Beating Populism: How To Fight Back

Alastair Campbell· Host0:00

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 therestispolitics.com. That's therestispolitics.com. Welcome to The Rest is Politics with me, Alastair Campbell, without Rory, but shortly with Liam Byrne, MP, for the second part in our miniseries 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 one will know. But that was really all about diagnosing the problem. Uh, 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, um, and don't be surprised if you hear the name Franklin D. Roosevelt quite a lot in this episode. [whooshing] We, we talked in part one about these, these five groups, the disgusted disruptors, the left-behind collectivists, the traditional conservatives, the melancholy middle, the civic pragmatists. I want to focus on the bottom two.

Liam Byrne· Guest1:13

Yeah.

Alastair Campbell· Host1:14

Um, because you're basically saying the top three, the Tories and Labour might as well take the bat away and go home because they're not going to come back to them. Um- And they were never, and, and they- And they were never- And they were never within reach. Well, they might have been with the Tories, some of them.

Liam Byrne· Guest1:27

Some of them were with the Tories, but I mean- They were never Labour ... seventy percent of