On 23 June 2016, British citizens voted to leave the European Union (EU). Less than five months later on 8 November, American citizens elected Donald Trump as the President of the United States of America (USA). A consensus quickly emerged that both votes represented a reaction against ‘globalization’ by ‘dispossessed’, ‘left behind’ population segments (Harris, 2016). Guy Ryder, the director general of the International Labour Organization (ILO), called it ‘the revolt of the dispossessed’, arguing that: ‘The societies we all live in are distributing the benefits of globalisation and economic processes extraordinarily unfairly and people think they are getting a raw deal’ (cited in Allen, 2016). The consensus also identified ‘global elites’ as the target of this vote of dissatisfaction (although in some of the right-wing media coverage this was cleverly repackaged as a rejection of an undefined ‘liberal elite’, thus implying a rejection of ‘liberal’ politics rather than the inequalities associated with neoliberal globalisation). President Barack Obama, for example, observed that: ‘When we see people, global elites, wealthy corporations seemingly living by a different set of rules, avoiding taxes, manipulating loopholes … this feeds a profound sense of injustice’ (cited in Smith, 2016).

There are clearly idiosyncratic aspects of each vote. In the UK, for example, a deeply Eurosceptic national press sustained a discourse over a number of years prior to the referendum, in which the EU was portrayed overwhelmingly as a foreign threat to British sovereignty rather than as a common European project (Hawkins, 2012). The complexities of EU membership, let alone those pertaining to an exit process, were never properly explained to the British electorate. Furthermore, while Trump has promoted deeply protectionist politics in the USA, the dominant discourse in the UK has been one of the need for continuing liberalised trade outside of the EU (albeit without free movement of people). While recognising these specificities, however, it seems credible that both votes reflect a deep dissatisfaction among particular population groups with the outcomes of neoliberal globalisation. These outcomes are simultaneously economic, social, political and cultural, and it is difficult to disentangle the interaction between these elements, especially since they may not be separated in the minds of voters themselves. The perceived impact of immigration was a key element in both cases.