Beating Populism: How To Fight Back

**Alastair Campbell** (0:00)
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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 have 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. 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 collectivists, the traditional conservatives, the melancholy middle, the civic pragmatists. I want to focus on the bottom two. Yeah. Because you're basically saying the top three, the Tories and Labour might as well take the bat away and go home because they're not going to come back to them.

**Liam Byrne** (1:22)
And they were never within reach.

**Alastair Campbell** (1:25)
Well, they might have been with the Tories, some of them.

**Liam Byrne** (1:27)
Some of them were within the Tories. But I mean, 70% of reformed voters will have not voted Labour in the last 20 years.

**Alastair Campbell** (1:33)
Well, if you never voted for Tony Blair, you're never going to vote Labour. We know that. 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.

**Liam Byrne** (1:54)
Correct.

**Alastair Campbell** (1:54)
Right. Which has alienated 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, 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?

**Liam Byrne** (2:28)
Well, we learn 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 a big set of reforms that I prepared. We ran out of time before implementing them, Shabana Mahmood has picked them up. I spent a lot of time going around the country talking to people about, okay, what is the deal to be British? How do you earn the right to be British?
And 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 on paying tax. Beyond that, we should be living let live.

**Alastair Campbell** (3:25)
You're talking here about all of these people or some of these people?

**Liam Byrne** (3:27)
Your civic pragmatists and your Mullen-Colley 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're not going to win them back on an argument about immigration.
They're not going to leave.

**Alastair Campbell** (3:43)
But 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.

**Liam Byrne** (3:59)
We are. Look, the big question in Western economics right now is how do you maintain economic dynamism in an aging society?