The Swamp Exists — But Populists Won’t Fix It. Labour Must
Populists thrive by exploiting public anger at failing institutions. Labour must offer a credible plan for renewal — not just defend the status quo.
Farage and Trump are right: there’s a swamp — but only a modernising, bold, and decentralising centrist Labour can drain it. Acknowledging that government institutions are failing is not a surrender to populism, rather it’s the first step toward meaningful reform. Voters are losing faith in the state’s ability to deliver and Labour must embrace reform and lead a project of national renewal.
Confronting reality
Listening to focus groups with Trump voters during the US Presidential elections a recurring theme was a need to drain the “swamp”. Since the UK General Election I discovered, when speaking with Reform voters for an academic research project, that the same impulse also keeps surfacing in Blighty.
For Trump voters there is a powerful feeling that political institutions are broken, unresponsive and populated by elites and apparatchiks which are in essence self-sustaining. This is at the core of the populist appeal, an ‘us’ versus a distained ‘them’. In America, Donald Trump has a quality which few others possess, he is perceived an ‘outsider’ to that Washington D.C world of civil servants, think-tanks, special advisors and campaign experts.
In the UK, Nigel Farage plays on similar theme of a ‘Westminster system’ in dire need of someone to break the perceived logjams. For their voters both men represent a ‘straight talker’, businessmen, outsiders ready to break the rules. Elon Musk can equally be seen in a similar vein, as the egotistical and deeply troubled centi-billionaire vows to “kill” the “woke mind virus”.
But for those of us identifying as centre-left this poses a pernicious problem. Do we acknowledge that the levers of power of the state aren’t working functionally or effectively? If we do, does this mean we are enabling maverick populists seeking to tear down the state? This prickly dilemma has reduced social democratic and liberal political movements in the UK and USA to mere defenders of orthodoxy. We talk of historical political norms, of orthodox political culture and champion the old playbook of politics. I know I do, but I am beginning to re-evaluate some of my assumptions.
As someone who is a nephew of a former Scottish Labour MP who was wiped away in 2015 by the nationalist populist surge, I assure you I view such talk of defending democratic norms as not just laudable, but essential and unnegotiable. Who does not wish to defend a rational, normal political order geared toward policy than personality and chaos? Name any sane person not wishing to defend democracy? If our centrist tribe does not do it, it is unlikely the contemporary new right of Farage, Trump and Musk will.
Yet, as strange as it sounds coming from a lecturer, writer and commentator known for opposing populism, there actually is a “swamp”. But it is only a centrist, reforming and modernising left which can drain it. If we do not, we alienate the voters further and risk being seen as effete and removed from the ordinary lived realities of too many voters.
Did we really learn any lessons?
If we are willing to look reality in the eyes we need to begin by recognising that the state has not been delivering for far too many voters in either the United States or the United Kingdom for at last two decades (if not more). Whether we are discussing the economy, foreign policy, health and much more it is not hard to point to examples of state institutions as they are currently modelled failing to be the positive transformative force for the public good which they ought and need to be.
Infected blood, Hillsborough, Grenfell, Windrush, post-office postmasters scandal or in the Scottish prism ferry fiascos, highest drug and alcohol deaths in all Europe. How can anyone seriously driven by social justice seriously defend our British state as it stands?
Listening to the Democrats in America their hysterical reactions to Trump’s every utterance has blinded them to a similar story in the USA. A list for there is just as easy to put together folks. But on both sides of the Atlantic too many of my comrades on the centre-left of politics have retreated into a miasma as electoral setbacks occur.
Hillary’s ‘basket of deplorables’, Biden’s ‘garbage’ remark or leading MSNBC Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough’s ‘misogyny’ rant the day after Trump’s re-election. Sorry folks, but it is never smart to blame the electorate. It was bad politics when British far-left MP Dennis Skinner vowed not to compromise with the electorate in the early 1980s, and it’s still wrong in 2024.
Afterall, which of you reading this can honestly - hand on heart - tell me that the lessons have been learned post-Grenfell? That the issues and fixes have been implemented to ensure Hillsborough and the Post-Office scandals cannot be repeated? Does anyone truly feel that Scottish political institutions really know how to fix our nightmare of drug and alcohol deaths?
Taking these examples I have listed (there are surely many more) all point unavoidably to a single truth. Our systems of governance are breaking if not broken.
Politically engaged Scots can all recall the absolute farce of the ferry fiasco where civil service head-honchos all apparently have no written (digital or otherwise) record of any communications about budgets, approvals for a ferry procurement contract which failed to satisfy the Scottish administration’s own core requirements.
Reality check: our capacity for collective action is failing amid bureaucratic bungling, incompetence and buck-passing. Far too many citizens in the UK - and the USA - have a palpable suspicion that the state disempowers rather than empowers them .As feelings go, it is not entirely baseless.
As a lecturer I can testify from my own personal experience that back home in Scotland the higher education system is increasingly driven by a need to figure out work-arounds for deeply damaging financial and funding decisions being set by central government in Edinburgh. Aberdeen University is but the first Scottish higher educational centre facing a future “in significant doubt” as international student numbers collapse exposing inadequate funding models resultant of SNP government orthodoxies. Professor George Boyne, Aberdeen University chief has had to impose a recruitment freeze, implement a voluntary redundancies, close whole department programmes in a scramble to find £18.5m of ‘savings’ to rescue a 500-year-old institution.
A can assure you that among Scottish higher education it is a very common refrain to denounce the arrogance of policy makers, whose rules and policies rarely if ever have much added value to the sector. Across Holyrood, Westminster and even Washington D.C. it is depressingly common to discover windbags who do not know what they are talking about wheezing on for the glitzy cameras. Experts? We have apparently decided we’ve had enough of them, ‘progress’ is now measured by how many headlines the systems of state can guarantee for the incompetents in power.
If you read ‘Anti Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy’ by William Galston you quickly discover that what explains the rise of the populists can be summed up on one word: delivery. Or if we flesh it out a bit more, the stunning absence of it for many many millions of voters on both sides of the Atlantic.
2008 financial crisis saw Obama use the little guy’s dosh to bail out the investment bankers whose reckless greed and corruption caused the crisis. Only to witness the new President of ‘hope and change’ permit those same ‘masters of the universe’ to use their bailout money to evict them from their homes. All while not a single banker ever saw the inside of a court room. These giant investment banks had indulged bottom-feeding mortgage providers (sub-prime) to buy all these dodgy mortgages, pull them together and sell tranches (shares) of the pulled together mortgages as ‘Mortgaged Backed Securities’. Then market it as a ‘triple A’ guarantee to eager, greedy investors wanting big returns for perceived low risk.
I wrote a while back a big piece explaining the 2008 financial crisis, since it is likely the single most important event in my 35 years of life. Many ripples extended from that catastrophe, people should fully understand it.
Let me ask you, what does the Liability Driven Investment (LDI) crisis under Liz Truss short premiership have in common with the collapse of Crypto giant FTX? This is another article I wrote a while back. Let me answer my own question: while all those aforementioned crises can be explained by individual circumstances, nevertheless they all have one thing in common. They were all caught out by the rapid raising of interest rates by central banks across the world. In large part this was due to the incompetence of the Federal Reserve and the Biden administration having spent the immediate aftermath of lockdown insisting inflation was merely ‘transitory’ only to reverse-ferret catching many actors short.
As William Galston explains in his book, the reality is that government has been shockingly bad at pulling the levers of power to deliver promised desired outcomes for voters. It has generally proven inadequate on both sides of the Atlantic, if not even incompetent on economic policy.
Economic crashes, underestimating inflationary pressures, health crises, illegal criminal wars, the performance of governments have been securing a failing grade for most of my lifetime.
Peter Hyman, a key former adviser to both Keir Starmer and Tony Blair sums matters up neatly for Labour and the wider centre-left
“Working for Keir Starmer in the run up to the election, we debated which adjective would be most appropriate for describing the kind of state that we wanted to build – the catalytic state, the enabling state, the active state, the entrepreneurial state, the decisive state. But implicit in all these phrases is the premise that the state can make a positive difference to people’s lives. I don’t think we can assume people think that anymore.”
His point was one I was touching on when I wrote ‘Populism vs. Pragmatism: Labour’s Moment of Reckoning’ I described the herculean challenge as Starmer needing to meet the public’s hunger for transformative change. Peter Hyman outlines the challenge succinctly
“Politics will only be rehabilitated if this belief is restored intentionally and systematically, because it’s difficult and takes time. That is why Starmer’s mission-led government is so important. The ambitious goals the missions represent – faster growth, clean power by 2030, halving knife crime – were only part of the story. The real power of the missions comes from what they imply about the reinvention of government. For the missions to be a success, they will require massive decentralisation, digitisation, the breaking down of departmental silos, the reform and renewal of an unmodernised civil service, the creation of a culture of innovation, and a relentless focus not on passing legislation but making real change for the public.”
Rebuilding trust
It is an axiomatic truth that people sometimes vote against their own economic self-interest at times. Not everything is simply about economics, it’s also about cultural values. I have often argued that culture leads politics. A key moment from the US 2024 election was a vox-pop I viewed on CNN where a suburban mom vowed to vote GOP ‘for her son’. She said nobody seemed to talk about male issues (such as male suicide rates being higher in the US than the average). In what ought to be a surprise to nobody, the postliberal post-modern identitarian left’s obsession with bleating endlessly and exclusively about ‘toxic masculinity’ had ramifications.
We cannot simply call that ‘suburban mom’ stupid. That is simply no answer. So what is to be done?
First up, never underestimate the importance of finding the right leader and letting them be a living avatar for their own narrative and story.
Blair, Thatcher, and Bill Clinton all had something amazing in common. All three were living testimony to their own compelling story. Thatcher’s administration was able to convince millions of British voters of her narrative that she understood their needs because she presented as the grocers daughter. Blair and Clinton did not need to endlessly explain that they were a new generation of leaders for a new time, they were the living embodiment of that message (and by extension ‘New Labour / New Democrats and the third way).
Secondly, belonging is something we can accomplish. It is possible to rebuild trust in the ability of our democratic institutions by ensuring voters realise we can deliver with as opposed to merely being for them.
Tony Blair’s skills in this area is obvious. 2001 witnessed an extremely adept messaging line ‘a lot done, a lot to do’. It allowed the then Labour government to smuggle in achievements without merely telling voters ‘look how much we’ve done for you’. All while acknowledging that looking ahead there is so much still to accomplish. Can anyone looking at Biden or Kamala Harris led Democrats seriously tell me they were able to pull that off? No, instead they were reduced to sermonising to voters about how wrong they were to think they were struggling economically by listing off achievements. You need to bring people with you, acknowledging that for all you have accomplished there is so much left still to be delivered. Blair understood this in 2001, the Democrats did not in 2024.
The mission must be clearly understood. Starmer must empower citizens and communities, building a sense of common purpose. Let us call this a mammoth project of national renewal.
Synergising our politics around class as opposed to an identitarian base is essential. Far too many of my colleagues in academia, commentating and writing have disappeared up their own rear-end musing endlessly about whether Trump , Musk and Farage represent modern day fascists or not. You cannot say to voters ‘don’t vote for darkness and fear’ if you are not offering up a meaningful alternative. And that alternative needs to be an acknowledgement that the ‘swamp’ is a reality. But our solution to it is a national project for renewal.
Decentralisation and new structures which can deliver shall be key. Alan Milburn’s original incarnation of Sure Start was exactly that back in the early days of New Labour. Before the politics of top-down instincts overtook it, Sure Start was really a model of Milburn’s vision when he - correctly - in 2004 said “the old style, public service monoliths can not meet modern challenges. They need to be broken up.” In its early days Sure Start was a thriving embodiment of reinventing the state to make it work more effectively, localism, putting centre stage a combination of community and charitable organisations. Before Gordon Brown centralised the programme, Sure Start led the effort to break down boundaries and build new partnerships for delivering effectively for and with people.
As Alan Milburn explains, “True devolution sees power flow from central government, through regional government and into local government and out into communities and neighbourhoods. True decentralisation empowers the individual at the expense of the institution.”
We simply must listen to the Peter Hyman’s and Alan Milburns of the Labour movement, rejecting old Labour solutions. The old orthodoxies are not working and there is a ‘swamp’ of failure to deliver for desperate voters. While for those of us in the political centre cannot possibly tolerate the language of ‘draining the swamp’, what we must do is acknowledge that there indeed is one needing to be drained. But let us call it a national project for renewal. Decentralising, breaking up failing and unresponsive bureaucratic monoliths to bring people with us as we fight for them.
Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Nigel Farage are not draining the swamp. But a reforming, ambitious Labour and Democrat administrations in the UK and USA respectively can.
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Great article 👏