Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics Beating Populism: How To Fight Back About this episode Are we living in a 1930s moment in history? How can leaders fight back against populism? And is Franklin D Roosevelt the answer?
Join Alastair Campbell and Liam Byrne for part 2 of their discussion on why populism is winning and how to beat it.
To hear the whole Populism series, sign up at therestispolitics.com
Social Producer: Celine Charles
Video Editor: James Clayden
Producer: India Dunkley
Exec Producer: Tom Whiter
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Alastair Campbell? Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell, without Rory but shortly with Liam Byrne MP for the second part in our mini-series on populism. Liam's written this very, very interesting book about populism, where it comes from, what it means, how it's exploited, and we're talking particularly about right-wing populism, as people who've listened to part one will know. But that was really all about diagnosing the problem. What this episode seeks to do is to go through how it can be defeated by those who still believe in progressive democratic politics and politics as a force for good, rather than the force for exploitation by charismatic charlatans. So here you go, a few ideas.
0:43 Alastair Campbell? And don't be surprised if you hear the name Franklin D Roosevelt quite a lot in this episode. We talked in part one about these five groups: the disgusted disruptors, the left behind collectives, the traditional conservatives, the melancholy middle, the civic pragmatists. I want to focus on the bottom two.
1:01 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:02 Alastair Campbell? Because you're basically saying the top three, the Tories and Labour, might as well take the battle away and go home because they're not going to come back to them.
1:10 Speaker 01 And they were never within reach.
1:12 Alastair Campbell? Well, they might have been with the Tories, some of them.
1:14 Speaker 01 Some of them were with the Tories, but I mean, 70% of Reform voters will have not voted Labour in the last 20 years.
1:20 Alastair Campbell? Well, if you never voted for Tony Blair, you're never going to vote Labour, right? Well, we know that, Liam, we know that. So, but of that 40%, you alluded to this in part one, but let's just dig into it now. See, I would argue in the approach on immigration, I kind of understand the politics of it, but I do think the rhetoric of it through this parliament has been, in a sense, about aiming at all of these people.
1:41 Speaker 01 Correct.
1:42 Alastair Campbell? Right, which has alienated
1:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:45 Alastair Campbell? a lot of people who you're losing to the left of Labour and to the Greens. So, based both on your analysis of all this, but more importantly in a way, your experience as immigration minister under New Labour.
2:01 Alastair Campbell? What is the right balance between we're going to sort this and we're going to be tough and we're going to stop this and stop that and what's the balance that is most likely to at least get these people thinking differently?
2:16 Speaker 01 Well, we learned the hard way is that there's basically a double balance you've got to strike. So one, your borders have got to be strong. So if you think about what we had to do, we had to go to the UK Border Agency, put people in uniform, create these kind of offshore checks before people got anywhere near the border, you've got to have strong borders and that is why you have to fix the boats crisis. But the second balance you've got to strike is that people have got to kind of earn their stay, earn their path to citizenship. So earn citizenship with the big set of reforms that I'd prepared, you know, we ran out of time before implementing them, Shabana Mahmud has picked them up. And I spent a lot of time going around the country, talking to people about, okay, look, what is the deal to be British? How do you, how do you earn the right to be British?
2:58 Speaker 01 And the, you know, the thing that struck me is that actually people are perfectly reasonable. They say, look, do you know what? It comes down to three things. It comes down to learning to speak English, obeying the law and working hard and paying tax. Beyond that, you should be live and let live.
3:13 Alastair Campbell? You're talking here about all of these people or some of these people?
3:15 Speaker 01 Your civic pragmatist and your melancholy middle actually, I mean, I think your more hardcore reform voters are just so fixed that all immigration is bad, can never be good, you know, you're not going to win them back on an argument about immigration, you know, they are, you know, they're, they're not going to leave.
3:31 Alastair Campbell? But in which case, in which case you're going to lose other people on the economy, those people who are more driven by the economy doing well, because if you don't, let's be frank, with the birth rate declining, with our demographics as they are, we are going to have to keep making the case for immigration.
3:46 Speaker 01 We are, and look, the, the big question in Western economics right now is how do you maintain economic dynamism in an aging society? So you, you are going to, but I think you can win a story about immigration if you
3:58 Alastair Campbell? Provided you fix the system.
3:59 Speaker 01 Provided, you could basically say, look, it is a system that is in control, not out of control. And actually, if you want to be part of the country, you've got to earn your right to stay here. Those are kind of two. Perfectly reasonable kind of propositions and all of the work that people like Sineka Waller has done at British Future shows that that kind of pragmatism is actually where most people are. But if you don't fix immigration reform, then you're not going to win these people back. And that, if you like, is one of the messages to many people in the Labour Party, which is, look, don't pretend this is not an issue, because we are going to have to make progress on it. Do you put it at the top of the list of things that you talk about every day on your messaging?
4:41 Speaker 01 No, you don't. Actually, you fix it, because what you're trying to do is to reduce the salience of the issue at the next election, because actually Labour's got to run on the economy at the next election, because all of our message testing shows that the big way that you beat reform is by reminding people that his economic plan is basically Liz Truss on steroids.
5:00 Alastair Campbell? Promising the earth.
5:02 Speaker 01 And what does that mean? It drives up your interest rates.
5:05 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, absolutely. Maybe that discussion on immigration leads us into one of the key points of your prospectus for how to beat the populace, which is what you call fairness, the fairness code.
5:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
5:19 Alastair Campbell? And I guess that's what you're saying about immigration. We need to assist and that people understand and respect and they think is fair. But which other areas?
5:28 Speaker 01 There's two. So one is that we have got to be puncture in taking on this selfish minority who don't play by the rules. And on the Business and Trade Committee, we see them week in, week out. Why has Fujitsu not contributed a bean to the £2 billion bill for restoring justice to post-obstinate rights and victims? Not a penny have they paid. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
5:52 Alastair Campbell? What's the answer to that?
5:52 Speaker 01 Well, A, they haven't had the moral courage to do it, and B, ministers have not been demanding enough, you know, so actually sin on both sides. But equally, if you think about the companies that we've had to bring in for shortchanging their workers, now, they would all kind of argue this, but we have had to bring in companies like Every and companies like Amazon and companies like McDonald's, who, because we've had real concerns about how their workforce is being treated, we think that consumer harm in our country, the Of rip offs at bills and tills. It's not a small problem. It costs consumers seventy one billion pounds a year. These are these are kind of big problems that people feel at a time when they're under financial pressure. And so. So why aren't we doing it? Well. Why aren't we doing it? Why aren't we taking that on?
6:36 Speaker 01 I think from a lack of self confidence. The reason they're not doing it, of course, is that they're worried about, you know, disincentivising investment in the economy and all that kind of thing. And I get that. There's a balance to strike, which is why I'm saying we're not, we're not here to launch a war on capitalism. We're here to pick a fight with some vested interests who are not playing by the rules. We need to be the party of a more kind of civic capitalism. So that's fairness point number one. Fairness point number two is in the social security system where we now have a country where it is very difficult for people to build wealth and assets. And as I've said, the top one percent has multiplied its wealth by thirty one times more than everybody else since twenty ten. So the big idea in the book that came before this on the inequality of wealth is
7:18 Speaker 01 an idea, not universal basic income, but universal basic capital. And the idea here is that you restore savings, matches, tax breaks and incentives for people to build up assets, to put down a deposit on a home to call their own, to retrain, restock their human capital and to save more into a pension. Is that being done anywhere? It's being done in places like Singapore. So Singapore is probably the best example. And the way you pay for it is actually by building a sovereign wealth fund, which we're beginning to do. Which we should have done when we had North Sea Oil. If we had not given away North Sea Oil, we would have a sovereign wealth fund of five hundred billion pounds right now. But the way that you build it now is by restoring fairness to this tax system and actually introducing
8:02 Speaker 01 not necessarily a wealth tax, but higher taxes on wealth. So if you think about Rishi Sunak's tax return, which I don't know if you've read, it's not very long, it's about a page long. And the last tax return. Twenty two percent.
8:16 Alastair Campbell? Was it?
8:17 Speaker 01 Bang on.
8:17 Alastair Campbell? There you go.
8:19 Speaker 01 Two million in income, tax rate 23%. I mean, how can that be right? They can't be right, be wrong. So if you begin, you know, restoring a bit of fairness to the tax system, actually like that old socialist Nigel Lawson did, equalising capital gains tax rates and income tax rates, you would begin to raise the money over the course of five to six years to build the kind of sovereign wealth fund that could help you finance those kind of tax breaks. To restore an old idea, actually, once upon a time, we used to talk about the property owning democracy. Noel Skelton, who was a Tory, talked about it in the 1920s. John Rules, the, you know, left wing philosopher, talked about it in the 70s. Maybe we would call it the wealth owning democracy today. But that's got to be one of the ideas that is in the radical centre of politics today.
9:02 Alastair Campbell? Right, but if I add what you've just said to what you said in part one about small businesses and the high street, you're saying, I think, that if we're going to counter this, we have to have bigger, bolder strategies for the budgets that remain between now and the elections.
9:19 Speaker 01 Hundred percent, hundred percent. And, you know, they're not going to be easy because Iran has just put the cost of everything up. But if we don't do this, what is going to happen? You know, we are going to end up with weaker governments in the future, not stronger governments in the future. And democracy's promise, this idea that if you work hard, play by the rules, you can get on, is not going to be restored. And that is fatal to the health of a democracy.
9:44 Alastair Campbell? You also talk about something called civic gospel.
9:47 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:47 Alastair Campbell? Are you a faith guy?
9:48 Speaker 01 Kind of, I'm a sort of struggling Catholic, I would say. I kind of grew up in a Catholic family and my dad was much influenced by the kind of social Catholic theory of the sort of 50s and 60s.
9:58 Alastair Campbell? Okay, because your civic gospel, which, look, I believe in, I'm not a faith guy, I'm not a god guy. But the worry I had about reading this part of your book was... State and local government.
10:10 Speaker 01 Yeah, but the idea comes from actually Joseph Chamberlain.
10:14 Alastair Campbell? Yeah.
10:15 Speaker 01 In Birmingham, my hometown. And the insight is that, you know, the time Birmingham was being built, you had kind of thousands and thousands of people leaving the farms and villages, coming into these strange new places called cities. And the response was not, oh, my God, this is terrifying. Let's go back to the farm and the village. It was, right, a revolution in civic inventiveness. We invented this kind of incredible clubs. You know, we invented, you know, the powers of municipal government back then, gas and water socialism. You know, it it it wasn't a terrified response. It was an inventive response. And people like Robert Putnam have written about this for a long time. This kind of reinvention of social capital and civic connectedness is is what we need to glue communities back together again.
10:59 Speaker 01 And this is where the government has actually got, it's got its plan bang on. So this big multi-billion pound Pride in Place fund that it's launched, 10 year fund, a bit like our neighbourhood renewal fund back in the day, is actually one of its biggest and boldest and best ideas.
11:13 Alastair Campbell? How important as a negative for the sort of world that we've, we're now living in has been the relative decline of the church and the trade unions, speaking as a, from an atheist to what do you call a struggling Catholic?
11:27 Speaker 01 Struggling Catholic.
11:28 Alastair Campbell? Does that mean you go to confession a lot?
11:29 Speaker 01 Uh, no, it means I worry about not going to confession.
11:36 Speaker 01 It's been important, but I mean, if you think about a lot of our communities today, it is actually the faith institutions that have held things together. So I, you know, had to spend a lot of time over the last 10 years, running through bank collection systems in my constituency. It's a very high rate of child poverty. You know, very often it's the churches and the temples and the mosques that I'm working with, as well as the primary schools, much underrated actually. The way primary schools kept our communities together over the last 10 to 15 years has been one of the unsung miracles of British national life. We should be giving O B Es to head teachers, in my view, left, right and centre. But we've got to build on those foundations now for new times. And then we've got to have the courage to take on some of the forces that are deepening divisions. One, American big town.
12:19 Speaker 01 To kleptocrats trying to surge dark money into British politics. So there's a, there's a fight there as well. It's not just about, let's just refresh fraternity.
12:29 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, yeah.
12:29 Speaker 01 And build a more united kingdom from this diverse nations that we've got. That there's also, you know, they need to get a lot punchier with some big and powerful interests.
12:41 Alastair Campbell? So there you go. That was part of the conversation in part two of our mini series on populism. And if you want to hear the whole thing, you've just got to join the club. Go to the rest is politics.com and subscribe.
Previous 522. Has Hungary Shown Britain How to Beat Farage? (Question Time) Next 523. The Starmer-Mandelson Scandal: Lying or Incompetence? Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
