The phrase “rain does not fall on one roof alone” is not just a nice, proverbial hair-stroke to a friend who is grieving, but is particularly applicable to almost everything in our modern-day reality, where the principle of six degrees of separation has become more of a barely-there high-school diploma. In our ever-exponential world of connectedness, nothing can go on without everyone else eventually hearing about it. At worst, they may even get involved themselves.
This interconnectedness has (to no one’s surprise) trickled down straight into politics, and when authoritarianism rains, it does not pour; it drowns. Movements in other countries inspire others, and soon enough, great swathes of a public many of us only imagined existing within our borders is undeniably real, and currently marching down our streets. I suppose it only takes one voice to be taken seriously to open the flood gates.
When Donald Trump described the US’s friendship with the UK as so good that “special does not begin to do it justice” (n.b. last night’s Newsnight was particularly nauseating), he was completely wrong. Our relationship is not a friendship; it is a sisterhood. Our motherlands are cut from the same cloth, bleed the same blood, and are built on the same foundations – foundations of coloniality, of oppression, of genocide, of the freedom fantasy. So when opinions and falsehoods fester in one, it is inevitable that it should hop straight across the pond.
Albeit – in its current form – certainly inspired by the rise of the far-right fascists in the US, anti-immigrant and racist rhetoric has always been central to British politics. It is simply experiencing a rebirth. Trump and the consequential rise of anti-intellectualism and anti-DEI told those of like minds on UK soil that their voice was a “valid” one. No longer silenced by the fear of isolation, such people are happy to take to the streets. These facets of fascism are now so strong in numbers that the shame once brought down upon them in their admission to voting for UKIP is now celebrated in the corners of the community in which they now coalesce.
UKIP’s, the Leave campaign’s, the Brexit Party’s, and now Reform UK’s Nigel Farage is practically synonymous with this particular wave of discontent. He has perfected the art of playing the insurgent while being very much part of the establishment, a salesman who has repackaged xenophobia under the label of “taking back control”. It would be comforting to dismiss him as a footnote, a carnival barker at the edges of performatively polite politics, but the truth is less palatable. Farage has redefined what it means to seize political space in Britain, shaping the national conversation and shifting the Overton window so far right that mainstream parties are left scrambling for relevance, and said window somewhere in the neighbour’s garden. Want proof? Just look at Labour’s immigration policy of “one-in-one-out”.
Britain’s political stage is now a crowded one. What was once a Westminster duopoly is today a nine-party circus, and that multiplicity of voices – some reasoned, others reactionary – has both enriched and destabilised our democracy. The Lib Dems, the Greens, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Your Party, Sinn Féin, Reform UK, among others, now share the arena; a constant reminder that no single party can claim to truly represent “the people”. In theory, this diffusion of power allows for greater representation; in practice, it opens more avenues for demagogues like Farage to exploit division on both an inter- and an intra-party basis. But I suppose, at least we have the choice: we have the opportunity to rebel, to support something new, to root for the underdog.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the US system remains shackled to its own design flaw: the Electoral College. The structure ensures that independent or third-party movements are cast not as alternatives but as spoilers – every vote for an outsider is translated as a subtraction from one of the “Big Two”. This binary stranglehold breeds an impoverished political imagination, where citizens are taught to fear “wasting” their vote more than they are encouraged to vote their conscience. The result is a system built to protect itself, to neutralise insurgency, and to render true reform all but impossible.
Britain’s fractured multiparty politics and America’s calcified two-party duopoly may look like different beasts, but they are, in essence, two sides of the same colonial coin. Both operate through exclusion: in the US, the exclusion of choice; in the UK, the exclusion of belonging. The stakes are not simply about who governs but about who gets to belong, who gets to speak, and who gets to be heard. And in both cases, the storm clouds gathering are not new weather systems – they are the same old rain, and when it rains, it pours.