Two slogans that define our world
Let’s Take Back Control and Make America Great Again. They are slogans that hark back to better times, respectively, before Britain was in the EU and before America was… well that remains unclear. According to Trump, America has become a second-rate country with its wealth being drained by China and its southern border with Mexico seeing an invasion of ‘rapists’. Brexit in June 2016 and Trump’s victory in November 2016 shocked the world. The establishments of both Britain and the United States had written off the possibility of either winning. I saw educated people my age embrace Brexit. Even basic research will show it is very much in our interest in be in the EU. Just what drove people to vote Leave?
As someone who stayed up all night to watch the Brexit referendum and Trump’s victory, Brexit left me feeling what FT’s Robert Shrimsley rightly described as the ‘five stages of grief’. I was simply in a state of shock that the British people could vote for such a downright foolish decision, despite all the evidence that Britain was indeed stronger in Europe. Unlike many, I didn’t immediately turn to condemning 17.5m people as bigots. Friends and family members of mine had voted for Brexit. None of them were racists. It is simply a fact that British Euroscepticism has been a powerful force for decades. For me, the reason Remain lost was because it relied on facts, it did not appeal to people’s sentimentality. Politicians are proof that people vote off their emotions, not through reason. How could anyone in their right minds think Boris Johnson would be a good Mayor of London other than because of his extrovert persona? A comparative problem I have also seen in Brexit and Trump is people seemingly not respecting democracy. A second EU referendum was never going to happen. Likewise, Americans marching in the streets condemning Trump and signing petitions demanding Clinton be made President anyway just adds fire to the problem that got us here in the first place. It is ignoring the legitimate concerns of many Brexit and Trump voters who have been abandoned by Tory austerity and the American free market system.
From the outset it was clear to me that Brexit was a vote against Tory austerity, against the Westminster establishment and against the rich. The poorest areas of the UK, which have been left behind since Thatcher’s deindustrialisation in the 1980s, came to see the EU as their nemesis, particularly because of its freedom of movement rules that have seen EU migrants come for work. For many working-class Britons they are seen as competition. Trump’s victory, on the other hand, did not surprise me at all after Brexit. Such was my confidence in him winning that I put a fiver on it with a friend and a pint with another, betting being something I very rarely do. I feel there is a mood of anti-establishment rhetoric spreading across Europe and America currently. People are sick of the status quo and feel abandoned after the recent recession. Tragically, decisions like leaving the EU or electing Trump will only worsen our economic situation. Populists like Farage and Trump are exploiting their anger and directing it at the wrong people. People always look to blame others in times of economic hardship. The other they condemn have far more in common with them than the populist politicians.
Both the Leave campaign and Trump’s presidential race placed themselves firmly in the anti-establishment camp. This is despite the Leave’s campaigns two main figureheads, Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, being of a very much establishment background (Boris’ infamous Bullingdon Club picture springs to mind). Nigel Farage himself attended private school and worked as a banker for 20 years, yet proclaimed Brexit as a victory against the bankers, the elite and the yuppies (a term I was called myself by a BBC News Have Your Say user). After his astonishing electoral victory, billionaire Trump returned to his literal ivory tower in New York City, made from Chinese steel, to plan his next move. He was obviously tired from his campaign trail, ranting to his audiences about the evils of free trade and globalisation which had so helped his Trump Tower in rising. The irony of establishment figures preaching to the working-class about establishment evils is not lost on many.
Both campaigns aimed to appeal to the poorest areas of the country with their anti- establishment rhetoric. The Lord Ashcroft polls showed that the poorest areas of the UK Had the highest proportion of Leave voters, such as Boston in Lincolnshire, with an incredible 75% voting to exit the EU. Whilst Trump also appealed to the white college-educated population, he managed to breach Clinton’s blue-state ‘firewall’ in the Midwest, helping him capture blue states like Wisconsin by capturing the white vote. These blue-collar Democrat states, which hadn’t voted Republican since the 1980’s, voted for Trump because they felt abandoned by the establishment that Clinton epitomised. Midwest Trump voters were condemned as backward racists, similar to northern and Welsh towns that voted for Brexit, which merely adds fuel to the fire. Whilst there are obviously some Brexit and Trump supporters who indeed are racist, brandishing them all under the same brush exacerbates and simplifies the underlying poverty, class and disillusionment issues evident in the triumph of Brexit and Trump.