Pod Insights The Rest Is Politics The Real Reasons Populism Is Taking Over About this episode What is populism, and why is it so attractive to voters? Which human instincts do populists tap into to get votes? And what does a populist-led country look like?
Alastair is joined by Liam Byrne, MP who served in both Blair and Brown's government, and who has been conducting deep research into the rise of populism.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Alastair Campbell? 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, Rory 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.
0:46 Alastair Campbell? They're still the 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. And 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 they've, people don't like the establishment,
1:26 Alastair Campbell? 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? So 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 Labour MP Liam Byrne. The title says it all, Why Populists Are Winning and What We Can Do to Beat Them. And Liam Byrne is a, he was a minister in the Labour Government, which I worked 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.
2:10 Alastair Campbell? 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.
2:21 Alastair Campbell? Let's just work out where it all come from. You seem to think that the global financial crisis is the big driver.
2:27 Speaker 01 I do, and I bring a kind of an economic lens to this. And in a way, you know, what, you know, as you know, I was a kind of 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. And I think inequality had begun to grow, especially after the financial crash. And we should have been tougher on that. But look, in the New Labour years, we were growing wages each year at about one and a half percent. What does that mean? That means your wages double every 44 years. After 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
3:09 Speaker 01 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, you know, there's nothing open, they don't feel in control. And so their lives just feel like they're going backwards. And so people are, you know, 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
3:51 Speaker 01 tribes of reform. Some are, some are different, but there is a few things they've got in common. They felt 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 jumping ahead of them. And they're furious about broken politics. Those kind of five things basically get a lot worse for a lot more people after the financial crash.
4:18 Alastair Campbell? Why do they see as the potential solver of their problems?
4:25 Alastair Campbell? Somebody like Trump, who is a kind of inherited wealth millionaire.
4:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:29 Alastair Campbell? Who, he just look and hear the guy and you say, this is not a guy who cares about working people.
4:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:35 Alastair Campbell? This is a guy, 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?
4:53 Speaker 01 For 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.
5:29 Alastair Campbell? He is the rich and powerful and he's feeding the rich and powerful.
5:32 Speaker 01 Indeed.
5:32 Alastair Campbell? So why can?
5:34 Speaker 01 Because there's.
5:34 Alastair Campbell? Why does that not become a problem?
5:36 Speaker 01 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 Matson ran, you know, 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 strong man leader who can de-rig 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.
6:11 Alastair Campbell? Do 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.
6:21 Speaker 01 Hmm.
6:21 Alastair Campbell? 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?
6:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:41 Alastair Campbell? We were in government and we were thinking, oh, this is a bunch of.
6:44 Speaker 01 Yeah.
6:45 Alastair Campbell? A bunch of hippies joining together the trade unions and they, you know, they don't understand globalization is going to help them as well.
6:50 Speaker 01 Now, we thought it was an unalloyed good, didn't we?
6:52 Alastair Campbell? 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, these unbelievably wealthy people in our country, in Europe, in America, do you think that might have been a driver of it?
7:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, and by two thousand and eight, um, 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. And I remember going to see Joe Biden's team actually in two thousand and nine. 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, God rest his soul, that Alistair, I think we've got something like this going on in our country. I think we need something like the middle class.
7:40 Alastair Campbell? This is when you were his number two.
7:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, when I was chief secretary and he said, well, look, you're, 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 have basically begun plateauing in Britain in about two thousand and four, two thousand and five. And so for about four or five years in the run up to the twenty and ten election, ordinary working people in Britain had not really had a pay rise and we had missed it, if we're honest.
8:05 Alastair Campbell? And why did we miss it?
8:06 Speaker 01 Well, no one put this analysis together before 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 two thousand and four, that stopped happening.
8:22 Alastair Campbell? Hmm.
8:23 Speaker 01 And that's why you've got this inequality of wealth in particular that has grown since twenty ten. So since twenty ten, the top one percent in our country have multiplied their wealth thirty one times more than everybody else. So if you're an ordinary working person and most reform voters are a median income, median wealth, you now look out on a country where there's, there's this inequality of progress. These people at the top, it's haves, have-nots and have-yachts now. Whereas I'm busting your gut every day and I'm just not moving on. And the kids, they feel they're not, the kids now feel they won't haves. They will never have a piece of the pie.
9:01 Alastair Campbell? Yeah, that is the big change, I think, from previous periods of economic discontent. It's this sense of hopelessness that they're ever
9:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:09 Alastair Campbell? going to get a fair deal.
9:10 Speaker 01 And so people are prepared to roll the dice, as Kelly Beaver from Ipsos puts it. Not 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. They're 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.
9:27 Alastair Campbell? I don't know if you saw the Channel Four series recently on Tony Blair. But he was interviewed and at one point he said,
9:35 Speaker 01 Made me a bit nostalgic.
9:36 Alastair Campbell? 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'd have said you're away with the fairies. Both of those things have happened. See, 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, whether we're conscious that there could be a really big downside to globalisation. Because I think I was feeling it in certain places.
10:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, you've seen it in Burnley.
10:06 Alastair Campbell? Correct, yeah.
10:07 Speaker 01 I saw it in Harlow, where I grew up in Essex.
10:09 Alastair Campbell? Yeah. And so I don't think we've gone 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. The 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.
10:35 Speaker 01 No, when I was knocking on doors in Shire End in my constituency, East Birmingham, and tried that argument, people just thought I was from a different planet. Because they just sort of thought, well, look, what, 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. And the heckler in the audience said, who's GDP? And that, 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.
11:04 Alastair Campbell? 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 they're. That the populists, I guess, is 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 programme?
11:24 Speaker 01 Hmm.
11:25 Alastair Campbell? Is that because people have given up believing that serious policy programmes can work?
11:29 Speaker 01 I think that's part of it, but 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. If you couple that with a sense that I've got nothing to lose by voting these guys in,
12:14 Speaker 01 then actually you've got quite a potent political movement.
12:17 Alastair Campbell? You, in a way, are a victim of populist politics. Because, as you say, you were chief secretary.
12:24 Speaker 01 Hmm.
12:24 Alastair Campbell? And then we lost the election to David Cameron's coalition government. And the new chief secretary comes in and he finds your notes saying, there is no money left, which I at the time thought was a perfectly.
12:38 Speaker 01 Traditional bit of gallows humour.
12:39 Alastair Campbell? A bit of kind of banter between, you're basically saying, welcome in and da da. And you may be underestimated the extent to which the Tories are utterly ruthless. And they think, right, we've got back in, we're not going to go any time soon. That became weaponised to the extent that it it's kind of, it almost defines you. It follows you everywhere.
12:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, the I mean, the notes got a bit longer now, so this book is for, the notes have got a bit longer, so this is now, they're now forty thousand words.
13:06 Alastair Campbell? 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
13:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, you know, 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 Laws, who kind of revealed the note once, when he apologised to me a few years later, said, Liam, if it's, if it's any consolation, David Cameron came to my constituency waving that note around and I then lost my seat. And 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
13:57 Speaker 01 the disastrous austerity programme. Because of course, what people forget-
14:00 Alastair Campbell? That's why it became so significant.
14:01 Speaker 01 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, Osborne through all of that in the bin. And you know, the rest is history, as they say.
14:12 Alastair Campbell? No, we don't plug the rest of this history. The rest is politics, Liam. 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 fuelled, but is also weaponised, not least with the media landscape that you've talked about.
14:32 Speaker 01 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. I 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?
15:17 Speaker 01 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. People 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 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 organised 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.
15:59 Speaker 01 Plus, half the shops are shuttered and and there's no public services left because they've been shut down thanks to austerity. You you you now basically feel like you're trapped in a world that is very different and much worse than your memories. So when you talk to people about like, what do you want to see restored? The words that people come up with are things like, well, I'd like to see the butchers back and the post office. You know, and the the green grocers, people have these kind of, it's it's rosy retrospection as the as the pollsters tell you. But but the nostalgia thing, I think, is a local nostalgia.
16:34 Alastair Campbell? But 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, we don't equate our own conduct, our own behaviour, 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.
16:58 Speaker 01 Partly, but I think there are also some consequential 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 tonne of costs right now, whether that is crime costs, labour costs, energy costs, business rates.
17:13 Alastair Campbell? You're talking this Labour government?
17:14 Speaker 01 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 by dynamics 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.
17:45 Speaker 01 To actually be able to do an awful lot better and we need to rethink the way that we're not overburdening them right now.
17:50 Alastair Campbell? Is this a call to reverse the national insurance rises and more?
17:53 Speaker 01 Well, I think you could, NICS is definitely a tough, tough deal for a lot of small businesses. But the, my point, and this was my first question actually to Kieran 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.
18:16 Alastair Campbell? And you mentioned earlier this thing about nostalgia. I guess this relates to take back control, make America great again. Do we mythologise the past or do they have a point that there's something better in what we've lost?
18:33 Speaker 01 So I think this is really important. One of the things that struck me hardest when we ran this semantic analysis of popular speeches, it's the language of time. They freight their speeches with time, again, past, once more. It's incredible.
18:51 Alastair Campbell? When we were running campaigns, we 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.
19:01 Speaker 01 Right, exactly. And in a world where people are profoundly pessimistic about the future, it's got a 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, you know, the centre right too, has got to reinvent some optimism, plausible optimism about the future. Because we, 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. The 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.
19:46 Alastair Campbell? 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 therestispolitics.com.
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