On a chilly, gray morning last December, I found myself receiving the keys to a brand new white van in Covent Garden, London. Grateful to find a part-time job for the Christmas season, I’d promptly become that figure located deep in the English cultural psyche — the “white van man.”

It’s a trope so loaded with connotations of class, race, nationhood, and individualism that Labour MP Emily Thornberry was pressured to resign from the shadow cabinet in 2014 after posting a tweet that seemed to sneer at the patriotic, English working classes.