The Populist - a Political Entrepreneur

The Galton and Denton by-election has raised the issue of left and right wing populism. Let's have a look at them and what makes they different.

There is a familiar character who turns up whenever politics starts to feel managerial and faintly smug. He does not arrive with a costed manifesto and a spreadsheet. He arrives with a story. He spots grievance rather than fiscal headroom. Where voters feel stalled or ignored, he senses opportunity. Where governments explain trade-offs, he promises resolution. That is the Political Entrepreneur.

Populism suits him because it is tidy. Politics becomes a moral drama between the virtuous people and the corrupt elites. It works on the left and on the right. The only real difference is who counts as “the people” and which elites are in the dock.

On the right, the people are usually defined in national and cultural terms. Sovereignty, borders and identity come first. The elites are liberal politicians, senior civil servants, judges, academics, media figures and supranational institutions. In other words, many of the very bodies that make liberal democracy function day to day. Supporters will say some of these institutions have drifted or overreached. The entrepreneur sharpens that into something harder: they are not merely mistaken, they are obstructive. They are frustrating the popular will.

In parts of Europe that rhetoric slides into talk of civilisational defence or cultural homogeneity. In the UK it is usually couched in the language of control and cohesion. But when courts and regulators are described as illegitimate barriers rather than constitutional guardrails, you are no longer just arguing about policy. You are edging towards arguing about whether the system itself is fair.

On the left, the picture looks different. The people are defined more broadly in socioeconomic terms. The dividing line is wealth and power, not ethnicity. Workers and renters of all backgrounds are said to be squeezed by corporate and financial elites. The anger is directed at concentrated private power rather than at judges or electoral processes. Fiscal limits are portrayed as choices that protect entrenched economic interests.

It is worth remembering that Labour itself began life as precisely this sort of insurgency. In the 1920s it was viewed as destabilising, captured by trade unions and threatening to the established order. It challenged economic elites and class privilege. Yet it did so by entering the parliamentary system, contesting elections and accepting defeat as well as victory. It widened democratic inclusion rather than questioning the legitimacy of the rules. Yesterday’s insurgent became today’s establishment.

That distinction matters. When the right trains its fire on judges, civil servants or independent oversight bodies, it is pointing at the scaffolding of the democratic system. When the left trains its fire on corporate or financial elites, it is pointing at market structures. Both can overpromise economically. Only one, in the contemporary European and UK pattern, more often risks eroding trust in the neutral machinery that makes democratic competition possible.

This is not to say the left is incapable of institutional overreach. In other regions, particularly parts of Latin America, left-populist governments have centralised authority when frustrated. The entrepreneurial temptation to blame obstruction rather than accept constraint is universal.

The common thread is simpler. To mobilise, you need a villain. Structural limits are dull. Bad elites are useful. Remove them and things will improve. Quickly.

That is where the arithmetic quietly slips out of view.

On the right, tax cuts or border controls are presented as straightforward fixes held back by liberal elites. On the left, large investment programmes are framed as being blocked by financial elites and timid technocrats. The awkward trade-offs that dominate real budgets are downplayed because they cool enthusiasm. The government has to explain why not everything can be done at once. The insurgent asks why it cannot.

When delivery falls short of the pitch, disappointment is sharp. And disappointment does not usually produce calm reflection. It produces the search for someone who sounds even more decisive.

The Political Entrepreneur may be sincere. But mobilisation comes before nuance. A clean story about elites blocking the people will always travel further than a careful explanation of debt dynamics.

He flourishes when trust is thin and progress feels slow. He struggles when institutions deliver visible improvement.

The real danger is not criticism of elites. Democracies need that. The danger begins when the institutions that referee the game are recast as players who must be removed. At that point, the argument is no longer about policy. It is about the rules themselves.

Terminator VI

It has been reported that a leading AI company declined to relax certain safeguards around how its systems may be used, particularly in defence settings, and that the US administration reacted with notable fury.

What might have been a technical dispute about guardrails quickly became a political row about who gets to decide how powerful AI tools are deployed - the elected government seeking strategic latitude, or the private firm insisting on limits.

And naturally, the word “woke” was wheeled out like an ageing pantomime villain.

Which is where my mind drifts, unhelpfully, to Skynet. You will recall that the engineers at Cyberdyne were not paralysed by ethical overreach. They were not convening stakeholder workshops on the lived experience of intercontinental ballistic missiles. They were brisk, confident men in suits, congratulating themselves on having removed slow, fallible humans from the nuclear decision chain. The machine would be faster. More rational. Free of hesitation.

It solved the problem by attempting to remove humanity altogether.

The moral of that story was never that caution was the enemy. It was that confidence without constraint can become catastrophic when married to immense power. Skynet was born not from excessive sensitivity but from institutional hubris and the logic of competition. There was a rival. There was a perceived threat. There was a belief that speed and autonomy were virtues in themselves. So they built it, switched it on and assumed control would remain comfortably in human hands.

Now, in the real world, if a developer suggests that certain uses of advanced AI ought to retain human oversight, this is framed by some as ideological softness. As if prudence were a scented candle in the server room. The politics of it are obvious enough. Cast tech executives as obstructive elites and you tap into a ready made grievance. It is good theatre.

But beneath the theatre sits an unglamorous strategic truth. Once one state deploys systems capable of acting faster than traditional command structures, the pressure on others to do likewise is intense. That is not science fiction. It is the dynamic that has driven every arms race from dreadnoughts to drones. In that environment, the instinct to build in friction is not decadence. It is a hedge against escalation.

So no, the developers of our fictional robot overlord were not woke. They were certain. They were efficient. They were in a hurry. History suggests that those qualities, untempered, are not always the ones you want at the helm of anything with launch codes.