The Real Reasons Populism Is Taking Over

**Alastair Campbell** (0:00)
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 the restispolitics.com.
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 taught anxiously about the growing influence of populist leaders and populist appeal all around the world. 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, 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 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, 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.

**Liam Byrne** (2:40)
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 labor minister, help 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 labor 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 percent 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 feel 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.