The new Fabian pamphlet, Common Endeavour, has one of the sharpest lines written about populism this year. In chapter 8, Labour MP Liam Byrne borrows the old country music saying that all you need is “three chords and the truth.” Populism works, he argues, because it plays three simple emotional chords: patriotism, nostalgia, and moral combat. Pride, loss, fight. Simple, repeatable, and perfectly tuned to social media algorithms that reward feeling over thought.
He’s right. And he’s honest enough to admit that mainstream politicians have been answering with word salads while populists holler a battle cry. Reform UK doesn’t win arguments. It wins feelings.
But Byrne’s own answer is where it falls short. His formula for beating populism is “optimism plus fairness plus performance.” That’s a strategy memo, not a song. It tells a government what to do. It doesn’t tell a movement what to feel. You can’t knock on a door and sing optimism plus fairness plus performance.
Liberals need our own three chords. Here are mine.
Power. Security. Respect.
Start with power, because that’s where liberals are different. Labour’s instinct is to fix things for people from the centre. Reform’s trick is to offer the feeling of power by handing it to a strongman. One is paternalism. The other is surrender dressed in a flag.
As countless leaders of radical movements have noted, power is not given, it is taken. I believe that’s not only a radical proposition, it’s liberal as well.
The preamble to our party’s constitution states that power belongs at the lowest level that works. The implication is that the centre must justify each power it possesses, not the other way around.
Yes, the consequences of this are significant at the local level – neighbourhood budgets and planning decisions made by people who live with the outcome. But power isn’t only a local question.
As a species, we are wealthier than at any point in history, but the people in the bottom half of the economy aren’t feeling it. That’s not a local problem; it’s a national and global failure of power. Who sets wages, who controls housing costs, who decides where investment goes, who writes the rules of the economy, and for whose benefit?
Liberals may have cracked the local argument. The national one – dispersing economic power, not just political power – is harder. But it matters, and we haven’t begun to answer it seriously.
it looks like a relatively gentle week in the Lords, although there will be an opportunity for the Lords to ask the Commons to think again… again… on the Victims and Courts Bill and the Crime and Policing Bill. Yes, it’s ping-pong time in the Lords…
I’ve been doing European politics with the Liberal Democrats on and off since 1989, long enough to know that it’s always worth waiting a little before declaring that a change of government is good news or not. Indeed, I’ve been around so long that I remember when FIDESZ were a welcome part of the liberal family – and Viktor Orban was its leader in those days too.
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