Nick Snow and I have been wanting to write a paper on the skinhead youth movement in England. We are interested in this topic because we’ve read and heard stories that described the first so-called skinheads to have inter-mingled with black Jamaican immigrants in British dance halls during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Jamaican immigrants and white dock workers, worked and played side by side. The popular British soul music of the time matched well with the blue beat ska music that the Jamaicans brought from their home land. The fashion emblems of the skinhead subculture were functional responses to their modes of employment. Dock workers faced a high threat of catching lice while unloading freight so they shaved their heads, and steel-toed boots helped avoid broken toes and foot injuries on the job. The empirical puzzle that remained was, when and why did the image of skinheads come to signify racial hatred, intolerance, national socialism, and fascism?
Our proposed description of this history is inspired by Butler Shaffer’s pamphlet, Violence as a Result of Imposed Order. We guess that governmental policies and economic controls of the time created zero sum games across race lines. Whites were pitted against black and Pakistani immigrants for financial and employment privileges. After reading Thomas Leonard’s paper on eugenic ideology in early unions, we’re suspicious that a similar racial hostility was cultivated in English labor unions during this time.
The newly successful film, This is England shows exactly what we were thinking of elaborating on.

Quasi-spoilers ahead…
A group of young kids including a Jamaican friends identify themselves as “skins” by shaving their heads and dressing alike. This solidarity serves useful at fending off aggression from other gangs of kids. When an older member of the gang gets released from prison he introduces the group to racial intolerance fueled by an dissatisfaction over the economic condition of whites.
In the film, the racist skin heads feel a sense of entitlement to wealth and priveledge above immigrants because they have either served in recent wars or lost family members who served.
This sounded similar to a factoid I heard recently — in WWII more Italian Americans than any other group volunteered for service. Despite being proud of their immigrant parents and grandparents, Italian Americans today appear to me to be more against immigration than the average American. Could this be a similar entitlement phenomenon? If a demographic group disproportionately serves in armed combat during a war, will they be more anti-immigration in upcoming generations? Would this also imply that forced conscriptions invoke anti-foreign bias more than voluntary service?