How to defeat populism

Spoiler alert: it won't be easy

Last week, St Antony’s college, Oxford, hosted the first of a series of seminars on populism. The series is being organised by two MPs, Liam Byrne (Labour) and John Glen (Conservative), who are the college’s 2025 visiting parliamentary fellows. With Reform now competing for first place in the polls, the issue is both serious and urgent.

To introduce the series, Kelly Beaver, Chief Executive UK of Ipsos, gave a presentation; her slides can be seen here. I followed by setting the debate in a broader context of the relationship of populism to democracy. Here is an edited version of what I said.

I have two big questions. First, is democracy fundamentally a moral or an instrumental project? Second, is populism essentially driven by culture or economics?

Britian’s 700-year journey from the Magna Carta to universal adult franchise was one that combined the moral virtue of human equality with the instrumental function of giving more and more people rights that they had previously lacked. When my grandmother campaigned as a suffragette, she was simultaneously seeking a moral objective – equality of the sexes – and an instrumental goal: her own right to vote.

So the straight answer to my question is: democracy has always been both a moral and an instrumental project. Indeed, its strength is that it is both things. As a nineteenth century non-conformist might have put it, a successful democracy both feeds the soul and fills the stomach.

However, these days, the two goals of democracy are increasingly in conflict. If we were to represent the story of democracy as a Venn diagram, its moral and instrumental circles would be overlapping less and less.

The film, Made in Dagenham, a film about a strike in ntghe late 1960s by women at Ford’s car factory, provided a vivid example. The moral argument – women and men being treated and paid equally – provoked an instrumental clash between women who wanted higher pay and men who wanted to protect their power, pay and status.

In my lifetime, some of the fiercest arguments have seen progressives promoting moral causes that millions, and often a majority, feel are either irrelevant to them or threaten their interests. They have included:

· Overseas Aid

· Abortion

· Gay marriage

· Immigration

· Britain’s place in Europe

· Transgender rights

All this has fed populism. The moral causes of progressives are dismissed by populists as ‘woke’ passions that they reject. Meanwhile, they say their real, and mounting, social and economic concerns – from take-home pay to the impact of immigration – are ignored by a remote elite.

This tells us that populists are delivering a damning instrumental verdict: Our democracy is not working for them. The great, historic cause of democracy – one citizen, one vote – has given way to a series of skirmishes which are fought using the language of morality but which are essentially instrumental. The overt question is, what’s right? But often the unspoken question matters more: cui bono? Who benefits?

The answer given by populists is: “Not us”. They want something different. In some cases – a minority but a disturbingly large one – they say they would prefer a dictatorship that can get things done.

What is to be done?

Let’s start by tackling my second big question: Is populism essentially an economic or cultural phenomenon? Is it about living standards or identity?

Once again, my answer is both. If you want to see tribal passions in full cry, go to the Emirates stadium when Arsenal are playing Spurs. Given the price of tickets and the demographics of North London, we cannot explain it either as a cry of anguish from those who can’t make ends meet, or (aside from fragments of anti-semitism) as a crusade against multiculturalism.

Identity and economics matter to almost everyone. Which matters more politically in any given country at any given time depends on circumstances. The rise of fascism in the 1920s and 30s, like the rise of populism in recent years, coincided with economic hardship.

The surge in the identity issues of culture, race and immigration leads to the search for scapegoats for people’s misfortunes and hostility to “the other”. Identity has always lurked beneath the surface; economic failure converts it from a relatively harmless private matter into a dangerous political weapon.

The extreme right takes unhappy voters and tells them that the democratic norms as understood by progressives are actually devices designed by a remote elite for its own purposes. Populist leaders exploit their voters’ identity feelings in order to turn them into revolutionaries.

When populism is successful – the historical and current examples are obvious – that is where their voters end up, But it is not where they start out; and the latest polling for the Tony Blair Institute confirms what Kelly has shown us: populist politicians and populist voters are not the same. In the main, populist voters are NOT ideological. They DON’T want to overturn the economic order. They have little interest in debates about the size of the state, or in arguments between all-out socialism and laissez-faire capitalism.

What they DO want, and what they feel mainstream parties are failing to give them, is honest, competent government that raises living standards, keeps our streets safe and provides decent schools and hospitals.

Which prompts this conclusion. Mainstream parties are in danger of fighting the wrong battle. This is especially true of immigration. Populist parties fight this as a matter of identity. We are being swamped by people in numbers we cannot absorb. They need to be drastically reduced. Polls find that most voters agree with this.

But polls – often the same surveys – also tell us something else. We like people who come to Britain to treat us in hospitals, work in care homes, serve in our restaurants, teach in our schools, study in our universities, build new homes, pick fruit each autumn and so on. (I discussed this in more detail in my last Substack post.)

Populist leaders are exploiting widespread views that people coming here are mainly asylum seekers, when the true proportion is tiny. However, the saga of the boats DOES matter. It feeds today’s damaging perception that both Labour and the Conservatives are incompetent and out of touch.

Like many people I do not just disagree with populist parties; I find them offensive. My instinct is to argue strongly that they are morally wrong. The trouble is that if that is our main way of fighting back, we shall lose, because it drags us into a battle about identity, which, in these difficult times, we might well lose. What is being said too little is that the populist project is rubbish. It’s doomed to fail. Its mad approach to immigration should be its Achilles heel, not its passport to power.

Mainstream parties need above all to revive their reputation for honesty and competence. Then, and only then, can they defeat populism. To be sure, their policies need to be both moral and instrumental. But the argument they need to win is mainly instrumental.

They should learn from Brexit. Here was a perfect example of populism in action. We had a referendum – a device that populist politicians love, precisely because it reduces a complex issue to a simple binary choice in which evidence can be ignored and the elite snubbed. David Cameron hoped the 2016 referendum would kill off the populists. Instead, it played into their hands.

Look at where we are today. Fewer people than ever think we took the right decision nine years ago. However, there is no evidence that nationalism is on the decline. The reason is that Brexit has failed. We are NOT better off. The NHS has NOT improved. Immigration has NOT declined.

This reinforces my basic proposition. The populism we face today is wrong; and we should say so. But our core message should be that the policies of populist parties are stupid and won’t work. The trouble is that such a message is credible only if it comes from people that voters respect. Sadly, that applies to too few mainstream politicians. Unless and until they put that right, they will be fighting populism with their most potent ammunition locked in a cupboard they can’t open.

One final proposal. It links Brexit to Margaret That Thatcher, but not in the way the two are normally discussed together. She became Conservative leader fifty years ago this week. We should adopt the view she put so forcefully four weeks later in her first major speech to Parliament as leader of the opposition: referendums are devices for demagogues, not a parliamentary democracy. How right she was. We should have nothing to do with them.