Anti-Trump protest, Philadelphia International Airport, January 2017. USA TODAY Network SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved. The political systems on both sides of the Atlantic have been subjected to seismic quakes and perpetual uncertainty following Britain’s decision to leave the European Union in June 2016, and the election of Donald Trump as US president in November. Political commentators have been left scratching their heads over what Brexit plus Trump actually means for us all, and they have been bracketed in this debate because similar factors seem to have played a part in their outcomes. These include the mutually professed political affinity between Donald Trump and the UK Independence Party’s Nigel Farage; both are popular nationalists who made political capital from platforms that sought a reclamation of a perceived lost sovereignty and promotion of protectionism to restore lost economic lustre.
Trump and Farage positioned themselves as outsiders shaking up the failed political establishment and appealed to communities that felt abandoned by the political elite. The economist Thomas Piketty found evidence of this decline in the United States with new research showing “that over the last 30 years the growth in the incomes of the bottom 50% has been zero, whereas incomes of the top 1% have grown 300%”. And in the UK, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found in 2014-15 that 13.5 million people or 21% of the total population were living in low-income households; a proportion that has barely changed since 2002-03.
