The Populist Playbook

One of my favourite hobby-horses - there’s a depressing inevitability about it. 

Back in the 90s and early 00s, people moaned there was no clear blue water between the Conservatives and Labour. Blair’s New Labour had nicked half of Thatcher’s playbook – deregulation, privatisation, the whole “tough on crime” mantra – and the Tories, reduced to a sulk on the opposition benches, had nothing fresh to offer. Both parties clustered around the centre, competing over the same middle-England marginals, and voters quite rightly said they were all the same.

Fast-forward to now and the chorus is eerily similar – “they’re all the same” – but for a very different reason. Today, instead of huddling in the middle ground, they’re all stampeding after Nigel Farage. The Tories do it out of desperation, Labour out of fear, and Reform because it’s literally the only tune they know. Immigration, Brexit, and “law and order” posturing dominate the script, while the big questions – growth, public services, climate, Europe – are left to the LibDems and Greens, who don’t have the numbers to shift the debate.

The Overton Window hasn’t gently drifted – it’s been hauled rightwards by a loud minority. These people aren’t numerous, but they are relentless. They never stop shouting, and in a political climate where volume gets mistaken for support, the few end up setting the agenda for the many. Farage knows the trick: keep the noise simple, keep it furious, and make anyone talking sense sound weak.

A large section of the population will happily be taken in by any old nonsense, provided it’s wrapped in a catchy slogan and shouted loudly enough. Say “take back control” or “stop the boats” often enough, and it’s repeated like a prayer – never mind that “control” usually ends up in the hands of some billionaire with a spare passport and a Cayman Islands account.

The playbook never changes – simplify the complex till it’s barely more than a grunt, pick a scapegoat (immigrants, the EU, “the woke”), and hammer away until it’s been pummelled into public enemy number one. Meanwhile, the real problems – crumbling infrastructure, hollowed-out services, wages that don’t cover bills – get ignored, because fixing those means honesty and hard graft. That doesn’t win votes or sell newspapers.

History is littered with the same trick. Mussolini strutted into headlines, Hitler filled radios with slogans, Goebbels perfected repetition, Berlusconi drowned Italy in his own image, Trump floods the news cycle with bluster, and even Johnson tried the bargain-bin version with his messy hair and bumbling gags. Promise the moon, deliver a lump of mouldy cheese, and still get a cheer if you say it with enough conviction.

And here we are again. “Taking back control” turns into handing it to the very people you needed protecting from. Democracy gets chipped away while everyone gawps at the pantomime villain of the week. By the time the crowd realises, the rights they thought they were defending are already packed into boxes and carted off.

It isn’t clever politics. It’s the oldest con in the book – and somehow we (well, not me) keep falling for it.