Liam Byrne

Osborne threw all of that in the bin and, you know, the rest is history, as they say.

The rest is politics.

Well, I think nostalgia is a long-standing conservative tradition.

It goes back to Burke, to de Tocqueville.

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?

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 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.

Plus half the shops are shuttered.