The rise of UKIP began in the 1990s under the leadership of Nigel Farage, another admirer of Powell. From the 1990s on, prominent Conservative Party figures spoke against what they regarded as the foreignization of Britain, sometimes overtly sometimes by insinuation. The latter approach was continued in the malevolent poster slogans of the Conservative campaign during the 2005 general election. After the Conservatives gained power, this activity continued in the even more aggressive ‘hostile environment’ campaign. By the time of the 2016 referendum, anti-immigrant sentiment was mobilised in various ways that included hints and allusions, the citing of misleading statistics, emotive metaphor and barefaced reiteration of untruths. The most blatant example was the pro-Leavers’ assertions that Turkey was about to join the EU, contrary to the well-known fact that Turkey’s application was indefinitely stalled because of its human rights record. In Brexit propaganda, the danger of Turkish accession was tacitly racist, and represented in terms of an ‘invasion’ of the British Isles. The workings of these various types of truth-twisting are examined in depth in this chapter.

The national populism of the Brexit movement builds up its political worldview on the basis of an ethnocentric myth of continuous homogeneous British nationhood. This was a construct of the imagination that included nostalgia for lost British empire. It was tightly bound up with the Brexiters’ concept of ‘the people’, which brought into their campaign rhetoric the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and ‘the mandate of the people’, as well as ideas from social contract theory. ‘The will of the people’ was a phrase that ran throughout Brexitspeak, deployed by the ex-Remainer Theresa May and ardent Leavers alike, and backed up by the populist press. Brexitspeakers knew what the people’s will was, by implication at least. And the claim that this ‘will’ gave the government an unquestionable mandate followed automatically, despite the narrow margin by which the Leavers had won, and despite the fact that before it the result had been defined as ‘advisory’ only. There was also the question of who precisely constituted ‘the people’ at the referendum, for there were important groups of potential voters who were excluded by the Brexiter-influenced Referendum Act.

This chapter begins applying the theory to the core cases, starting with Trumpism in the USA and Euroscepticism and Brexit in the United Kingdom. It traces the evolution of the populist radical right in both countries; throughout the process, economic trauma, compounded by inadequate or imprudent political responses to the unfolding crisis, stoked and inflamed cultural tensions. Yet in both cases, discontent failed to break through the political status quo as radical right antecedents like the Tea Party and the UK Independence Party (prior to Farage’s ascension to leadership) failed to embrace their supporters’ cultural radicalism. Only when Trump and Farage began to explicitly connect economics, culture, and politics did radical right populism manage to provoke a rupture. We support these arguments using original survey data in the USA, the British Election Study, and analyses of Trump’s rhetoric.

In this chapter we describe the second important electoral development of the Coalition period: the ‘reshuffle on the left’. Coalition with the Conservatives unravelled the Liberal Democrats’ electoral alliance of identity liberals, protest voters and tactical anti-Tory voters. More than one voter in eight in England and Wales switched from the Liberal Democrats to other parties during the Coalition. Protest-motivated Liberal Democrat supporters switched largely to UKIP, but the biggest shift was the migration of identity liberals to Labour, tipping the balance of the Labour electoral coalition. The traditional alliance of ethnic minority voters with Labour was also reinforced in this period as Muslim voters alienated by the Iraq War returned to the Labour fold. As white school leavers alienated by New Labour and angry about immigration shifted in large numbers from Labour to UKIP, the growing strength of identity liberals within the Labour coalition was accelerated. As a result, the 2015 Labour electorate, though similar in size to that of 2010, was dramatically different in composition. The traditional party of the workers was, for the first time, drawing more support from graduates and ethnic minorities than from white school leavers. This was a new Labour Party.