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In centring on a group of young skinheads, This Is England addresses questions of identity, belonging, and community that figure prominently in the majority of contemporary television programmes. As a sociological concept, community goes back to Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ – ‘community’ and ‘society’. In Tönnies’ influential study, which was first published in 1887, community appears as organic and associated with ‘real’ life, whereas society represents an artificial, mechanical construct (see 3).1 For Tönnies, the term ‘community’ contrasts with society in designating a group of people whose togetherness is based on interaction and mutual esteem. This is perfectly in line with the representation of the skinheads in This Is England, who set themselves apart from the remainder of society as a group whose particular “style helped reinforce a shared, systematic subcultural identity” (Bergin). At the beginning of the film, the skinheads embody the generally positive view of community highlighted by Zygmunt Bauman:

Community, we feel, is always a good thing. […] To start with, community is a ‘warm’ place, a cosy and comfortable place. It is like a roof under which we shelter in heavy rain, like a fireplace at which we warm our hands on a frosty day. Out there, in the street, all sorts of dangers lie in ambush […]. In here, in the community, we can relax – we are safe […]. In a community, we all understand each other well, we may trust what we hear, we are safe most of the time and hardly ever puzzled or taken aback. We are never strangers to each other. We may quarrel – but these are friendly quarrels […]. (1-2)

If community in this sense provides a feeling of warmth, security, and belonging, This Is England foregrounds this notion when Shaun first meets the group of skinheads, led by genial Woody (Joseph Gilgun). The inclusivity and West Indian roots of skinhead culture come to the fore in the fact that a Black British youth nicknamed ‘Milky’ (Andrew Shim) is also part of this group. After a violent struggle which Shaun, clearly an outsider, has to face at school, Woodie invites the boy to join the ‘warm circle’ of the skinheads. However, critics like Zygmunt Bauman and Gerard Delanty emphasise that this positive sense of community has fundamentally been connected with a sense of loss since the arrival of modernity, “a sense of passing of an allegedly organic world” (Delanty 15). The concept of community basically serves the purpose of projecting a holistic notion of togetherness not touched by the characteristics of the modern age: contingency, differentiation, and specialisation. This may also be one of the reasons why, within the past twenty years, there has been an “upsurge of TV dramas that deal with periods in recent British history: the final years of the nineteenth century and the Edwardian era” (Baena 119). Series like Downton Abbey (2010-2015), Parade’s End (2012), and Poldark (2015-) either show communities which, though touched by modernisation, are still largely intact, or they investigate into the historical moments in which the ‘warm place’ of community was perceived to be lost.2

As Zygmunt Bauman pointedly illustrates, the positive view of community as a ‘warm place’ at any rate tends to conceal its origins in an uncompromising division of insiders and outsiders, which “is exhaustive as much as it is disjunctive” (12). This Is England, too, emphasises the fragility, if not illusion of community as a haven of security by focusing on how the group of skinheads disintegrates. The original film traces the historical split of skinhead culture, rather unpolitical at the onset, into the far left and the far right when the nationalist sympathies of ex-convict Combo (Stephen Graham) turn into outright racist aggression, and he brutally beats up Milky to within an inch of his life. The title of the film and the series is borrowed from Combo’s impassioned diatribe against immigration, in which he evokes the xenophobic clichés and anxieties exploited by the National Front: his assertive claim of “this is England” refers to a proud history of Empire blighted by immigration. When Combo thus adopts nationalist stereotypes, this represents not just “the hijacking of an optimistic, celebratory working-class culture – one that revels in Jamaican music and influences – by an angry, bitter reactionary movement that wants to blame ethnic minorities and immigrants for their problems” (Butler); Combo’s embracing of nationalism and xenophobia poignantly highlights more generally how “the ostensibly shared ‘communal’ identities are after-effects or by-products of forever unfinished (and all the more feverish and ferocious for that reason) boundary drawing”, as Bauman (17) argues building on the ideas of Norwegian anthropologist Frederick Barth.

Most, if not all contemporary television series tend to approach community through what it is lacking. As Zygmunt Bauman points out, “[w]hat that word evokes is everything we miss and we lack to be secure, confident and trusting” (3). Community certainly comes in different shapes in these series, be it “a particular form of social organization based on small groups, such as neighbourhoods, the small town, or a spatially bounded locality” (Delanty 2), or a culturally or politically defined group. As Gerard Delanty explains,

a closer look reveals that the term community does in fact designate both an idea about belonging and a particular social phenomenon, such as expressions of longing for community, the search for meaning and solidarity, and collective identities. (3, emphasis in original)

In practically all cases, however, community appears fragile at best, which corresponds to the sociological observation that the “loss of community and family solidarity is precisely the substance of the changes theorized by many contemporary social theorists” (Charles 452). Even those series set in places that represent the ideal type of community in being distinctive, small, and self-sufficient (see Bauman 12), such as The Street (2006-2009), The Village (2013), Broadchurch (2013-2017), or Shetland (2013-), reveal cracks in their social fabric that identify community in the sense of “a source of security and belonging” (Delanty 1) as a nearly unattainable ideal.