Robert Philpot
by Robert Philpot
For much of the last three decades, left-wing populism has seemed something of a contradiction in terms. Even after Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan departed the political stage, the right retained a powerful hold over much of the traditional discourse of populism, inverting and perverting its narrative of the “people versus the powerful” to target government in general and the welfare state in particular, while suggesting to the middle classes that their economic interests were more closely aligned with the super-rich than the working poor.
Ed Miliband’s promise in his speech to the Labour party conference last month of a “government that fights for you”, his pledges to freeze energy prices and tell developers to “use the land or lose the land”, and his portrayal of the recovering economy as a “rising tide [that] just seems to lift the yachts” represents the latest attempt by the Labour leader to challenge neoliberalism’s domination of this important part of the political terrain. Over the past three years, we have seen Miliband frequently attack the “vested interests” and juxtapose wealth-creating “producers” with short-termist “predators”. In so doing, he echoes the language of late 19th-century American populism which, during a similar time of economic dislocation and recession, railed against the corporate “parasites” on behalf of the “producers” of the nation’s wealth.
Nonetheless, Labour should be cautious about the popularity of this left-wing populism for four reasons. First, as the YouGov poll indicates, there has been a big jump since 2010 in support for Labour among “squeezed middle” voters.
Second, as Labour’s experience in the 1980s and the Tories’ in the 1990s show, voters can agree with a party on a whole raft of policies – including many which they profess to care deeply about – but if they do not trust that party to run the economy, it will pay a heavy price at the ballot box.
Third, the correlation between good short-term politics and a credible long-term governing agenda is not always a strong one. As Roger Liddle has pointed out, Harold Wilson’s campaigns in the two general elections of 1974 promised to tackle the cost of living crisis with a string of price controls, rent freezes, and rises in benefits and subsidies which, when implemented, provoked the “worst postwar crisis in the public finances Britain experienced prior to the present one”.
Finally, history suggests populist messages tend to succeed when they are combined with a strong agenda around reforming the state and its institutions. Only when allied in the early 20th century with the progressive movement, which wanted to clean up the corrupt machines which dominated American urban politics, did the populist movement succeed. Under presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, that fusion produced a raft of measures, including antitrust legislation which busted monopolies, the creation of regulatory agencies, and the introduction of income tax, which fundamentally altered the balance of power between citizen, state and market.
THE GUARDIAN
by Robert Philpot
For much of the last three decades, left-wing populism has seemed something of a contradiction in terms. Even after Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan departed the political stage, the right retained a powerful hold over much of the traditional discourse of populism, inverting and perverting its narrative of the “people versus the powerful” to target government in general and the welfare state in particular, while suggesting to the middle classes that their economic interests were more closely aligned with the super-rich than the working poor.
Ed Miliband’s promise in his speech to the Labour party conference last month of a “government that fights for you”, his pledges to freeze energy prices and tell developers to “use the land or lose the land”, and his portrayal of the recovering economy as a “rising tide [that] just seems to lift the yachts” represents the latest attempt by the Labour leader to challenge neoliberalism’s domination of this important part of the political terrain. Over the past three years, we have seen Miliband frequently attack the “vested interests” and juxtapose wealth-creating “producers” with short-termist “predators”. In so doing, he echoes the language of late 19th-century American populism which, during a similar time of economic dislocation and recession, railed against the corporate “parasites” on behalf of the “producers” of the nation’s wealth.
Nonetheless, Labour should be cautious about the popularity of this left-wing populism for four reasons. First, as the YouGov poll indicates, there has been a big jump since 2010 in support for Labour among “squeezed middle” voters.
Second, as Labour’s experience in the 1980s and the Tories’ in the 1990s show, voters can agree with a party on a whole raft of policies – including many which they profess to care deeply about – but if they do not trust that party to run the economy, it will pay a heavy price at the ballot box.
Third, the correlation between good short-term politics and a credible long-term governing agenda is not always a strong one. As Roger Liddle has pointed out, Harold Wilson’s campaigns in the two general elections of 1974 promised to tackle the cost of living crisis with a string of price controls, rent freezes, and rises in benefits and subsidies which, when implemented, provoked the “worst postwar crisis in the public finances Britain experienced prior to the present one”.
Finally, history suggests populist messages tend to succeed when they are combined with a strong agenda around reforming the state and its institutions. Only when allied in the early 20th century with the progressive movement, which wanted to clean up the corrupt machines which dominated American urban politics, did the populist movement succeed. Under presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, that fusion produced a raft of measures, including antitrust legislation which busted monopolies, the creation of regulatory agencies, and the introduction of income tax, which fundamentally altered the balance of power between citizen, state and market.
THE GUARDIAN
