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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thanks 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, Alistair 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. There's 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.
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Chapter 2: What is populism and why is it gaining popularity?
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. 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, 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.
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. Let'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. And in a way, 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 1.5%. 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 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. And 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 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 are 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.
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Chapter 3: How do populist leaders exploit the sense of loss?
What you're looking for, your best hope in that choice, is a strongman 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.
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 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, we were in government and we were thinking, oh, this is just a bunch of hippies joining together with the trade unions and they don't understand globalization is going to help them as well. No, we thought it was an unalloyed good, didn't we? Exactly.
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've been a driver of it?
Yeah. And 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. And 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, 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 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.
And 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.
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Chapter 4: How did the global financial crisis influence populism?
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 populists, 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. 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 in politics, you do need enemies.
And it's why I 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, 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 humour. Well, a bit of kind of banter between.
You're basically saying, welcome in and do that. And you maybe underestimated the extent to which the Tories are utterly ruthless. And they think, right, we've got back at it. We're not going to go anytime soon. That became weaponised to the extent that it almost defines you.
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Chapter 5: What role does inequality play in the rise of populism?
It follows you everywhere.
Yeah. I mean, the notes got a bit longer now. 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 Laws, who kind of revealed the note once when he apologised 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.
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 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. Osborne threw all of that in the bin and, you know, the rest is history, as they say.
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.
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Chapter 6: Why do voters turn to populist figures like Trump and Farage?
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.