind” via a right-wing populism, whereby aspects of a presentist national imaginary as heritage and destiny (outlined in the previous section) are rescaled to an international horizon.

This section discusses how the Global Britain agenda engages with the “Left Behind”. The ensuing account reveals a contradictory depiction of the “Left Behind” as both a White working class deserving community (whose prosperity supposedly hinges on the exclusion of others) and inadequate subjects for contemporary capitalism. Alongside this, the Global Britain agenda purports to include racialised others as policy beneficiaries. These ambiguities of Global Britain are orchestrated by a presentism, which is conditioned by the dynamics of majority-minority history. By exploring this we can begin to grasp how a chronopolitics is configured to shape the “Left Behind” as protagonists of, and problem subjects for, a Global Britain.

The term Global Britain began to circulate shortly after the 2016 EU referendum. It was advanced by the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Prime Minister Theresa May to refer to a new economic and diplomatic vision for Britain after Brexit (Johnson, 2016; May, 2017). National prosperity was deemed to have faltered in recent years and Brexit was said to create new challenges for both redressing this and ensuring Britain's influence in international society; Global Britain was a response (Niblett, 2021). The Global Britain agenda exhibits various connected strands, which strive to restore the nation to a former premier economic and political standing. A policy focus concentrates on the strengthening of defence, international development, and soft power (HM Government, 2021). Another strand claimed that novel trade relations with the Commonwealth and emerging economies could revitalise Britain after its exit from the EU single market. Yet this was asserted against a backdrop of uncertainty in striking favourable trade deals with EU and non-EU states (Niblett, 2021). Equally, Global Britain intensifies a domestic and foreign policy discourse on human rights promotion in spheres of de jure citizens’ rights; rights-promotion ostensibly centred upon matters of socio-economic equality and healthcare (Molloy and Smith, 2022), while responsibilities towards refugees are largely ignored. In brief, the Global Britain narrative was weighed towards strengthening Commonwealth state ties and free trade (HM Government, 2021).

Another facet of the Global Britain narrative revolves around shaping the “Left Behind” as an object of redress. This becomes apparent when Global Britain is connected to the Levelling Up agenda. The latter is a beleaguered initiative to redirect funding outside Southeast England – with a view to mitigate regional inequalities in terms of health services, transport, housing, employment, skills development, and council empowerment. A British Foreign Policy Group report has repeated the governmental emphasis on linking the success of Global Britain as contingent upon, and entwined with, Levelling Up (Gaston, 2021). The chief executive of BAE Systems exemplified this narrative when explicitly tying the Global Britain defence strategy with a Levelling Up focus on local enterprise investment and skills development (Carr, 2022). Impoverished regions with high unemployment became a site of BAE Systems’ factory expansions, which were integrated with the push for skilled local workers and regional job opportunities (Carr, 2022). The “Left Behind” was a target of that initiative. It sought to institute a singular, uniform, and shared time of globalisation for the “Left Behind”. A more muted aspect of the Conservative Global Britain narrative, prior to its explicit labelling, contradicted this. For instance, Britain’s prosperity was, in part, deemed to hinge upon adopting the supposed work ethic of those arriving from emerging Commonwealth economies and accession countries (Kwarteng et al., 2012). The work ethic of the British unemployed, with the White British section of this population implicitly evoked, is supposedly too discerning about occupation choice and lazy when compared with ‘low-skilled’ European workers and the expectation of UK Asian businesses (Kwarteng et al., 2012). Thus, while the figure of the “Left Behind” was cast through a redemptive and generic time of globalisation, they were also framed as cultural subjects who are unable to adjust to conditions of contemporary UK capitalism. Global Britain follows the narrative of socio-economic winners, who successfully navigate late capitalism, and losers (the “Left Behind”) (Boswell et al.,2022). The latter are situated as unable to thrive in a transformed economy and remain bound to their local impoverished conditions (Boswell et al., 2022).

Just as the “Left Behind” were positioned within a singular and shared time of globalisation, albeit unevenly experienced and located, this temporality is striated by postcoloniality. First, a postcolonial time shapes Global Britain through what can be termed a majority history (Chakrabarty 2000) (a history that successfully assumes the status of official national history). Although Dipesh Chakrabarty's reflections are addressing professionalised history in a South Asianist context of historicism (i.e., linear and progressive modernist history), they hold resonance for thinking through the piecemeal making of history through presentism. Unlike a majority history that remains within modernism – whereby the very passage of time is both an ideological guarantee of development and fundamentally unknowable in content (i.e., a neuzeit) (Koselleck, 2004) – an undifferentiated past-present-future is mobilised. Global Britain is depicted as both latent within contemporary Commonwealth relations and needing revival. This presentist temporality can be elicited from existing critiques of Global Britain (sometimes called Empire 2.0), which foreground nostalgia about lost imperial greatness (Kenny and Pearce, 2018; Murphy, 2018; Saunders, 2020). For instance, proposed trade details with Commonwealth countries resonate with the late nineteenth century ‘imperial preference’ ideal, which was rooted upon intra-imperial protectionism; the notion of Britain steering a Commonwealth economy is wholly out of sync with the contemporary geopolitical context (Blitz, 2017).

Economic and political domination, as a source of Britain's erstwhile standing, is recognised within critiques of Global Britain (Kenny and Pearce, 2018; Murphy, 2018). Yet what makes presentism an organising feature of Global Britain is the combination of a lost imperial supremacy that could not find its place in the EU; a re-coding of present-day Commonwealth relations as already reflective of British leadership; and visions of a future that is fundamentally guided by a mythical past of shared national interests across the Commonwealth, which work in centripetal fashion for the benefit of Britain (Kenny and Pearce, 2018; Mitchell, 2021; Murphy, 2018). Global Britain is thus an effort at generating a ‘perpetual present’ (Hartog cited in Holden, 2019: 388) (see the previous section). The “Left Behind” is integrated in this presentist Global Britain imaginary as part of an esteemed and entitled community; the populist turn away from Europe rekindles an ideology of British imperial autonomy and prosperity that is shared across so-called natives – despite imperial renewal being an impossibility (Mitchell, 2021). In turn, critiques of Global Britain find that it neither seeks to represent all Britons nor offers a political response away from the present socio-economic crisis. For instance, it does not offer principles against: identitarian nostalgia; the erosion of social rights; and widening class inequality (Zappettini, 2019). Furthermore, the audience of Global Britain is not global. It is an insular discourse that seeks to assuage fears amongst a British populace about Britain's economic and political unmooring from the EU; the traction that Global Britain agendas hold with Commonwealth states appears an afterthought (Turner, 2019).

Second, the Global Britain narrative incorporates a ‘minority history’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 100). The latter refers to how marginalised identities or struggles can become assimilated into recognisable forms of political agency (e.g., equal rights or redistributive justice), which can in turn become part of a majority history (the official national story) that serves contemporary political agendas (Chakrabarty, 2000). Thus, minority histories can arise as ‘good histories’ in the sense of making the past more representative of diverse groups; it is integrated within, rather than fundamentally disrupts, existing structures of representation (Chakrabarty, 2000: 98). In the context of Global Britain, an interplay between majority-minority history is supplemented by presentism, as a way of conditioning historical time. This presentist majority-minority history gains form through attempts to situate EU membership as a reason for discriminatory policies towards Commonwealth migrants. The following explores this chronopolitics by revealing how legacies of colonial space and bodies are incorporated as part of the national story in an ambivalent manner, both a deserving British (like the “Left Behind”) and perpetually other to the territory.

A Global Britain narrative became part of Brexiteer efforts at courting the Leave vote amongst those with connections to former dependencies – stating that ‘new’ Commonwealth ties and favourable immigration rules would follow EU departure (Saunders, 2020). The inequality between Commonwealth migration and EU free movement was critiqued by prominent politicians from a range of political parties, such as Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, George Galloway and Khalid Mahmood (which is not to say that their positions on Commonwealth migration are wholly equivalent) (Saunders, 2020). For instance, although a specious claim, Priti Patel (Employment Minister at the time) stated that EU membership was preventing British immigration policies that could redress worker shortages in curry houses (Khan, 2019). As Global Britain seeks to appeal to ethnic minorities and secure skilled labour (such as via the UK Global Talent Network that operates akin to a points-based migration system) (UKVI, 2023), it arises in contradiction with the framing of the “Left Behind” as having their interests fulfilled through general restrictions on immigration. The hostile environment policy, which sporadically targeted both racialised British nationals and those residing without nationality for deportation (Erel et al., 2016), further illustrated how this concurrent migration discourse contradicts the ostensibly Commonwealth-friendly Global Britain narrative.

How Global Britain works through majority and minority history is underpinned by an ambivalent presentism. Although national narration locates the present as an unbroken continuity, whereby heritage and destiny overlap (see the previous section), this is made possible through a discontinuous national imaginary. Homi Bhabha helps clarify this process, revealing the chronopolitics at work. The national imaginary is only possible through a ‘timelessness’: an unchanging tradition or people, and a ‘disjunctive time’ that incorporates new ideals and social groupings (Bhabha, 1994: 204). Put differently, national time is both ahistorical (its past, present and future are unchanging) and historical. Even in the most vehemently exclusive nationalisms, the signifiers of the nation are not stable or timeless. The nation is periodised and narrated as different from a past in order to survive in, reflect, and generate contemporary political exigencies and a “people”. National narration is a necessarily selective process of ‘remembering’, ‘forgetting’, and departing from prior representations (Bhabha, 1994: 204). It is this often-disavowed ambivalence of the national imaginary that informs decisions on how to differentiate, rank-order, or include/exclude people through the nation. National narration casts a particular politics of borders, interest and bodies. It shapes terms for disputing who counts as a community of equal citizens. Figures of the migrant, the racialised working class, and the metropolitan “elite” become metonyms for “changing communities”. This populist discourse co-constitutes these figures alongside (and against) White working-class communities, with the latter cast as territorially legitimate and unchanging populations who have been subjected to political neglect and labour displacement (Isakjee and Lorne, 2019). The “Left Behind” are positioned as deserving because of their supposedly unchanging and traditional rooting. The Global Britain narrative subtly taps into past imperialism as a legacy, which in turn situates the “Left Behind” as a deserving subject. However, these moorings are also rendered a symptom of being unable to adjust to changed post-imperial market conditions and labour competition. This coincides with the incorporation of racialised others into the Global Britain imaginary, a trace of colonial rule, which jars with (but does not displace) the nativist politics of the “Left Behind”.

Global Britain is important for highlighting the dual inward and outward-facing dimensions of a national imaginary, through which the “Left Behind” are positioned. It is articulated through a configuration of chronopolitics, which advances presentism and eschews a discontinuous linear modernism. For instance, Global Britain relies upon a ‘restorative nostalgia’ (Taş, 2022: 131–132) – a practice that refers to the cultivation of a collective memory that is mobilised to ‘rebuild a lost home’ (Boym, 2001: 41). The practice of ‘restorative nostalgia’ does not simply project a lost past glory as an object of re-establishment in the present (Boym, 2001: 41). That past is rendered a contradiction within this discourse since it is situated as never having been an object of ‘decay’ (it is already vitalised in the present), and is discerned through already existing national symbolic representations (Boym, 2001: 49). The internal contradictions of restorative nostalgia underpin Global Britain. For example, adapting Taş’s interpretation of Svetlana Boym's concept to our context, Global Britain draws together the ‘good old days’ (national prosperity through imperial ties), a conspiracy of ‘collective victimhood’ (suppression of national destiny through EU membership and the presence of racialised others), ‘making the country great again’ (national prosperity through former imperial ties), and an already realised route of revival via the Commonwealth (Taş, 2022: 131–132). Global Britain as a restoration of national prosperity and esteem, for the benefit of the “Left Behind”, involves incorporating racialised others from the Commonwealth (at least in rhetoric) as potential citizens or vital state partners. However, as Global Britain renders past, present and future as fundamentally continuous, racialised Britons are also cast outside of the presentist notions of national heritage and destiny. Furthermore, Global Britain could not easily be marketed as an exclusive object of populist investment for the “Left Behind”. Global Britain remained a type of populism that circulated amongst elite imaginaries, without diffusing to a wider public. It does not reflect a populism that claims to adequately represent a ‘majority’ national opinion in unmediated fashion or redistribute decision-making powers to the masses (Anduiza et al., 2019; Mondon and Winter, 2020). Global Britain situated the “Left Behind” within a presentist time in ambivalent fashion. They emerge as the unchanging essence of Britain and a problematic subject of restoration through enduring-novel Commonwealth relations.

Conclusions

Decades of neoliberalism in the UK have exacerbated de-industrialisation, the erosion of union solidarity, wage stagnation and the depletion of universal welfare – all of which contribute to a widening gap between rich and poor. Against this backdrop, discourses around the “Left Behind” (similar to their antecedents) circulate to frame a section of the British population as an (unacknowledged) symptom of these developments. The category of the “Left Behind” is constructed to reflect an identity politics, whereby British national identification is deemed under threat by “immigrants” from former colonies and the EU. This article did not aim to reaffirm the “Left Behind” as an authentic and measurable class in-itself or for-itself, which exists independent from narratives about their existence. Instead, we sought to foreground the overlooked role of chronopolitics in shaping the figure of the “Left Behind” as a governmental problematic. We examined the “Left Behind” as an imaginary and descriptor that evokes a set of political responses, orchestrated through presentism.

The “Left Behind” was advanced within Conservative and Labour political discourse to simultaneously shape and address a voting constituency. Both self-aggrandising and self-pitying, the figure of the “Left Behind” falls within a populist template of entitlement, grievances, and impoverishment. Through this ambivalent majoritarian worthiness and victimhood, the “Left Behind” is made reflective of a general will. Their dire socio-economic plight is attributed to a lack of ‘authentic’ political representation (i.e., being misrepresented by corrupt elites); their condition becomes attributed to a supposed decline in nationalist supremacy (Mondon and Winter, 2020). This populism depends on framing the past, present and future in terms of presentism. That historicity works to validate neoliberal dysfunction, anti-immigrant narratives, and the association of the past with a character-building hardship. Presentism reflects an ‘underdetermined’ temporality in the sense of being formed as an object of political intervention, which can manifest as singular narratives of resolution and development (Clarke, 2023: 51). Therefore, beyond divisive politics, we noted the uses of a presentist temporality for structuring the “Left Behind” as a worthy embodiment and trace of a past capitalist order (while also being positioned as facing an ominous present-future characterised by existential threat).

How the “Left Behind” are rendered as both authentic Britons and a governmental problematic work to steer line of redress. Alongside the populist answers of anti-immigration and Brexit, a connected discourse of Global Britain also positioned the “Left Behind” as an object of justice. The article made explicit the chronopolitics that underpinned the Global Britain agenda, along with the role it played in shaping the “Left Behind”. Global Britain creates and entwines a triumphalist post-colonial time of nation-state formation after Empire (a new possibility to engage overseas capital and labour), a nostalgia of ‘taking back control’ (framed as a national project against migrants), and a dependence on contemporary Commonwealth ties and peoples as motors of the national economy. The future is to be realised through a restoration of a past, at the same time as recognising the impossibility of returning to an imperialism that produced this desired past. We outlined how the “Left Behind” was situated as a beneficiary and outlier to this Global Britain imaginary. This contradiction engenders their ambivalent positioning as both the destined rightful post-imperial ‘people’ and problem for post-imperial economic renewal. Through this article, it becomes apparent that the spatial and identitarian qualities of the “Left Behind” are orchestrated via a politics of time.

By drawing attention to the chronopolitics of the “Left Behind”, a distinct line of critique is opened. More than simply a figure conjured to divide working-class constituencies – forging archetypical communities of imperial nostalgia and subjects in ambivalent relation with Global Britain – resistance to this elite populist imaginary requires an engagement with its underlying politics of time. Since the “Left Behind” is a symptom of a populism that depends upon presentism, political contestation needs to engage with that front. There needs to be further critical reflection on the uses of time and social relations in tandem; both mutually shape one another. In other words, it is important to change the approach to the past and future, which also requires a transformation of social relations so that populists are not able to exploit presentist conceptions of temporality. The development of alternative chronopolitics are therefore inseparable from the development of alternative social relations and publics.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Kirsten Forkert

Zaki Nahaboo

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