The Real Reasons Populism Is Taking Over

0:00Thanks for listening to The Rest is Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. Hi there and welcome to The Rest is Politics with just me, Alastair Campbell. We're doing something a bit different today. Pretty much most weeks in the four years we've done this podcast, Roy and I probably use the word populism and we've talked anxiously about the growing influence of populist leaders and populist appeal all around the world. And I really wanted to get right to the bottom of why people do seem to feel such a pull towards leaders that, frankly, Rory and I both see as charismatic charlatans, people like Trump, people like Farage, people like Orban in Hungary, and then even the ones that have been found out, like Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson, they're still a kind of, oh, well, you know, they're quite this, they're quite that, they're quite funny, they get things done, which is nonsense.

1:06And so what's it all about? And also, what does it mean? I think the word populism itself needs a bit of kind of exploration and understanding. But above all, how do progressives, Democrats, call them what you want? How do we counter it? And what's at the heart of it? Is it a sense of personal loss? Is it that populists are the only ones who acknowledge what has been lost? And of course, as we see with all the false promises they make, that they're promising to return it all. Or is it just kind of pure rebellion that people don't like the establishment, whatever that means, don't like elites, whatever that means, and voting for these right-wing populists is a way of kind of rebelling against that.

1:49So I've been thinking about this for many many years i've been talking about it on the podcast with rory and then a few weeks ago i got sent a book by the labor mp leon byrne the title says it all why populace are winning and what we can do to beat them and leon byrne is a he was a minister in the labor government which i work for and his book really unpicks a lot of this so i thought why not get him in and have a long chat about what this is all about. And so it's in two parts. And in this first part, we're really just going to try and start to unpick it all. So here we go. Part one of our mini series on populism with Liam Byrne, MP.

2:33Let's just work out where it all come from. You seem to think that the global financial crisis is the big driver. I do. And I bring a kind of an economic lens to this. In a way, I was a new Labour minister, helped start progress and all that kind of thing. But I became a bit unhappy with the way that we stopped really focusing on inequality. I think inequality had begun to grow, especially after the financial crash. We should have been tougher on that. But look, in the new Labour years, we were growing wages each year at about 1.5%. What does that mean? That means your wages double every 44 years.

3:09After the crash, wages grow at about 0.5 % a year. That means it takes 106 years for your wages to double. So all of a sudden, democracy's promise is broken. This idea that you work hard, play by the rules and get on in life, it's gone now. But alongside that, something else happened. You've got particular communities that have gone into serious decline, where social capital has collapsed, where social media is especially divisive. And so it's not just people's financial horizons that have shrunk. It's their local horizons that have got much worse because they're looking at a shuttered high street, fly tipping, the library's been closed, there's nothing open, they don't feel in control.

3:48And so their lives just feel like they're going backwards. And so people are naturally kind of angry. So when we basically did our big survey work on who is voting for reform, we found two things. One, they're not actually an army marching in lockstep. There are these five tribes of reform. Some are different, but there is a few things they've got in common. They feel under pressure financially. They're really pessimistic about their future prospects. They're living in communities that they feel are in sharp decline. They then feel a sense of dispossession about their place in the queue and they feel that others are jumping ahead of them and they're furious about broken politics.

4:24Those kind of five things basically get a lot worse for a lot more people after the financial crash. Why do they see as the potential solver of their problems, somebody like Trump, who is a kind of inherited wealth millionaire, who you just look and hear the guy and you say, this is not a guy who cares about working people. This is a guy, and we're seeing this in his second term, who cares about himself and his family and his wealth and his power and his fame, and that's about it. Why do they look to somebody like Farage? Why did they look to somebody like Johnson as a kind of old Etonian media establishment figure to be the person that they suddenly believe in to address those problems?

5:06For one big reason, because politics has become zero sum. When you've got this kind of low growth economy, what you gain is what I think I lose. And so, politics becomes changed. Instead of a kind of generous conversation about what is it we build and share together, it becomes a mad scrabble to defend what I think belongs to me. And who is going to deliver that for me best? a strong man leader. And so when you look at the kind of focus groups about Trump supporters, the thing that comes through in them is that I think he is strong enough to stand up to the rich and powerful, to take on the rich and powerful.

5:42But he is the rich and powerful and he's feeding the rich and powerful. Indeed. So why does that not become a problem? Well, I think it will become a problem. But in the first instance, it is if you're faced with a candidate who you think is strong, tough, who in the focus groups, Deborah Mattinson ran, he's described as neat whiskey or a dump truck on the car, compared to Kamala Harris, say, who people saw as a bit ineffectual, too weak. What you're looking for, your best hope in that choice, is a strongman leader who can derig the economy in favour of working people. Now, it's a myth, it's a fib, it's a lie, but actually that explains a lot of why people are seduced by the populist message.

6:23Do you think it's possible that we could go even further back in terms of where this all stemmed from, that actually, if you go back to Seattle and globalization, and I mean, our friend Scaramucci, Anthony Scaramucci, has got a book coming out in the autumn, and it's called All the Wrong Moves. And the first of the All the Wrong Moves, one of them is the reaction to the crash. But the first one was actually letting China in to the World Trade Organization. Do you remember? Yeah. We were in government and we were thinking, oh, this is a bunch of hippies joining together with the trade unions and they don't understand globalization is going to help them as well.

7:03No, we thought it was an unalloyed good, didn't we? Exactly. And so in a way, that was a way where a lot of working class people maybe did know better than we did because they saw the downside of globalization. And the inequality that you're talking about has got so much worse. Because the other thing that we see now are these unbelievably wealthy people in our country, in Europe, in America. Do you think that might have been a driver of it? Yeah. By 2008, we had begun to get really interested in why was it that there was productivity still growing in the economy, in the British economy, but wages had stopped.

7:35And I remember going to see Joe Biden's team, actually, in 2009. And you might remember this. He'd basically just set up this middle-class task force. And I came back to, and I said to Alistair Darling of Restless Holt, that Alistair, I think we've got something like this going on in our country. I think we need something like the middle class task force. This is when you were his number two at the Treasury. Yeah, when I was Chief Secretary. And he said, well, look, you're not setting up a middle class task force, but you can go and have a Treasury team to go and have a look at this. We went off for six months, came back, and sure enough, we'd found that living standards had basically begun plateauing in Britain in about 2004, 2005.

8:09And so for about four or five years in the run-up to the 2010 election, ordinary working people in Britain had not really had a pay rise. And we had missed it, if we're honest. Why did we miss it? Well, no one had put this analysis together before. It was the first time. I mean, it took us a long time to kind of put it together. But I think we were just too optimistic about the unalloyed good of trade and technology lifting all boats. And the truth is, by 2004, that had stopped happening. And that's why you've got this inequality of wealth, in particular that has grown since 2010. So since 2010, the top 1 % in our country have multiplied their wealth 31 times more than everybody else.

8:47So if you're an ordinary working person, and most reform voters are median income, median wealth, you now look out on a country where there's this inequality of progress. These people at the top, it's haves, have-nots, and have-yots now. Whereas I'm busting a gut every day, and I'm just not moving on. And the kids, they feel they're not, the kids now feel they're won't haves. They'll never have a piece of the pie. Yeah. That is the big change, I think, from previous periods of economic discontent. It's this sense of hopelessness that they're ever going to get a fair deal. And so people are prepared to roll the dice, as Kelly Beaver from Ipsos puts it.

9:26Not with leaders that are unknown, by the way, because actually, if you think about Trump, Farage, Le Pen, they've actually been around for a long time. Here are the two that have been on the fringes, but actually people have a familiarity with them and they just think, right, it is time to roll the dice and just try something else. I don't know if you saw the Channel 4 series recently on Tony Blair, but he was interviewed and at one point he said, Made me a bit nostalgic. If you'd have said to me when I was Prime Minister that Nigel Farage will become a hugely consequential political figure and Jeremy Corbyn will lead the Labour Party, I said you're away with the fairies.

9:57Both of those things have happened. And I think I'm not – this is something that's – I know this because in my diaries, though I don't remember it. But in my diaries, I do record having arguments with Tony about whether we're conscious that there could be a really big downside to globalization. Because I think I was feeling it in certain places. Yeah. Well, you'd have seen it in Burnley. Correct. Yeah. I saw it in Harlow where I grew up in Essex. Yeah. And so I don't think we got into that. And so, therefore, you have this sense of people seeing a world out there that is better than the world that they're living in.

10:32The politicians still saying, this is a really great world and you're part of it, but they don't feel part of it. So, I think in Brexit, for example, I think that David Cameron going around saying, if you vote leave, you know, you're going to destroy this great economy. So many people go, I don't know what this great economy is. No, when I was knocking on doors in Shard End in my constituency in East Birmingham and tried that argument, people just thought I was from a different planet because they just thought, well, look, you tell me, please, what have I got to lose? It goes back to that classic question that I think came up in Newcastle during the referendum when I think it might have been George Osborne talking about the potential hit to GDP.

11:07And the heckler in the audience said, who's GDP? And that is actually one of the things that I don't think we'd paid enough attention to at the back end of the new Labour years. Yeah, so you've got a sense of people feeling that democracy is not working, the economy is not working, their wages aren't rising, and so forth. So that's the thing that the populist, I guess, is playing into. How are they able to do it without what I would define and you would define as a kind of a serious policy program? Is that because people have given up believing that serious policy programs can work? I think that's part of it.

11:42But the second part is that they will always play on blaming the outsider. So they will always find somebody to blame and say, look, if we just take on these people who are to blame, then actually things will be okay for the rest of us. And so that's why, you know, in politics, you do need enemies. And it's why I, you know, go on to argue that actually mainstream politics needs to define its enemies better as the vested interests holding back our economy. But that kind of blame carries you a long way. But second, people do just feel that because the system is broken, it needs shaking up. And therefore, that becomes the principal objective in supporting populists.

12:23If you couple that with a sense that I've got nothing to lose by voting these guys in, then actually you've got quite a potent political movement. You, in a way, are a victim of populist politics because, as you say, you were chief secretary. And then we lost the election to David Cameron's coalition government. And the new chief secretary comes in and he finds your note saying there is no money left, which I at the time thought was a perfectly… Traditional bit of gallows humor. There's a bit of kind of banter between, you're basically saying, welcome in, and you maybe underestimated the extent to which the Tories are utterly ruthless, and they think, right, we've got back in it, we're not going to go any time soon.

13:04That became weaponized to the extent that it almost defines you. It follows you everywhere. Yeah. I mean, the notes got a bit longer now, so this book is... The notes have got a bit longer, so this is now 40 ,000 words. But was that a form of populist politics? The fact that David Cameron, who knew that it was a joke, and it's probably the sort of joke that he would have made to somebody. Yeah, and people have been leaving that note since Churchill. So, Churchill invented the tradition and everyone has followed in their wake. And it's carried a bit of a curse. So, David Lourdes, who kind of revealed the note once when he apologized to me a few years later, said, Look, Liam, if it's any consolation, David Cameron came to my constituency waving that note around and I then lost my seat.

13:47And we all know what happened to George Osborne. So there has been a curse of the note. But I'm not sure if it was populism because I think it was just, you know, effective Tory attack kind of politics. I mean, it certainly had a level of kind of speed and aggression, as they say in the British Army, that was quite effective. But I think in the long run, it will be judged as the cover for what was the disastrous austerity program. Because, of course, what people forget - That's why it became so significant. Yeah, and what people forget is that we also left a plan for getting the deficit down by half by 2016, debt falling by 2016.

14:22Osborne threw all of that in the bin and, you know, the rest is history. Yeah, no, we don't plug the rest is history, the rest is politics. They do their own dirty work. So let's just have a little look at how they turn some of this sense of loss that people have into the anger that is both fueled, but is also weaponized, not least with the media landscape that you've talked about. Well, I think, you know, nostalgia is a longstanding conservative tradition. You know, it goes back to Burke, to de Tocqueville, the kind of the wisdom of the past has always been an important trope in conservative thinking.

14:57I think what populists do, though, is they effectively combine it with what I think I've discovered is the secret to their nostalgic message, which is actually the hunger for something lost that is local. So I think this whole local thing has been radically underestimated. Hardcore reform voters, about 80 % of them, think that their area is in decline. That is twice the level of the national average. When you then go on and ask, again, the most hardcore reform voters, what's the community spirit like in your neck of the woods? They will say, overall, then very negative about it. When you then kind of dig into it, like you then do the kind of the word clouds on what people say in focus groups that we've run with them.

15:40People talk about two words in particular, crime and shops. So the death of the high street in particular has become the kind of cipher, the symbol of communities that are going backwards. And look, if you've got high streets that are full of shop units which have been taken over by organized crime, money laundering, people smuggling, illegal tobacco, and worse, frankly, the BBC's got a good piece of work coming out on this shortly. And the National Crime Agency tells me there are thousands of those units on high streets now. plus half the shops are shuttered and there's no public services left because they've been shut down thanks to austerity you now basically feel like you're trapped in a world that is very different and much worse than your memory so when you talk to people about what do you want to see restored the words that people come up with are things like I'd like to see the butchers back and the post office and the green grocers people have these kind of it's rosy retrospection as the pollsters tell you But the nostalgia thing, I think, is a local nostalgia.

16:46But then, isn't one of the problems that we all buy in or have been pushed to buy in to this tech revolution that means that we don't equate our own conduct, our own behavior, our own sense of responsibility with the fact that because we all shop online, because we go onto Amazon, because we can't be bothered to go and find a shop, These shops are shutting down. Partly, but I think there are also some consequentials here for Labour and its economic policy. So, I mean, if you look at the way that we have loaded up small business with a ton of costs right now, whether that is crime costs, labour costs, energy costs, business rates.

17:25You're talking about this Labour government. I'm talking about this Labour government, HMRC that doesn't answer the telephone. It's impossible to find out who owns these shop units because they're often based abroad because we haven't sorted that out yet. Actually, we're not helping ourselves here. you could actually have a small business renaissance on high streets if we changed our economic thinking a bit and actually moved on from the kind of Bidenomics that characterised, you know, Labour getting elected and actually thought, do you know what? To rebuild our economy, we actually need small business entrepreneurs, freelancers to actually be able to do an awful lot better.

17:59And we need to rethink the way that we're not overburdening them right now. Is this a call to reverse the national insurance rises and more? Well, I think you could – NICS is definitely a tough, tough deal for a lot of small businesses. But my point – and this was my first question, actually, to Kira on the liaison committee when I joined the liaison committee at the beginning of this parliament. Do you think it's actually wise to do NICS and labour rights and energy costs and business rates and not do anything about crime costs all at the same time? Because I don't think it is, frankly. And you mentioned earlier this thing about nostalgia.

18:30I guess this relates to take back control, make America great again. Do we mythologize the past or do they have a point that there's something better in what we've lost? So I think this is really important. One of the things that struck me hardest when we ran the semantic analysis of popular speeches, it's the language of time. They freight their speeches with time, again, past, once more. It's an incredible - When we were running campaigns, you always thought, you know, you've always got to be focused on the future. Bill Clinton, don't stop thinking about tomorrow. And they're saying, don't stop thinking about yesterday.

19:13Right, exactly. And in a world where people are profoundly pessimistic about the future, it's got to market. So, half of reform voters think their wealth is going to decline in the future. Now, populists don't give them an answer to that, apart from trying to take it off other people. But it's one of the reasons that Labour, or indeed the centre-right too, has got to reinvent some optimism, plausible optimism, about the future. Because we should be the party that says, look, you can build the future with pride in the past, but you can't live in the past. Because frankly, that is not an answer to the problems that we've got today.

19:47The world is not slowing down. It's speeding up. And if we want to be a winner in the future, then we need a story about plausible optimism for the future. It's one of the big dividing lines that I think we can win on, actually. There you are. That was me talking to Liam Byrne about populism. And if you enjoyed it, you want to hear the whole conversation, become a subscriber. join the club sign up at