After Gorton and Denton, and with the Greens leapfrogging Labour in the polls, we are living through two rival populisms. Right-wing populism has been the raucous background music of recent years – unavoidable, challenging everyone. Now, left-wing populism has broken through and five parties are in serious contention. This Manchester Peterloo for modern times will ripple across British politics in revolutionary ways.
A laughable exaggeration? How can we compare the giant eruptions of Brexit and the double Donald Trump presidential victories; the surge of Maga and Reform, the big backwash of Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni with a single by-election and a single opinion poll?
The answer involves a homeopathic dose of Marxism, the recognition that big political change derives from big economic change, and that radical challenges to the existing order come when big groups (call them classes if you want) feel they have nothing left to lose. The right-wing insurgency across the West follows deindustrialisation, the collapse of traditional communities this caused, and mass migration as war and climate change drove people north. Anxieties about relentless small-boat crossings and a waning Christian culture are a big part of this insurgency. But it wouldn’t have happened without the economic hollowing-out; the anger and desperation for extreme measures required an engine.
In the second wave, we are seeing something comparable. The breakthrough on the insurgent left may focus its attention on Gaza, trans rights and dislike of Keir Starmer – but it is fundamentally driven by the economic betrayal of generations of younger voters.
Millions of optimistic, questioning people in their twenties and thirties find themselves unable to buy a home of their own, or even rent affordably. Many of the same people have been hammered by rip-off student loan schemes. And now – this year and next, and the year after, running towards the next general election – a giant wave of job destruction by AI is going to rob them of the prospect of decent, well-paying careers.
I hope to God I’ve got this wrong, but I fear not. I’ve spoken to people working in AI and read the public predictions. The International Monetary Fund says that in advanced economies 60 per cent of jobs are likely to go within the next few years, while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei says AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years. Dex Hunter-Torricke, who has worked in senior positions at Meta, DeepMind and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and who sits on the board of the Treasury, tells me that today’s politicians are not ready for what will happen.
But perhaps all of this is self-interest hype? AI is controlled by a tiny number of giant companies who have raised eye-watering quantities of capital. They can, according to the “godfather of AI”, Geoffrey Hinton, only recoup those investments by shredding jobs elsewhere. Flexing their muscles about job losses and “efficiencies” in the rest of the economy reassures tech investors. More generally, we know that mankind advances partly by overstating the dangers just ahead.
Yet when so many people, insiders and former insiders, analysts as well as coders, are saying much the same thing; when Morgan Stanley says the UK is more vulnerable to job losses through AI than most countries; and most important of all, when graduates coming out of education are already having far fewer job offers (I’ve heard dramatic accounts from colleges and universities) we must confront the possibility that what seems to be happening, is happening.
This is crucial to the politics of this spring, because it distinguishes the outward signs of left-wing revolt and the underlying story. Read what’s going on wrongly and you might think different language on Gaza or more of a tilt to Europe, or a slightly more environmentalist colouring around Whitehall will calm things down. None of this will help Labour much. Only a full acknowledgement of the intergenerational economic challenge facing younger Britons will be enough. That means a far faster and more radical housing programme. It means talking about AI and jobs every day of the week and recasting tax and redistribution away from older voters (I have ranted about the triple lock enough) and towards, eventually, some kind of minimum basic income.
This, in turn, means a continent-wide alliance to oblige the tech titans to cough up more taxation if they want our markets. The politics of all this is extremely difficult. As with the need for proper defence, I no longer hold out much hope of the government listening. But nothing less will do. And Labour would at least have one huge advantage in this, of being the first to address the big truth. Nobody else – not Reform or the Tories or the Liberal Democrats or the Greens – are really confronting the coming AI deluge. Coverage of tech and business must lock arms with coverage of politics. Until it does, Westminster is living in a fantasy world – voters know this in a way politicians don’t seem to.
The stakes are high. Revolutionary churns occur only when there are enough people feeling dispossessed to embrace radical changes that established society fears. In this case, it is the young and educated, historically the most potent group, that are particularly affected; students of 1848 and 1917 will sit up and take notice.
The criticism of populism is that it offers too-simple solutions to hard and complex problems. On the right, it’s that if only we can get to zero immigration and kick out enough Muslims, Britain would become a law-abiding, happy, productive nation.
Left, or “Green” populism, is very different. Its language is couched in inclusion and fairness, projecting a sunny optimism. But its policy responses, from “eat the rich” to “leave Nato”, from open borders to the legalisation of all drugs, are radical and equally threatening to what’s left of the middle ground.
Yet, because it doesn’t address the economic tidal wave behind this spreading sense of dispossession, grief and anger, the conservative response is pathetically inadequate. The taxation proposals are impractical! Don’t care. Open borders would bring in more criminals and threaten more working-class livelihoods! Don’t believe you. Don’t care. Leaving Nato would embolden Vladimir Putin. Don’t care. And so on. If you aren’t connected to society, if you have no personal stake in it, then you don’t care about its norms or offending them.
Recent events, from the Mandelson scandal to the by-election, have encouraged left MPs itching to replace Starmer or control him. Some Labour people who greatly admired the victory speech of Hannah Spencer, the People’s Plumber, believe that Angela Rayner is a superior model of the same populist type. Rayner herself, after a quiet period, was quick out of the blocks after the by-election result, writing: “This result must be a wake-up call. It’s time to really listen – and to reflect. Voters want the change that we promised – and they voted for. If we want to unrig the system… we have to be braver.” I don’t call that a coded message.
But Labour people to her right haven’t given up. The most eloquent response to the by-election defeat came from Wes Streeting at the recent Labour North conference. It combined a robust defence of the changes the party has made in power with a pretty ferocious attack on Zack Polanski, as well as the rising racism on the right. He addressed the Spencer speech directly: “When she said, ‘I don’t think it’s extreme or radical to think working hard should get you a nice life,’ she was right. When she said, ‘I will not accept a society where having more money gets you a longer life expectancy,’ she could have been quoting me… When she said, ‘We don’t have to accept being turned against each other,’ that echoed Jo Cox… Those are our values.”
The Prime Minister knows there are powerful voices on either side prepared to take over from him. He fights on. Confronted with acute overseas crises, he remains adroit. Under the surface, the biggest policy challenge he faces is intense US pressure to make us change direction on energy, and the threat that, if we don’t, Britain will be cut out of the AI and data-centre revolution. There’s a giant choice. But like almost everyone else, I see small signals that he is moving left.
Yet – once more with feeling – without addressing the economic challenge posed by AI to jobs, nobody in government has much of a chance of repelling left-populism. You have to look at the big forces, respond to the big forces, to make a big enough difference.
The Greens, meanwhile, will not find life becoming easier. Just as Reform has fought to distinguish itself from white nationalist racism, so the Greens will find examples of outrageous Jew-hatred and Islamic triumphalism among their backers. As with Reform, their own policies, on borders, drugs and foreign policy, will create a ceiling for them above which they cannot move. Traditional politics is not over.
I fear we are probably going to see nastier forms of communal conflict as Green and Reform, the two populisms, square up over the sprawled outlines of Muslim, and other impoverished, communities. It was straight out of the Trump playbook that one of the first Reform attacks after the by-election was that Spencer had won because of “sectarianism” and “family voting”.
Where does this take us? Right or left, we are living through the politics of a nation that has lost its confidence, battered by global forces its leaders are too weak to repel, and searching for easy enemies to blame.
As the ripples spread through a firmly entrenched five-party political competition, we must prepare ourselves for a hung parliament and some kind of fragile, unhappy coalition after the next election. Until then, we will have cascades of political news, vivid competition for attention, and a great deal of grievance politics.
But until politicians are brave enough to address the transformative forces of technology, the new capitalism reshaping our world, nobody will break through.
[Further reading: We cannot afford another failed government]
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Subscribe here to commentHonestly Andrew, where is the anti semitism or the Muslim triumphalism in the Green Party you are referring to? Throwing over the top attacks at the Greens isn’t going to get social democrats very far. Your actual case that the move to the left is a sign of a massive economic disruption is spot on, so why the knee jerk unpleasantness?
In Bristol one Green councillor issued various social media posts denying the role of Hamas in 7 Oct attacks and saying deaths were inflicted by the Israeli military; another Green councillor posted a Hamas publicity video & was later officially disciplined in his role as a magistrate. Both are still councillors, with no punitive action taken by the Green party.
I feel that the revolution caused by AI will be slower than imagined. As one trade unionist remarked when shown the robotic functionality of car manufacturing, and told that this was the way forward, “these robots are not going to buy your cars”. I accept that AI will reduce the current methods of taking decisions, especially financial decisions on investment and services. Much of the current is both inefficient and ineffective. However more efficient decision taking will reduce waste and increase productivity so less people will be required to maintain the economy. A four day week and earlier retirement would be welcomed by all workers at every stage in the process. The concept of a guaranteed minimum income would be welcomed by all, especially by young married people with children. I would certainly have welcomed it when I married in 1968 and had two children by 1971. The deindustrialisation of Britain had already started by that time and unemployment was already above the 3% that so called labour rotation that was so popular with economists. It took until the 1980’s for the economy to recover. If this process is repeated with AI then the politicians will have to be more astute than Edward Heath and Harold Wilson were at the time.
Andrew is as perceptive and clear as usual in his excellent analysis. But I can’t agree with his unusually stereotypical and negative commments about a coalition. Under a PR system, which is what a multi-party system requires, there would be a coalition. Coalitions are better placed to deal with longer-term issues like AI, as opposed to our see-saw tribal driven politics. We need politicans brave enough to address both our unfit voting system and the transformative forces of technology.