‘Three chords and a different truth: how ‘Strong Labour’ beats the populists’

Populists play their politics like country music: three chords and their truth. Patriotism and renewal. A grieving nostalgia for something lost. The summons to gather behind a strong leader. It is a beguiling harmony. To beat it, Labour needs to rewrite our own anthem for this age – not new Labour or old Labour, but ‘Strong Labour’, complete with an agenda and a story that is authentically our own.

Renewing the Nation – Or Picking on the Weak

Populists tell a story about national renewal freighted with patriotism but riddled with long laments about civilisational decline. They celebrate Britain in the same breath as they bury it. And for their villains, they always pick on the people at the bottom. The migrant. The foreigner. Families in need. It is the oldest trick in the book – divide and rule, set neighbour against neighbour and hope nobody notices who is really pulling the strings.

But populists aren’t nation-builders. They’re autocrats who hollow out democracy and subordinate institutions to the will of one man. Strong Labour defends tolerance and pluralism as the foundations of a free society because our patriotism knows how strong nations are really built. 

READ MORE: ‘Labour needs to rediscover its own authentic populism’

Strong nations are built on our best ideals: the conviction that countries are strongest when they belong to all of us in a land where everyone can reach their full potential and no-one is denied or deterred by prejudice from joining in our national life together. 

Populists always pick on the powerless. By contrast Strong Labour must take on the powerful; the selfish minority who hold our country back by holding back our country’s people. We all know who they are; those trying to rig the marketplace, dodge their dues, shortchange their workers, or rip you off at the tills and on your bills. Would-be Reform voters would welcome the strategy. Over sixty per cent of hardcore Reform voters want a strong leader to take the country back from the rich and powerful. 

Strong nations need strong borders and strong defence. Where right wing populists would pull up the drawbridge and go it alone, we build strong borders by working with allies. Where they appease Putin and turn their backs on Europe, we must invest in strong defence, strong alliances, and the resolve to stand firm against a revanchist Russia. 

Optimism, Not Nostalgia

The second chord populists play is nostalgia: a hunger for something lost, a yearning to return to a mythical past. Many seduced by Reform are genuinely pessimistic about the future – convinced our best days are behind us. After fifteen years of Tory mismanagement, buckled incomes, swollen debts and boarded-up high streets, I get that.

But the answer to decline is not to wallow in it. Our answer must be plausible optimism, self-belief and self-confidence to embrace the future, not flinch from it.

That means being unapologetically pro-science: backing cutting-edge R&D and the rapid diffusion of AI for all. On that foundation we build a strong economy – not the populist fantasy of unfunded tax cuts that drive up interest rates and crater investment.

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Remember, populists deliver a weak not a strong economy. Evidence from 51 populist governments shows that after fifteen years, real GDP per head falls more than ten per cent. What would that mean for Britain? Over 15 years it would mean real GDP per head that is £22,000 lower. Populists promise prosperity. They deliver penury.

By contrast, Strong Labour must build strong public balance sheets, safe in the knowledge that too much debt weakens nations. But to build a truly strong economy we have to transform the offer for small businesses, entrepreneurs, the self-employed, freelancers – and our high streets.

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Strong Labour must stand for strong rights at work – because economic security is the foundation on which everything else is built. Strong Labour means strong public services – reinvested and reinvented, not just patched. To this we should add strong social security that restores the something-for-something deal at the heart of solidarity, not an unaffordable universal basic income – but universal basic capital: that genuinely helps people build wealth over the course of working life; a deposit for a home; lifetime learning; a nest-egg for old age. Strong Labour should deliver a sustained attack on the inequality of progress that has cursed our country for so long. 

Strong Society, Not Strong Man

The third chord is perhaps the most important. Along with appeasement and avarice, populists are autocrats. Strong Labour does not make a fetish of the strong man. It makes a foundation of the strong society – built on the conviction, written into our membership cards, that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone. Strong Labour’s answer to strong man politics is strong society: a new civic gospel, power devolved out of Whitehall, communities rebuilt, pride in place restored – coupled with the strength to take on kleptocracy and Big Tech where it runs riot in dividing us. Strong Labour stands against one leader’s will imposed from above. It renews the political belief of all of us in it together. 

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