Beating Populism: How To Fight Back

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Welcome to The Restisted Politics with me, Alistak Campbell, without Rory but shortly with

Liam Burn 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've listened to Part 1 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 1 about these five groups that discussed the disruptors, the LEPI

collectivist, the judicial conservators, the melancholy middle, the civic pragmatist.

I want to focus on the bottom two because you're basically saying the top three, the

choice and labor might as well take the battle away and go home because they're not going

to come back to them.

And they were never...

And they were never within reach.

Ron and I have been with the Tories, some of them.

Some of them were within the Tories, but I mean, we never labor.

70% of reform voters will have not voted Labour for them in the last 20 years.

Well, you never voted for Tony Blaine, you never going to vote Labour.

Well, we know that.

So, but without 40%, you alluded to this in Part 1, 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.

Correct.

Right.

Which has alienated a lot of people who you're losing to the left of Labour and to the Greens.

So base both on your analysis of all this, but more importantly in a way, your experience

is immigration minister under you 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 we have to...

What's the balance that is most likely to at least get these people thinking differently?

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 get to create 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 votes crisis.

But the second balance you've got to strike is that people have got to kind of earn their

stay, earn their path and citizenship.

So earn citizenship with the big set of reforms that I'd prepared.

We ran out of time before implementing them, Shabbar and the mooders picked them up and

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, do you know what?

It comes down to three things.

It comes down to learning speaking English, obeying the law and working hard on paying

tax.

Beyond that, you should be living that live.

You're talking here about all of these people or some of these people?

Your civic pragmatists and you might not call them it like.

I mean, I think your 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 are, they're not going to leave.

But in which case, 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.

We are.

Look, the big question in Western economics right now is how do you maintain economic

dynamism in an aging society?

So you are going to, but I think you can win a story about immigration if you say, provided

you can basically say, look, it is a system that is in control, not out of control, and

actually, if you want to be part of the country, you've got to earn your right to stay here.

There's a kind of two perfectly reasonable kind of propositions.

And all of the work that people like Cinnacock-Wyler has done at the British future shows that

that kind of pragmatism is actually where most people are.

But if you don't fix immigration reform, then you're not going to win these people back.

And that, if you like, is one of the messages to many people in the Labour Party, which is,

don't pretend this is not an issue because we are going to have to make progress on this.

Do you put it at the top of the list of things that you talk about every day on your messaging?

No, you don't.

Actually, you fix it because what you're trying to do is to reduce the salience of the issue

at the next election, because actually, Labour's got to run on the economy at the next

election because all of our message testing shows that the big way that you beat reform

is by reminding people that his economic plan is basically Liz Truss on steroids.

And that's promising the Earth.

And what does that mean?

It drives up your interest rates.

Yes, absolutely.

Maybe that discussion of immigration leads us into one of the key points of your respect

to us for how to beat the poppers, which is what you call fairness.

The fairness, the fairness, the growth.

And I guess that's what you're saying about immigration.

We need to system people understand and respect and they think is fair.

But which other areas?

There's two.

So one is that we have got to be punctured in taking on the selfish minority who don't

play by the rules.

And on the business and trade committee, we see them weak in, weak out.

Why has Fujitsu not contributed A-B to the £2 billion bill for restoring justice to a post

of its own victims?

Not a penny, if they paid.

Wrong, wrong.

The answer to that was A.

They haven't had the moral courage to do it and B. Ministers have not been demanding

enough.

So actually, it's in on both sides.

But equally, if you think about their companies that we've had to bring in for short-changing

their workers, now they would all kind of argue this.

But we've had to bring in companies like every and companies like Amazon and companies

like McDonald's, because we've had real concerns about how their workforce is being treated.

We think that consumer harm in our country, the kind of rip offs at bills until it's

not a small problem, it costs consumers £71 billion a year.

These are kind of big problems that people feel at a time when they're under financial

pressure.

So why are we doing this?

Well, I think from a lack of self-confidence, the reason they're not doing it, of course,

is that they're worried about disincentivising investment in the economy and all that kind

of thing.

And I get that.

There's a balance to the strike, which is why I'm saying we're not here to launch a war

on capitalism.

We're here to pick a fight with some vested interests who are not playing by the rules.

We need to be the party of a more kind of a civic capitalism.

So that's fairness point number one.

Fence point number two is in the social security system where we now have a country where

it is very difficult for people to build wealth and assets.

And as I've said, the top 1%, has multiplied its wealth by 31 times more than everybody

else since 2010.

So the big idea in the book that came before this on the inequality of wealth is an idea

not universal basic income, but universal basic capital.

And the idea here is that you restore savings, matches, tax breaks and incentives for people

to build our assets to put down a deposit on a home to call their own, to retrain, restock

their human capital, and to save more into a pension.

Is that being done anywhere?

It's being done in places like Singapore.

So Singapore is probably the best example.

And the way you pay for it is actually by building a sovereign wealth fund, which we're

beginning to do.

Which we should have done with our little seal.

If we had not given away Nilsu oil, we would have a sovereign wealth fund of £500 billion

right now.

But the way that you build it now is by restoring fairness to this tax system and actually introducing

not necessarily a wealth tax, but higher taxes on wealth.

So if you think about Rishi-Soon-X tax return, which I don't know if you've read, it's

not very long, it's about a page long.

And the last tax return is...

22%.

Was it?

Bang on.

There you go.

So if you're in the income, tax rate, 23%.

How can that be right?

They can't be right.

We're wrong.

So if you begin restoring a bit of fairness to the tax system, actually like that old socialist

Nigel Lawson did, equalizing capital gains tax rates and income tax rates, you would begin

to raise the money over the course of five to six years to build the sovereign wealth

fund that could help you finance those tax rates.

To restore an old idea, actually, once upon a time we used to talk about the property

of the accounting democracy, Noel Skeleton, who was a Tory, talked about it in the 1920s,

John Rool's, the left wing philosopher, talked about it in the 70s.

Maybe we would call it the well-thoning democracy today.

But that's got to be one of the ideas that...

So essentially...

...is in the radical center of politics, right?

Right.

If I add what you've just said to what you said in part one about small businesses in

the high street, you're saying, I think that if we're going to counter this, we have

to have bigger, bolder strategies for the budgets that remain between our elections.

100%.

100%.

And, you know, they're not going to be easy because Iran has just put the cost of everything

up.

But if we don't do this, what is going to happen?

You know, we are going to end up with weaker governments in the future, not strong

governments in the future.

And democracy's promise, this idea that if you work hard, play by the rules you can

get on, isn't going to be restored.

And that is fatal to the health of the democracy.

You also talk about something called civic gospel.

Yeah.

Are you a faith guy?

Kind of.

Am I sort of struggling Catholic, I would say.

I kind of grew up in a Catholic family and my dad was much influenced by the kind of

social Catholic theory of the sort of 50s and 60s.

Okay.

Because you're civic gospel, which, look, I believe in, I'm not a faith guy.

I'm not a God guy.

The worry I had about reading this parvy book was the state local government.

Yeah.

But the idea comes from actually Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham, my hometown.

And the insight is that, you know, the time Birmingham was being built, you had kind

of thousands and thousands of people leaving the farms and villages coming to these strange

new places called cities.

And the response was not, oh my God, this is terrifying.

Let's go back to the farm and the village.

It was, right, a revolution in civic inventiveness.

We invented this kind of incredible clubs.

You know, we invented, you know, the powers of municipal government back then, gas and

water socialism.

You know, it, it wasn't a terrified response.

It was an inventive response.

And people like Robert Putnam have written about this for a long time.

This kind of reinvention of social capital and civic connectedness is what we need to

glue communities back together again.

This is where the government has actually got, it's got its plan bang on.

So this big multi-billion pound pride in place fund that is launched, 10 year fund, a

bit like our neighborhood renewal fund back in the day is actually one of it biggest and

boldest and best ideas.

How important is a negative for the sort of world we've, we now living in, has been the

relative decline of the church and trade unions.

Speaking as a, from an atheist to a, what are you called a struggling Catholic?

Stuggling Catholic.

It really goes to confess a lot.

No, it means I worry about not going to confess.

It's been important, but I mean if you think about a lot of our communities today, it is

actually the faith institutions that have held things together.

So I, you know, had to spend a lot of time over the last 10 years running food bank collection

systems in my constituency, it's a very high rate of child poverty.

You know, very often it's the churches and the temples and the mosques that I'm working

with as well as the primary schools, much underrated actually.

The way primary schools kept our communities together over the last 10 to 15 years has been

one of the unsung miracles of British national life.

We should be giving OBEs to head teachers in my view, the front and center, but we've

got to build on those foundations now for new times.

And then we've got to have the courage to take on some of the forces that are deepening

divisions.

One, American big tech, two, kleptocrats trying to serve dark money into British politics.

But there's a fight there as well.

It's not just about let's just refresh fraternity and build a more united kingdom from this

diverse nations that we've got, that there's also, you know, they need to get a lot punchier

with some big and powerful interests.

So there you go.

That was part of the conversation, part two of our mini-series on populism.

And if you want to hear the whole thing, you're just going to join the club.

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