Nostalgia and Rebuilding Local Community Spirit

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 the rest ispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.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, Roy 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 su 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 Hung ary, 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 re 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 uh 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 is a he was a minister in the Labour government, which I work 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 of this. I do. And I bring a kind of an economic lens to this. And in in a way, you know, what you know, as you know, I was a kind of a new Labour 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% a year. That means it takes a hundred and si yearsx 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 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 h igh street, fly tipping, the library's been closed, you know, there's nothing open. They don't feel in control. And so their life just feels like they're going backwards. And so people are, you know, 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 some are different, but they' there is a few thingsve 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 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. Why do they see as the potential solver of their problems somebody like Trump who is a kind of inherited wealth millionaire, who you just look and hear the guy and you say this is not a guy who cares about working people. This is a guy and we're seeing this in his second term who cares about himself and his family and his wealth and his power and his fame and that's about it. Why do they look to somebody like Farage? Why did they look to somebody like Johnson as a kind of old Etoni an media establishment figure to be the person that they suddenly believe in to address those problems? For one big reason. Because politics has become zero sum. When you've got this kind ofw low groth economy, what you gain is what I think I lose. And so politics becomes um changed. Instead of a kind of generous conversation about what is it we build and share together, it becomes a mad scrabble to defend what I think belongs to me. And who is going to deliver that for me best? A strong man leader. And so when you look at the kind of focus groups about Trump supporters, the thing that comes through in them is that I think he is strong enough to stand up to the rich and powerful to take on the rich and powerful. Indeed. So why can't we become a problem? Well, I think it will become a problem , but in the first instance it is if you're faced with a candidate who you think is strong, tough, who in the focus groups Deborah Mattenson ran, you know, he's described as neat whiskey or a dump truck on the car compared to Kamala Harris, say, who people saw as a bit ineffectual, too weak. What you're looking for, your best hope in that choice, is a strong man leader who can derig 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. back in terms of where this all stem from that actually if you go back to Seattle and globalization and I mean our friend Scaramucci, Antony Scaramucci has got a book coming out in the autumn and he 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 I remember we were in government and we we were thinking oh this is just a bunch of yeah bunch of hippies joining together with the trade unions and they that you know they don't understand globalization is going to help them as well. No, we thought it was an unalloyed good, didn't it? Exactly. And 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 Do you think that might have been a driver of it? Yeah, and by two thousand eight um 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 two thousand and nine. And you might remember this, he'd basically just set up this middle class task force . And I came back to to and I said Alistair Darling of Rest of 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. 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 twenty ten 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 put this analysis together before was the first time. I mean it took us a long time to kind of put it together. But I think we were just too optimistic about the unalloyed good of trade and technology lifting all boats. And the truth is by 2004, that had stopped happening. And that's why you've got this inequal ity of wealth in particular that has grown since twenty ten. So since twenty ten, the top one percent in our country have multiplied their wealth thirty-one times more than everybody else. So for if you're uh an ordinary work ing person and most reform voters are a median income, median wealth, you now look out on a country where there's there's this inequality of progress. These people at the top, it's it's haves, have knots and have yachts now. Whereas I'm busting your gut every day and I'm just not moving on. And and the kids they feel they're not th the kids now feel they won't have's. They'll never have a piece of the pie. Yeah. That is the big change I think from previous periods of economic discontent. It's this sense of hopelessness that they're ever gonna get a fair deal. And so people are prepared to roll the dice, as Kelly Beaver from Ipsos puts it. Not not with leaders that are unknown, by the way, because actually if you think about Trump, Farage, Le Pen, they've actually been around for a long time. Hitherto they've been on the fringes, but actually people have a familiarity with them and they just think, right, it is time to roll the dice and just try something. I don't know if you saw the the Channel 4 series recently on Tony Blair, um but the he was interviewed and at one point he said nostalgia if you just said to me when I was Prime Minister that Nigel Farage will become a hugely consequential political figure and Jeremy Corbyn will lead the Labour Party. I've said you're away with the fairies. Both of those things have happened. See I and I think I'm not this is something that's I I I know this 'cause in my diaries though I don't remember it. But in my diaries I do record having arguments with Tony about whether we're whether we're conscious that there could be a really big downside to globalization. 'Cause I think I was feeling it in certain places. Yeah. Well you'd have seen it in Burnley. Correct. Yeah. I saw it in Harlowe, where I grew up in Essex. Yeah. So I think I I I don't think we got into that. And so therefore you have this sense of people seeing a world out there that is better than the world that they're living in. The politicians still saying this is a really great world and you're part of it, but they don't feel part of it. So I think in Brexit, for example, I think that David Cameron going around saying if you vote leave, you know, you're going to destroy this great economy, so many people thought, well, I don't know what this great economy is. No, when I was knocking on doors in Shard End in in my constituent East Birmingham and tried that argument, people just thought I was from a different planet 'cause they just sort of thought, well look what you tell me please, what do what have I got to lose? It goes back to that classic question that I think came up in Newcastle during the referendum when I think it might have been George Osborne talking about the potential hit to GDP and the Heckler in the audience said, Who's GDP? And that that is actually one of the things that I don't think we'd paid enough attention to at the back end of the new Labour years. Yeah. So you've got a sense of people feeling that democracy is not working, the economy's not working, their wages aren't rising, and so forth. So that's the thing that they're that the populist I guess is 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 uh 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, you know, in politics, you do need enemies, and it's why I, you know, 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 the 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 govern ment, and the new Chief Secretary comes in and he finds you a note saying there is no money left. Which I at the time thought was a perfectly traditional bit of gallows. banter between and you basically saying welcome in and you maybe underestimated the extent to which the Tories are utterly ruthless and they think right we've got back in and we're not going to go any time. So that became weaponized to the extent that it it's kind of it almost defines you. It follows you everywhere. Yeah. The no I mean the notes got a bit longer now. So this book is four the notes have got a bit longer. So this is now they're now forty thousand 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 someone. And everyone has followed uh 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 if it's any consolation, David Cameron came into my constituency waving that note around and I then lost my seat. Uh and we all know what happened to George Osborne. So that 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 programme. Because of course what 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 twenty sixteen, debt falling by twenty sixteen, 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 of his history, the rest is politics . They do their own dirty work. Um so let's just have a little look at how they turn some of this sense of loss that people have into the anger Well I think you know, nostalgia is a longstanding conservative tradition. You know, it goes back to uh Burke to De Tocqueville, the kind of 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 else that is local. So I think this whole local thing has been radically underestimated. Hardcore reform voters, about eighty percent 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 organized crime, money laundering, people smuggling, uh illegal tobacco, uh 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 and there's no public services left because they've been shut down thanks to austerity. You you you now basically feel like you're trapped in a world that is very different and much worse than your memory. So when you talk to people about right, what do you want to see restored? The words that people come up with are things like, Well, I'd like to see the butchers back and the post office. Uh you know, and the th the green grosses. People have these kind of it's it's rosy retrospection, as the um as the pulsers tell you, but but the nostalgia thing I think is a local nostalgia. But then isn't one of the problems that we all buy in or have been pushed to buy in to this tech revolution that means that we don't we don't equate our own conduct, our own behaviour, our own sense of responsibility with the fact that because we all shop online, because we go onto Amazon because we can't be bothered to go and find a shop, these shops are shutting down. Partly. But I think there are also some consequentials here for labour and its economic policy. So I mean if you look at the way that we have loaded up small business with a ton of costs right now, whether that is crime costs, labour costs, energy costs, business costs I'm talking about this Labor government, HMRC that doesn't answer the telephone. It's impossible to find out who owns these shop units because they're often based abroad because we haven't sorted that out yet. Actually we're not helping ourselves here. You could actually have a small business renaissance on high streets if we changed our economic thinking a bit and actually moved on from the kind of bi dynamics that characterized Labour getting elected and actually thought, do you know what? To rebuild our economy, we actually need small business, entrepreneurs, freelancers to actually be able to do an awful lot better and we need to rethink the way that we're not overburdening them right now. Is this a call to reverse the national insurance rises and more? Well I think you could Nix is definitely a tough, tough deal for a lot of small businesses. But the my point and this was my first question actually to Kier on the liaison committee when I joined the Ladies On Committee at the beginning in this parliament, do you think it's actually wise to do NICs and labour rights and energy costs and business rates and not do anything about crime costs all at the same time? Because I don't think it is, frankly. Aaron Ross Powell And you mentioned earlier this thing about nostalgia. I guess this relates to take back control , make America great again. Do we mythologise the past, or do they have a point that there's something better in what we've lost? So I think this is really important. One of the things that struck me hardest when we ran this semantic analysis of popular speeches, it's the language of time. They freight their speeches with time again, past , um once more. It it's it's a win When we were running campaigns, it we always thought, you know, you've always g otta be focused on the future. Bill Clinton, don't stop thinking about tomorrow. But in a we're saying don't stop thinking about yesterday. Right, exactly. And in a world where people are profoundly pessimistic about the future, it's got a market. So half of reform voters think their wealth is gonna decline in the future. Now, populists don't give them an answer to that, apart from trying to take it off other people. But it's one of the reasons that Labour, or indeed you know, the centre right too, has got to reinvent some optimism, plausible optimism about the future, because we we should be the party that says, look, you can build the future with pride in the past, but you can't live in the past because frankly, that is not an answer to the problems that we've got tod There you are, that was me talking to Liam Byrne