← Intelligence Squared
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- [00:01]
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- [00:31]
Liam Byrne
So good, so good, so good.
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Liam Byrne
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- [00:58]
Mia Sorrenti
That's why you wreck welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. Populism has been winning big in recent years. It is the wave that has buoyed Donald Trump's second term in office, Marine Le Pen's popularity in France and reform UK's recent leaps and bounds in British polling. Across the west, authoritarian populists now govern one quarter of the world's democracies. For what explains the surge of populism across the democratic world? And can it be reversed? In this episode, political economist and former editor in chief of the Observer, Will Hutton speaks with Labour MP Liam Byrne about his new book, why Populists Are Winning and How to Beat Them. Drawing on original polling, international reporting and interviews with leading thinkers, Byrne narrows down the meaning of populism, interrogates the funding, media, ecosystems and language deployed by populist leaders and the psyches of those who are persuaded to vote for them. Let's join Hutton now with more.
- [02:00]
Will Hutton
Liam, I mean, first off, I mean, congratulations on your book. It's powerful, it's tough, it's illuminating, it's got original data and it's brave for a practicing politician. There's not many people in the House of Commons who could write that or I wish that could be said, let's kick off. I mean, everybody talks about populism. It's become the kind of the trope of our times. But just is the populism of Donald Trump equivalent to the Populism of Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, Viktor Orban or even Prime Minister Modi. I mean, do you see a common thread between them? I mean, what's going on here?
- [02:53]
Liam Byrne
Yeah, great question. Well, brilliant to talk to you. In a way. The book is the, the culmination of a 30 year career in political economy which began by reading the State we're in, which I can't believe is, is now 30, but. So no, look, so you know, the political science would tell you the, the broad definition of populism is, you know, the people against the elite. That's a very thin centered ideology. That's the cast muda definition which is quite popular in political science land.
- [03:24]
Will Hutton
But I use a word like at your peril. I mean, not many listeners and viewers of this will know who, you know who and what.
- [03:32]
Liam Byrne
Just. Well, he's, he, you know, he, he's the kind of guy that's written the political science book on, on populism. But I guess I think of it slightly differently. So if you look at what really characterizes today's right wing populism, and I should say this is a book about right wing populism, these are authoritarian populists and they're a kind of a particularly. They're a particular type of populist. They're a particularly dangerous type of populists and they've got a couple of things in common. So I call it the kind of the three A's of authoritarian populism. They basically, they're all about appeasing Russia when you think about how they show up internationally. So appeasement is my first day. They believe in autocracy at home, so they are autocratic in their kind of political style. But they've also got this extraordinary business model that is intensely avaricious. So appeasement, autocracy and avarice is kind of three of the things that they've got in common. And one way that you can really begin to understand their strategy and their belief set is to, is to study what they say. And you know, one of the most fascinating bits of research that we did with a, a brilliant young researcher from Oxford was to take a massive data set of speeches and run this big semantic analysis. And it reveals these kind of three core tropes that these politicians use. So it's a struggle for national renewal, but set against this kind of ethno nationalist story of decline that goes back to a historian called oswald Spengler in 1920s Germany. Second, there's a nostalgia and a hunger for something lost so it's a very kind of whimsical look to the past kind of appeal. And the use of time, the language of time is. Is a constant refrain. And then third, of course, they believe in a sense of emergency, crisis, struggle, which of course can only be solved by a strong man or strong woman commanding all before them. So that kind of national renewal, ethno nationalist decline, that's a big piece of the story. Nostalgia and a hunger for something lost and a sense of struggle, crisis, need for strongman leadership. Those are the kind of. The three kind of core characteristics of this authoritarian populism. And it's remarkable how those tropes show up time after time after time in all of their speeches going back over 20 or 30 years.
- [06:02]
Will Hutton
Liam. I mean, what you could argue is that actually you're only describing sophisticated political storytelling that actually all political parties of left and right kind of adopt. You need an enemy, you need a rhetoric to describe the enemy. You need a base. You are the protagonist, and the enemy has to be slain. I mean, all those kind of elements of populism are actually part of any successful party. I mean, you know, Atlee was doing. Telling a story of that type in 1945. Mrs. Thatcher was telling a story of that type in 1979. So kind of what's distinctive about populism?
- [06:49]
Liam Byrne
So I think what's distinctive about populism is this very autocratic style of politics domestically. So they believe in this kind of strongman model of populism. They've got, you know, in foreign policy terms, you know, they are, you know, pretty relaxed about the rise of Russia and Russian aggression. And. And that is not an accident. It's because they kind of share some common kind of ethno nationalist philosophy between them, and they are sort of particularly personally avaricious. They couple it with what I call Nostronomics, so the kind of the economics of trying to recover the past. And so, you know, Nostraenomics, if you kind of smush economics and nostalgia together, the economics of nostalgia, I guess you would call Nostronomics. And so, you know, they'd like to reverse the economy back to the 1950s, and you can kind of bring back the great manufacturing towns of. Of the past. And they will go to all kinds of places to try and do that, whether it is tariffs or. Or something else. They couple it with a pretty aggressive neoliberalism. So, you know, it is, you know, an economic agenda that is often about tax cuts for the rich, which is why this point about avarice is. Is really quite Important and it's extremely free marketeer. So they've definitely got the kind of deep coded appeals to.
- [08:13]
Will Hutton
I was not sure this is. I'm not sure that Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban or, you know, Mr. Modi in India would be our free marketeers actually. I mean, isn't a lot of this kind of tortoise to this kind of an Anglo Saxon populism? You're talking about the populism of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump?
- [08:34]
Liam Byrne
Well, my focus is very much on Europe and the United States, but I would say that it is sort of quite free marketeer in the sense that it's tax cuts for the rich. So they believe in that kind of trickle down economics that characterized the neoliberal project for so many years. And that is why ultimately is a project that is anchored on the right. And so, you know, again, when you look at who is voting for these people, you know, by and large it is voters on the right that are seduced by these parties. Now that isn't always true everywhere. So if you look at the AfD in Germany, for example, they are drawing a lot of their support from SPD voters on the left, amongst working class voters, particularly in the east of Germany. But by and large, especially when you look at the uk, it's a revolt on the right. So only, you know, Labour is maybe losing 1 in 10 of their voters to reform right now, whereas the Conservative Party has kind of hemorrhaged their kind of support equally in the United States. You know, most of the Trump base is a former Republican base, but they do kind of bring these very distinctive elements to it. They are definitely a big break with the kind of conservatism of say Thatcher or Bush or Reagan. It is a distinctive, a distinctively new kind of conservatism.
- [09:51]
Will Hutton
You talked about ethno nationalism as part of the mix, but I think that, do you hesitate to actually go the next step and call it racist or neo racist? I mean, I think that, I mean in the United States, I mean a lot of the kind of commentators or people kind of disdain welfare claimants they're actually talking about that's coterminous with being brutally black. And it's kind of the white working class paying taxes for benefits for in black folks.
- [10:29]
Liam Byrne
And
- [10:31]
Will Hutton
that coda is actually well understood and that sits underneath Trump to a degree. And there's similarly with Nigel Farage, but you hesitate to go that far.
- [10:42]
Liam Byrne
Well, they definitely draw on those tropes and you don't have to look very far to see this pretty racist underbelly of the Great Replacement Theory. So, I mean, if you go through, I mean, the literature is extraordinary. I mean, just explain the great Replacement
- [10:59]
Will Hutton
Theory for those who don't. I will.
- [11:00]
Liam Byrne
So basically, a lot of the literature traces its roots back to Oswald Spengler, who wrote this book called the Decline of the west in the 1920s. And Spengler introduces this idea that the proper unit of study in history is the civilization. And so a lot of these kind of right wing writers since then have been looking at, okay, how is our civilization doing? And through the kind of 1960s of the far right in France through to the paleo conservatives like Pat Buchanan in the United States and the far right writers in Europe of today, you basically have these kind of common refrains, which is that all of the social progress that we've had since the 1960s, whether that is the feminization of the workplace, birth control, the kind of progressive changes that many of us now given us all kinds of new freedoms, they would say those are the trends that have collapsed the birth rate of those who happen to live in a particular country. And coupled with immigration, it means that we're all going to be sort of reverse colonized by all of these immigrants coming in. And when you look at the, you know, when you read these books, I mean, it's a, it's a, it was a sort of a pretty difficult summer for me having to kind of wade through this stuff. They're all called things like, you know, suicide of France or Suicide of the west or Death of a Nation. It's, you know, it's that they're all kind of, of a type, but they're basically taking aim at foreigners, especially if they're Mexican or Muslim. And, and so it, it really isn't very far before you get into some pretty racialized tropes.
- [12:34]
Will Hutton
We wanted you. Yeah, I mean, I, I thank, thank you, by the way, for doing, for doing all that waiting. I mean, it's kind of, it's pretty, it's kind of spares the rest of us for having to do it. Partly wants to go on and kind of explore this a bit, but we might. I just want to give people who are dipping into this podcast a chance to get a sense of the breadth of what you've kind of done in this book because, I mean, you've analyzed the categories of the kind of voting population who might be tempted to vote populist, right. And you have five topologies. So that's an area to go into. Another area to go into is the is the language that populists use and why it's been so effective. I think we might do that first and then come to the second. So what do we do about it? So what about this? Why is the language they use so effective? And why is it impossible for a politician of the left like yourself not to fight fire with fire?
- [13:45]
Liam Byrne
So what the book tries to do is it basically tries to lay out the demand side and the supply side of populism. So on the demand side, we, you know, we do lots of polling to figure out what are the five tribes of reform voters, who's voting for them and why. Reform supporters are not one army marching in unison. There are actually five quite distinct groups. You're disgusted disruptors and you're left behind collectivists.
- [14:06]
Mia Sorrenti
You're.
- [14:06]
Liam Byrne
You've then got your traditional conservatives who, you know, as the name suggests, once voted conservative. And then you've got these two other groups, the groups that we call the melancholy middle and the Civic pragmatists. And 40% of those groups would consider voting for another party. And so one of the messages of the book is, look, you shouldn't be setting your progressive messages against the most hardcore reform voters because they're not going to change their mind. You're not going to suddenly seduce those into voting for some center left parties. Focus on the civic pragmatists and the melancholy middle because actually they're progressive when it comes to Europe, to action on climate change, to support for public services, and they don't really like the idea of a strongman leader either. So they're actually voters who, if you get it right, are in play.
- [14:53]
Will Hutton
So the civic pragmatists and the melancholy middle, I mean, the melancholy middle doesn't sound like a very. I'm not sure I want to be melancholy or I never caught myself as the. Why do you call them the melancholy middle?
- [15:08]
Liam Byrne
Because they're quite middle of the road in terms of their economic and social beliefs, but they are really quite depressed. They're probably older voters. They're actually amongst the most financially secure of the reform voting base at the moment. They might live in a market town that they'd move to because they quite like the local high street and they might want to be close to the grandkids, but they've just seen their kind of community slide. They've just seen things get a lot tougher for themselves and for their family. You know, they're not angry kind of people, they're just really sad basically. And they just think things should be better if, If Anyone would just kind of, you know, work harder at it. But as important and what's got missed in a lot of the day to day debate in Westminster is the supply side of populace. So, so what, what do populists do when, what do populist entrepreneurs do? And that's where we go.
- [16:01]
Will Hutton
Populist entrepreneurs, that's a very distinct way of describing it.
- [16:04]
Liam Byrne
They're very, because these are very entrepreneurial, they are political entrepreneurs par excellence. And what they've done is they've invented this message, they've invented a social media system and the money is jaw dropping. So without understanding the message, media and money, you can't really understand what's going on. But on the message, what they've been able to do is to tap into some quite deep coded instincts, which is why it works. So for example, their kind of call, their kind of ethno nationalism is obviously designed to trigger anxieties and fears about, about others, about foreigners, you know, and of course that is one of the ways in which all patriots and have tried to kind of rally people to the flag. It's a, you know, it's a very, very old kind of set of instincts. But second on the nostalgia piece, I mean they are, you know, in a way trading on the appeal of conservatives to the wisdom of times past. And again, you know, that's, you know, a well established bit of conservative philosophy. You know, don't take down fences unless you know why they're there. The kind of appeals that de Tocqueville made to the past, the wisdom of the past, the kind of Burkean philosophy of the Conservative Party in Britain, these, the appeal to the past has always been a kind of a cornerstone of right wing thinking and they kind of wedded that to a whimsical nostalgia which by the way, I think its appeal is actually a nostalgia for something lost that is local. And we might come back to the importance of areas and social capital in understanding that. And then the third bit obviously is that if you can create a sense of emergency, urgency, struggle, crisis, again, that, that's always been the appeal of kind of strongman leaders that, you know, there isn't time for sort of fancy democratic decision making. There is so much, you know, such a crisis, it's such a burning bridge that we just need to give sweeping powers to a strong man to kind of look after us. And so again, what is kind of interesting about their message structure is the way that it really does sort of have quite deep tap roots into evolutionary psychology. And they've been able to kind of smush it together into a message system that travels extremely well on social media because it shares a language of outrage. And of course, many of them, sort of, many of the kind of people like Pat Buchanan struggled to get their message across for many, many years. And you know, in the 1980s in America you had a media system that was dominated by shop jocks, but it was only really when you got Fox News that you really got the same kind of style coming to television. Then once you get Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, that's when you've got a kind of an algorithmic amplification of outrage basically. And that kind of logic is what populists use to animate their kind of messaging. So it's not an accident, if you like, that the populists have really taken off in the social media age because their message structure actually quite, it sort of rhymes with the logic of algorithmic amplification. Social media companies are doing it for money, populist politicians are doing it for votes. But you know, they, they, they are a kind of something of a marriage of convenience right now. And you know, not to leave anything to chance, populists are also raising hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds to build this extraordinary digital media system. And one of the things, things that we do in the book is we kind of, we track hundreds of transactions which basically show that the populist funders have built about 175 million pounds worth of populist media system and political system in the uk. So you know, a lot of this is, it's not an.
- [19:57]
Will Hutton
Again, I think that shouldn't be allowed to go fast.
- [20:00]
Liam Byrne
Well, yeah, we basically, we looked at Follow the money is like one of the oldest bits of advice in politics, isn't it? If you really want to understand what's going on, then follow the money. And so we basically looked at all of the money flows were going into right wing media and right and reform and the Reclaim Party, but also reform politicians. And I mean it was jaw dropping. I mean we basically, we added it all up. There's several hundred transactions here that we found from the Electoral Commission and company's house and the register of interest in Al. You put it all together in one picture and it's £173 million over the course of five years and most of that money is going into building media systems. And we thought, well, are you including
- [20:47]
Will Hutton
GB News in that?
- [20:49]
Liam Byrne
DB News is the big one, but you've also got a number of right wing online magazines.
- [20:53]
Will Hutton
What about this new guy who lives In Thailand.
- [20:57]
Liam Byrne
Yeah. Chris harbor, indeed.
- [20:59]
Will Hutton
He's just given two tranches of money, but directly to the party. This isn't indirect, this is direct to the party, isn't it?
- [21:05]
Liam Byrne
That's, that's direct reform. But others about others are putting their money into the media systems. But most of the money comes from four people, right, so Paul Marshall, Christopher Chandler, Jeremy Hoskins and Christopher Harbor. Two of them are based offshore, one's based in Dubai, one's based in Thailand. But, you know, they have built this extraordinary political media complex in the uk and it's. So it's not an accident. And then many of the proxies in this network are obviously taking money from the American Christian right, which is putting in about one and a half billion dollars over the last 10 years.
- [21:41]
Will Hutton
One and a half billion dollars in the United States, you mean?
- [21:44]
Liam Byrne
That's from the American Christian right in the U.S. and of course we, you know, from the CIA estimates, we know that the Russian intelligence service has put in about the same amount over the last 10 years as well. And that includes money that has gone to politicians like Nathan Gill, who's just been charged and imprisoned in Wales. So you've got this extraordinary ecosystem that is, that has got hundreds of millions of pounds flowing through it as well. And, and that is the kind of the foundation on which a lot of this kind of movement is built. But it's not an accident because, you know, these people have been studying the great Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci for a long time. And Gramsci's lesson is that you've got to win a war, a position. You've got to try and shape what, what is the kind of the common sense of the day. And, and one of the things that just sort of really took me back is reading about the way in which populist politicians were organizing conferences called towards a right wing Gramscianarianism. You know, they've literally been studying Gramsci. And of course, what Gramsci teaches you is that you've got to win culture first, because as Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart New, says, politics is downstream of culture. So these guys have been building this massive kind of culture machine intimately woven into a kind of a political movement. So it's a, it's an extraordinary system that emerges from this.
- [23:06]
Will Hutton
That point's very, very salient. I think that policy is downstream from culture. I mean, I don't think what I felt about the book apart, so I thought that you could have made more of that. I mean, I think the. I myself don't don't fully understand it. And I understand the kind of the general sense that, you know, you think about the 1930s, you know, the, the kind of Penguin left book club and kind of theater and, and the beginnings of cinema and was that was the seed in which the kind of low labour movement and a success labor movement would be built and constructed in 1945 government and paradoxically, I mean the kind of beat generation of the 60s with all his love and individualism and now that as a number of political scientists have argued, laid the foundations of Thatcherism. But I mean it gets pretty fanciful, you know that actually if the Beatles had the song I love you do when all you need is love, he wouldn't have got me. Sasatcher. I mean, I'm not sure, you know, I'm not into, you know, I mean the populace can try to construct culture upstream by completing these media systems, but they can't guarantee the outcomes.
- [24:27]
Liam Byrne
They definitely can't. But I think the, you know, the thing that, you know, I'm still struggling to come to terms with it actually because it was just, it was just so surprising to see this kind of thing loom into view for the first time. Again, it comes back to the entrepreneurialism here. So, you know, these are folks that are not just, you know, if you look at the way the money works, I mean you'll put money into building a, a TV station set. You then flow the money on from the TV station to the bank accounts of politicians who you might take on as presenters. They then use that content online and get ad share revenue from that. So we've been tracking the amount of money coming to reform politicians from ad share revenue. But then they're not just cash flowing the money, they're capitalizing it by running the money through companies. And of course once you introduce cryptocurrency to the whole equation, then you've got the possibility of money transfers to companies in ways that are, that are really untraceable. And so this extraordinary, it's incredibly entrepreneurial. And of course entrepreneur in chief is the President of the United States. If you look at what he did with World Liberty, Financial Truth Social and these are very entrepreneurial ways of channeling very, very large amounts of money in a way that is obviously $2 billion
- [25:42]
Will Hutton
his family have reckoned to have made already. I mean, or more than that.
- [25:45]
Liam Byrne
The New York restaurant is about over 3 billion, I think.
- [25:48]
Will Hutton
Extraordinary. I mean, but can you. Is there a linear relationship? And here again, I wasn't sure about your argument. Is There a linear relationship between spending money, trying to kind of shave the news agenda and actually getting the votes that in a democracy mean you've got a root to power. I mean, it does seem that Nigel Farage is peaking at 30%, maybe a bit less than 30%. And actually, I mean, Donald Trump may try and fix the next election, the midterms, but his support is cratering as well in the states. I mean, it's not as linear. You can spend, and the four backers of reform may find they haven't spent their money very wisely.
- [26:38]
Liam Byrne
Yeah, I mean, so you can't be too determinist about this. That's definitely right. It's an important bit of the ecosystem. And I would say you can't understand modern right wing populism without understanding that. But nor can you ignore the reality of why people are voting for populists. And here I kind of zero in on what has happened since the financial crash, because since the financial crash, a couple of really significant things have happened. And so the first thing I would say is that wage growth has collapsed. So before the crash, in most major Western economies, wages are growing at about 1 1/2% a year. Since the crash, they're growing at about half a percent a year. Now, why is that important? Because if your wages are growing at 1.5% a year, your wages double in about 44 years. If they're growing at about half a percent a year, it takes a century for them to double. So, you know, people are now looking at kind of multi generational declines in earning power. And that is really desperately, desperately frustrating. Now, what goes alongside that, it would appear, is you've got a collapse in social capital, in particular communities. So the glue that binds us together has dissolved in lots and lots of places, thanks to 15 years of austerity. And so if you look at hardcore Reform voters, 80% think that their area is in serious decline. That's more than double the national average. And the sense of community spirit is negative. So it's that combination of collapsing social capital, multigenerational decline that's really important in explaining the demand for populism. And indeed, we find that populist voters have kind of five big things in common. So they're under pressure financially. They're very disappointed with how their life has turned out. They're very pessimistic about the future. So they're much, much more pessimistic about how they're going to fare over the years to come. They're often living in communities that are deprived and feel precarious and they feel a great sense of dispossession about their place in the queue, which is why they're so angry about immigration and they think politics is really broken. They're very, very angry about politicians failing them. And you can't ignore those kind of five big features amongst millions of voters. So the, the populists are definitely appealing to some voters who are supremely pissed off with life and with politics. And they're kind of the, you know, the pop. The populist political genius is, if you like, is to build these incredibly sophisticated digital movements often which then kind of trade on and exploit those feelings.
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- [31:59]
Will Hutton
But isn't the truth that actually there is some truth to all of this? I mean, if you think about coastal Britain, where a lot of the Reform voters are clustered, I mean, Farage himself represents Clacton. And the Reform vote is very big around in all these coastal towns and was actually for Brexit back in the day, 2016. And actually the deaths of despair in a coastal town like Blackpool at American levels, as our suicide rates and the GDP per capita has actually stagnated or fallen, life expectancy has fallen,
- [32:45]
Liam Byrne
young people
- [32:46]
Will Hutton
have moved out,
- [32:49]
Liam Byrne
the
- [32:51]
Will Hutton
wages are up to 15% lower than actually just 12 miles in land. I mean, so coastal Britain, you know, I've got a point, haven't they? I mean, and there's no satisfactory response that's come from mainstream parties. And so, I mean, it's not just a kind of. Is there nothing false here? I mean, a populist like Farage or Richard Tice is actually speaking to a real grievance.
- [33:22]
Liam Byrne
Yeah. And, you know, it's, it's not, you know, it's not even a grievance. It's a reality. And so, you know, and one of the conclusions from the book actually is that populism is what rebellion looks like in a democracy, you know, and people
- [33:38]
Will Hutton
are very, very good point in the book. I agree.
- [33:40]
Liam Byrne
And they're. And they're kind of rightly angry because, you know, they're basically, you know, a lot of populist voters will have, will have left school early or they won't necessarily have gone to university. But a lot of our kind of ethnographic research shows that there's often a reason for them leaving school early. You know, something bad happened in the family. You know, they might have been kicked out of home or there was a death in the family. There was some kind of reason that meant that they just had to get out there to work. And they've had hardscrabble lives and they fought really hard, you know, to keep their noses over above the waterline. And, you know, when they see, you know, politics just not kind of rewarding them in any kind of way, when they just. They're not where they thought they wanted to be, and when they look out to the future and they just feel things are getting worse, then of course they're angry, and they're right to be angry. And it is a failure of mainstream politics not to have provided, you know, a plausible set of answers. And indeed, you know, the back end of the book is about what those answers might look like. And it obviously builds on the other book that we talked about, Inequality of Wealth, which came out last year. You know, so the anger is kind of visceral and real. And unless mainstream politics gets their act together and starts offering a kind of plausible optimism, you know, a real and a realistic sense of national renewal, and crucially, a story about how we come back together again as a society, then populists are going to continue to win. And I suppose that's one of the big questions that looms over the book. Is this peak populism, populists are now running about a quarter of the world's democracies, or is it populism's tipping point? Because many of the forces that are driving populism today are all about to get stronger. So we have this kind of great disillusion right now. People are disappointed, but actually, artificial intelligence could make that problem far worse. We're much more divided now. Social media's played a big role in that, but that could get a lot worse. Migration has been a key factor. That could be something that actually gets. That grows over the years to come. You've got about 1.2 billion people about to join the labor market in poorer countries. Those countries are only going to create about 400 million jobs. Where are the other people going to go?
- [35:54]
Will Hutton
Hold on. Those are great figures.
- [35:57]
Liam Byrne
Those are all big trends.
- [35:58]
Will Hutton
No, hold on. 1.2 billion people are going to join labor market over the next 30 years?
- [36:04]
Liam Byrne
No, no, over the next decade. Over the next decade and a half, roughly speaking. And hold on, that.
- [36:09]
Will Hutton
Yeah, hold on. That's bigger than world population growth in that period, isn't it? I mean, that's a big nut.
- [36:13]
Liam Byrne
No, you just, you're basically just. The world's demographic structure changes fundamentally over the next kind of 10 to 15 years. But in those countries, you know, the World bank thinks maybe 400 million jobs might be created. Let you know, let's say it's 600 million jobs created, but that still means you've got 600 million people of working age living in countries where there aren't necessarily going to be jobs created. And of Course, you know, in search of the quiet miracle of a normal life, people are going to potentially move. So migration pressures could get a lot stronger over the next kind of 10 to 15 years. But the trigger, of course could be a stock market crash. And so if you, you know, if you think about all the kind of anxieties about whether the AI boom is going to deliver us a Wall street crash in the not too distant, if you put all of that together, you could easily see a scenario where you get a real economic crisis. And when you've got governments with already high levels of debt, very little firepower left to respond, it's not hard to see a scenario in which more and more extremists end up trading on a new crisis and getting propelled into office. So it could be populism's tipping point over the next five or 10 years. And that's the kind of the big warning in the book, I guess.
- [37:32]
Will Hutton
Two big areas to cover before we close. When I, I mean, I think you should, we should give an opportunity to kind of sketch out your policy prescription. But I, I myself before we hear you, just want to kind of express my own skepticism about whether populisms in government are that successful actually. I mean, none of them have got a particularly good record. Look at Donald Trump now. Maloney, I guess in Italy could be, has done quite well, but she is kind of, that's almost because she's the, an anti populist. I mean, you know, she's not having one power on a populist. Right agenda. She's moderated her view quite substantially in government. I mean I just, they can sell this snake oil but when they get power it, you know, I mean it's obvious to people in the States that actually Trump too, the cost of living crisis in the states, the variability of energy prices, food prices, depressed real earnings growth, it's all carrying on notwithstanding him. And the base is actually beginning to have a shrink a bit. I mean, it's not obvious that actually they can say all this stuff, but when they win power, it doesn't actually lead anywhere.
- [38:54]
Liam Byrne
No. And you know, that's becoming more evident in the United States. But that's not stopped the rise of, you know, Jordan Bardella in, In France, the AfD is still riding high in Germany. You know, although reform in the UK as we speak is kind of coming down a little bit. You know, they are still in the lead. And so I guess I wouldn't want mainstream politics to be complacent. Populists are a disaster economically because they do go to war with the institutions that help ensure an economy runs. Most of the economic research shows that they are, you know, they, they knock your growth rate down because they're so unpredictable. They start interfering with property rights. And so there is an economic cost to populism. It doesn't show up immediately, but over the course of a decade, a decade, populist led economies basically take a lower growth rate. But there's no substitute for mainstream politics getting its act together. I would say on, on both the center left and the center right. And in a way, you know, that's my hope with the book, is to kind of provoke a better debate about what the center, you know, the radical center as I call it, needs to do in order to kind of start speaking better to these places.
- [40:11]
Will Hutton
Right, let's get, let's get the Burn prescription. Come on.
- [40:15]
Liam Byrne
Very close to the Hutton prescription.
- [40:18]
Will Hutton
So what are you going to do?
- [40:19]
Liam Byrne
You've got to start off with a story about national renewal. I mean, you know, there's, there's kind of two stories in British politics at any election which is Steady as she goes or Time for a Change. The time for the change message is always a story about national. So you've got to start with national renewal. But I do think that you need a much better account of how you're going to kind of take on the selfish minority which is holding back the economy for most people. And what I found is that the populists will often call for a retreat from the world when actually what we need to argue for is a reform of what the world's become. And so whereas they're kind of calling for a restoration of a lost past, actually what we've got to call for is a restitution of lost values. And I think that does mean a more assertive, aggressive attack on those vested interests that are holding back the economy. So populists will always try and blame the outsider. And actually we need to be better at blaming the insider cartels, breaking the insider cartels that hold the economy back. And so those kind of companies that are not playing by the rules, whether they're shortchanging their workers or they're screwing their customers or they're dodging their taxes, they're basically out with what you and I would call the moral economy. We need to be far more assertive at taking those companies on. And it's not hard to name them. I mean, you know, Fujitsu is a company that, you know, we deal with a lot, helped cause the Horizon scandal that's cost taxpayers about 2 billion pounds. You know, they've not put anything on the table yet. You can see breakdowns in companies like Royal Mail. We've had to, you know, get quite aggressive about poor labor standards at companies like McDonald's and every in the past. So, you know, there are kind of bad actors in the economy that we need to be, I think, a lot more assertive about in the future. And I'm not talking about, and this is where I differ with the Greens, I think you've got to be quite careful about a sort of sui generis attack on capitalism. You know, you and I, I think, would argue for a more civic capitalism where we're kind of taking aim at that selfish minority which is holding back life for the rest of us. And I think you can't get away from this precision fairness approach because the truth is that living standards aren't going to be rising quickly over the next kind of five or 10 years. And so you're not going to escape zero sum politics. You know, living standards are going to improve a bit, but you're still in a low sum political frame. So distributional questions are going to remain really quite important. So that's the first thing I would say. You've got to have a big kind of story about who you're for and who you're against. Second, you've got to renew the opportunity economy. For me, that means a much more ambitious effort to support small businesses. You've got to couple that with the kind of public investment, much bigger public investment institutions, much bigger investment in new business, new technology business, transforming the size and scale of your venture capital funds. And then the third piece of the puzzle is you've got to tell a story about strong society rather than strong man politics. And so renewing civic life. What I call the renewed civic gospel, bringing neighbors together to actually get stuff done in their local communities that is really important. Renewing traditions as a living invitation, not merely a celebration of the past. There is a civic gospel that is there for the renewal and which was incredibly important to the labour tradition.
- [43:54]
Will Hutton
Give us a civic gospel.
- [43:58]
Liam Byrne
Well, actually Pride in Place is a really good example. So this is a big government program, it's about £5 billion and it's kind of giving some quite impoverished communities right now the chance to kind of renew the institutions, whether that is your local library, reopening your swimming pool, upgrading your local park. But the point is it's about bringing neighbors together and giving them kind of agency power, resources to actually improve the place in which they live. Because for Many people, I noticed this during COVID politics was no longer just local, it was hyper local. And actually that kind of space between your front door where you walk the dog and where you buy the milk, if that space just felt like it was going backwards and out of control, actually you felt like your life was just not where you wanted it to be. The best example is of course, the local high street. And the collapse of local high streets is for many people the sort of the most extraordinary, the most potent symbol of whether their community is going forward and backwards. And so unless you can give local communities much more power and agency to reverse that, then you're not really going to make progress.
- [45:06]
Will Hutton
Rip off Britain, according to your committee, cost the consumer £71 billion a year. That's a huge number. And it's not just, you know, it's a plethora of things, isn't it? It's kind of digital fraud, fake reviews, uncancellable direct debits, whatever it might be, you're right, it requires much more aggression. I'm not sure that actually our official and political class are up for that aggression and whether we've got the regulatory bodies that can quickly be made to act in this territory. By the way, we haven't talked about income and wealth inequalities yet. I mean, presumably that's part of the landscape, but better go there. But just answer that question, then let's get to inequalities.
- [45:53]
Liam Byrne
Well, no, so I think, I mean, you're right about this. I mean, my committee's having a kind of a week in, week out bust up with the competition Market Authority, for example, where we would say, look, the cma, which is the guardian of the consumer in the uk, it's got new powers, for example, to take on digital giants. We would say they're being far too timid in the way that they're using those powers. But more generally, you're right, the kind of. The political and regulatory class in Britain is just not being assertive or aggressive enough. And so at a time when you've got a kind of an environment of zero sum politics where if you gain, then I lose, if people feel that, then actually they're going to be. People want you to be a lot more assertive in taking on those who are profiting.
- [46:39]
Will Hutton
I don't get it. There's half a dozen examples. I could quote it, I'm sure you could do the same of actually occasions where this Labour government has actually shrunk from tough action and gone for halfway houses or nothing. At all or softened down a regulatory must to a nice to do rather than a must do. And I'm amazed at why they haven't got enough backbone to kind of go in the direction that you suggest.
- [47:12]
Liam Byrne
Well, because I think the needle they're trying to thread is they're trying to. Their principal anxiety is about the investment rate in the economy and they're so worried about deterring investment in the economy that they want to be kind of cuddly to businesses great and small. And I think actually the way you drive up investment in the economy is through the kinds of ideas that we've talked about. Much bigger public finance institutions, much bigger incentives to, you know, we're not short on money in this country. We've got £3 trillion worth of long term pension savings. We're just not mobilizing that into investing in ourselves. You know, most of that money is being invested abroad. So I think you can actually sort out your investment strategy and that should give you a lot more political space.
- [47:58]
Will Hutton
Of course, that's what the populists say themselves. I mean, Richard Tice now wants to have a turn the local government pension scheme into a sovereign wealth fund to invest in Britain. So you and he, like a Venn diagram, overlap to a degree there.
- [48:11]
Liam Byrne
Take Julian, there will be, I mean, you know, ideas like a sovereign wealth fund are, you know, completely sensible because, you know, these are ideas that 40 or 50 countries around the world, and indeed we could have had one ourselves if we hadn't given away all the proceeds from naughty oil all those years ago. We didn't keep it, we didn't, you know, we made that mistake. And so we need to kind of learn from that. But, but I don't want to lose your point about inequality because I think it is fundamental to giving people a sense that their lives are no longer stalled and that they are once again making progress. But I think we have got to be. You've got to have a tax offer here in the sense that there are some people who have done incredibly well over the last 10 to 15 years. The top 1% has multiplied its wealth by 31 times more than everybody else. Many of those lucky people have made a lot of money and pay a much lower rate of tax than anybody else. You've got to increase access on wealth, whether that is through capital gains tax or the host of other ideas that are available. But I think you put that money back to people through a something for something bargain. And crucially, you've got to help people build assets, whether that is deposit for A house or a better pension or retraining and reskilling. And so the idea in the Inequality of Wealth was this idea of universal basic capital funded out of a sovereign wealth fund that is built on a range of wealth taxes. Now, I think that would just do so much to transform people's sense of their stake in society and it would help you begin to build the wealth owning democracy again. And ultimately that's where our politics, I
- [49:50]
Will Hutton
think, has got to get to universal basic wealth. Which takes us back to the. Was it the book that kind of was the forerunner from Stopping the one
- [49:59]
Liam Byrne
before this was the economics, the Inequality
- [50:01]
Will Hutton
of wealth and Inequality of wealth. I mean, I have to say the last kind of chapter of the book where you set all that out, you know, it's good stuff. What I felt about it was that maybe the whole was less than some of the parts.
- [50:16]
Liam Byrne
Yeah, I agree.
- [50:18]
Will Hutton
Yeah. Okay. Well, I thought I was making a telling point that the author would reside from. But no, you agree that. I mean, it needed a kind of binding a political economy of, if you like, you call it the radical center. I like to talk about uniting the various progressive strands. I don't think that in 2026, the Social Democrats, newer social liberals, or even pragmatic socialists have got much to argue about. And it's time for the two of the traditions to kind of make common cause. And actually in the act of creating that kind of common political economy that actually binds them all, you'd have a political economy that would underwrite and I think give your final recommendations in the book kind of more as they come from a new progressive place. And actually you can then house that in a story in which, you know, our enemy is populists. So we need antagonists, but we are going to be kind of protagonists of the kind of policy framework you outline. I mean, I just kind of, you know, that's what I thought when I read it. I thought, I'm going to put that to Liam.
- [51:39]
Liam Byrne
But the conclusion is written by talking to like a lot of smart people, a lot smarter than me, to kind of boil it down into basically, you know, a field manual, if you like. But, you know, this is, you know, we're about to take the book on the road over the course of the next year. Lots of festivals, lots of student unions, lots of debates. And I think, you know, by. By the time we get to Christmas, I think you'll be exhausted. But also I think, I think your kind of unifying vision will emerge. And I suppose the inspiration that I leave people with I guess is Franklin roosevelt in the 1930s? Because while I was writing the book, somebody asked me this question that I thought about a lot, which is, are we at 1933? And I spoke to a lot of historians of Weimar Germany, and I do not believe that whatever shocks lie ahead, I don't believe that we're on course for the kind of extremism that we saw in 1930s Germany. But the lessons of Weimar Germany should teach us a lesson. You know, the defenders of Weimar Germany were quite cautious, quite constitutional, quite timid in many ways, and we all know what happened next. But actually, 1933 is also when Franklin Roosevelt gets elected and Franklin Roosevelt blows into office. You know, only thing we've got to fear is fear itself renews the way that government works, transforms the performance of government, the delivery of government, transforms the economic health of the country over, you know, quite a long period of time. He rides the tempest, he rides the anger. He builds a political project around it. And I think that's one of my messages to the progressive movement right now, is that you've got to ride the storm and, you know, and let's use the anger, the legitimate anger that is out there to actually build a different kind of progressive politics for this new era that is taking shape around us.
- [53:36]
Will Hutton
I have to say, each one of these kind of areas kind of deserves more time. But you are, you know, we are time constrained. The book is there for people to kind of buy and read and come to one of your events to explore the ideas more. But thank you very much. Very, very important work. Liam, great stuff and thank you very much for the book and thank you very much for the podcast. Thank you.
- [53:58]
Liam Byrne
Well, good to talk to you. Thanks for the inspiration.
- [54:01]
Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Mia Sorrenti and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a member@intelligencesquared.com membership and to join us at future live events. You can find our full program over@intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.
- [54:28]
Liam Byrne
Foreign.
- [54:41]
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Liam Byrne
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