Abstract

Abstract This chapter traces the response to inequality and financial collapse in the United Kingdom, with the anti-system Right represented by the Brexit campaign, and the Left by Jeremy Corbyn’s takeover of the Labour Party. Like Trump’s election in the United States, which it preceded by less than six months, the Brexit vote was an anti-system vote, a vote of rejection of the existing political establishment and the economic policies it had implemented since the 1980s. Just as Trump’s victory mobilized entrenched racial divides in the United States, Brexit reflected a long-standing skepticism about European integration in British society. The chapter then argues that Brexit formed part of a wider anti-system revolt in Britain, which replaced the centrist politics of the 1990s and 2000s with a deeply polarized politics pitting half the country against the other.

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