This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
Books on populism are so common these days they are barely worth remarking on. However, Liam Byrne is currently the Labour MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North (Electoral Calculus prediction: Reform gain from Labour) so this book is worth considering for any insights into the internal thinking of the Labour Party as it struggles to deal with the rise of right-wing (exclusively right-wing) populism.
In his approach to the problem, Byrne commits a great error in thought, which is to divide voters into “tribes”. This is a trend adopted by politicians of the establishment parties: isolated from voters by the death of mass political participation, they are attempting to map a coherent order onto an electorate that is fragmented and hostile. They are baffled at the ability of leaders such as Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump to unite disparate voters.
This categorisation of voters causes Byrne — like most anti-populists — to miss the most obvious lesson: people vote for a platform, not for a person, to act as a symbolic representation of their group identity. The roots of voters’ discontent that he identifies are symptoms of two underlying problems: each of his tribes is experiencing the effects of stagnating living standards, and each (as Byrne acknowledges) identifies immigration as their primary concern. Yet by attempting to segment these voters, he focuses on coaxing them with individual appeals, rather than on addressing the structural issues that actually drive their choices.
This is a symptom of what the writer Will Solfiac calls “folk beliefs of the upper-normies” — people with mainstream opinions who consider themselves more sophisticated than the average person. Much of this book is underpinned by such thinking. Were Byrne’s own views not so contradictory, inaccurate or facile, they would be charming in their naivety.
He repeatedly makes the claim that democracy died in Weimar Germany “when its defenders lost their nerve” and capitulated to the Nazis. In fact, democracy died in Weimar Germany thanks to the combination of an unworkable constitution and a retarded political culture in which violence both supplemented and served as substitute for political engagement.
Byrne also thinks, based on evidence from campaign groups, that the majority of Reform voters are historically anti-Labour. But this conflicts with his own assertion, made later in the book, that Reform polls strongest in left-behind industrial towns: in fact, as Steve Rayson outlines in The Fall of the Red Wall, many of those now backing Reform — having backed the Conservatives for the first time in 2019 — are former Labour voters whose disillusionment with the party began with the election of Tony Blair.
In a single page, Byrne makes the sweeping claim that we are living in a new age of global movement, with economic migration ”driven by Western nations’ need for labour”, before warning that artificial intelligence may wipe out millions of jobs and that “half of advanced nations may experience reduced labour demand, downward pressure on wages or a jobs wipe-out”. He then reasserts that the ageing societies of Europe “urgently need younger workers to maintain their economic dynamism”.
The problems with these folk beliefs are illustrated by Byrne’s consideration of two of the most awful crimes in recent history: the Southport killings and the rape gangs. Byrne refers to the latter as “terrible”, but immediately moves on to the fact that Elon Musk “hijacked the entire narrative”. He acknowledges that Axel Rudakubana’s ”appalling crime instantly horrified the nation”, before moving on to the issue of the false claims that arose as to the identity of the attacker.
That he focuses on the reception of these crimes rather than the crimes themselves and on how outrage was manufactured rather than perfectly natural — combined with an acknowledgement of their nature so cursory as to feel derisory — underlines John Gray’s point that “populism is the name liberals give to the reaction against their policies which they don’t understand”.
There are allegations in this book which we must confront. Byrne identifies The Critic, along with UnHerd and GB News, as the “biggest bets” that right-wing donors are placing on “polytainment (sic) platforms that reward populist politicians”. We have, of course, pushed back against the ludicrous policies on trans issues, immigration and more — all of which had popular support long before this magazine helped give them voice. Regardless, it remains unclear why it is unacceptable for right-wing individuals to fund causes as they see fit, whilst no comparable concern is raised over the billions channelled into progressive causes by the Soros Foundation, Dale Vince or myriad other activist sources. The situation is presented as intolerable in one direction only.
Perhaps Byrne has a more elegant solution, which is to draw from the biggest donor of all — the taxpayer. In May 2023 he was found to have misused parliamentary expenses when IPSA concluded there was “overwhelming evidence” that a member of his taxpayer-funded staff had worked on his failed mayoral campaign during office hours, conservatively estimating that at least 1,000 hours of publicly funded time were diverted. No repayment was required because the total number of hours could not be precisely established: Byrne accepted the findings but refused to apologise. Suggestions for preventing this kind of abuse are absent from his plan to “fight kleptocracy”, which is just one prong of his nine-point scheme to beat populists. The other eight strands involve building a heroic coalition, progressive optimism, an opportunity economy, renewing the “fairness code”, a new civic gospel, performance, the patriotism of our best ideals and creating a permanent dialogue.
This is the lingua franca of anti-populism, a kind of doggerel post-liberalism, bastardised to camouflage the intellectual hollowness of its ideas, which can be boiled down to the belief that all political problems can be solved through better comms, strategy and delivery. As David Goodhart, who helped to popularise many post-liberal phrases, has said, “I recall cringing at my past enthusiasm for these word salads that pass themselves off as serious thinking.” My own plan for defeating populism requires only two points: reduce immigration and improve living standards.
Ultimately this book is little more than a series of jejune LLMisms; vague, over-polished, slogan-like pseudo-aphorisms such as “a “Premier League” of the best ideas”, or “the language of renewal is drenched in decline”. They feel AI-generated rather than the product of actual insight. As a blueprint for defeating populism, this book is a non-starter. You should ignore the advice in it, unless you happen to be a Labour MP, in which case you should follow it to the letter and thereby rid us of a government that understands neither this country nor the bloody obvious.
