Lord Tom Watson reviews Liam Byrne’s ‘Why Populists Are Winning’

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5 min read17 min

Liam Byrne has always been two things at once: a campaigning pamphleteer and a pointy-headed wonk. He held the pen on Labour’s first 100 days grid in 1997, redesigned the pathway to British citizenship at the Home Office, and then, rather than sulk on the backbenches, took himself off to Oxford to spend a year dismantling the populist phenomenon with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb. This book is the most intellectually serious thing a Labour politician has produced in years.

The big-picture analysis is formidable. Byrne identifies three forces shattering the post-war democratic settlement: a great economic disillusion born of wage stagnation and the broken generational promise since 2008; a great digital division in which social media algorithms have turned public discourse into a giant online gang fight; and mass human movement, acting as a lightning rod for anxieties about identity, belonging and economic fairness.

None of this is entirely new, but Byrne’s synthesis is unusually rigorous, moving fluently between Washington think tanks, European polling data, and his own West Midlands doorsteps. He holds the global and the granular in his thesis.

What lifts the book is the original research. A 4,000-person survey with Best for Britain, King’s College London and YouGov, maps Reform UK’s electorate into five tribes. The strategically vital finding: roughly 40 per cent of Farage’s coalition, the ‘Melancholy Middle’ and ‘Civic Pragmatists’, are not hardliners. They are anxious, disappointed people who worry about bills, the NHS, and whether the system still rewards effort. They are reachable. If progressives cannot be bothered to reach them, they have only themselves to blame.

Byrne is equally sharp on the machinery of populism. A semantic analysis of hundreds of speeches reveals a three-chord trick: patriotism, threat and nostalgia, played with striking uniformity from Donald Trump to Giorgia Meloni to Nigel Farage. Combat language frames politics as high-stakes struggle, while bundles of time-words conjure a lost golden age only the strongman or woman can restore. The chapter following the money is revelatory: dark money flowing through crypto wallets, Kremlin-linked banks, and American Christian-right networks, alongside British mega-donors funnelling £153m into a populist media-political complex in four years.

The remedies are where the book finds its real purpose. Byrne presents a Rooseveltian 10-point plan and the ambition is exhilarating.

The civic gospel – rebuilding high streets, restoring local policing, and investing in community infrastructure – is grounded in his finding that 80 per cent of hardcore Reform voters believe their area has declined.

The remedies are where the book finds its real purpose

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The kleptocracy agenda is the most distinctive contribution: banning crypto donations to parties, outlawing paid media roles for sitting MPs, and enforcing transparency on offshore funding.

Populism, Byrne argues, is a business model built on patronage, and you cannot defeat the politics without disrupting the economics. The proposal for universal basic capital, a savings account for every young person, seeded by a sovereign wealth fund, deserves more detail, but the instinct is right: a fairness agenda must give people a stake in the future.

The call for progressive optimism – insisting the left offer a credible vision of technological abundance rather than defensive managerialism – is a rebuke to a politics that has forgotten how to inspire. John F Kennedy’s “new frontier” and Harold Wilson’s “white heat” are invoked not as nostalgia but as challenge.

Two passages carry political charge. On earned citizenship, Byrne argues that probationary citizenship linking rights to responsibilities is the foundation of a progressive immigration policy that commands public consent. At least two potential challengers to Keir Starmer have already pressed the Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood on this territory. They would do well to read this book before they say much more. Byrne’s framework is considerably more developed than the soundbites that have so far passed for a debate within Labour.

On media regulation, the book delivers a direct charge sheet. Byrne documents broadcast propagandists bending impartiality rules to destruction, building empires funded by opaque structures in the British Virgin Islands. He is withering about Silicon Valley algorithms doing to our towns what the enclosures once did to common land. The message to Ofcom and those responsible for the Online Safety Act could not be plainer: pull your finger out. The architecture exists. What is missing is the will to use it.

The messages for the Labour Party are unmistakable. When he argues progressives must move beyond Bidenomics, he is telling Starmer’s team that fiscal caution is not enough if people cannot feel the difference. When he insists the antidote to populism is not another comms grid but deep listening, one senses an MP who knows the difference between a party that hears voters and one that merely surveys them. When he warns that Labour faces peril in over 80 seats where Reform runs second, it lands with the authority of someone who represents one of them.

Labour ministers should read this book. Those circling the leadership should study it. Regulators should act on its findings. And, while they are all at it, they might use its author to help implement them.

Lord Watson of Wyre Forest is a Labour peer

Why Populists Are Winning: and How to Beat Them

By: Liam Byrne

Publisher: Apollo