Laughing at the populist right is not a political strategy

New Statesman​

a day ago

Photo by ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images
Across north London, in the citadels of the liberal elite, it has been hard to hear yourself think. The roars, whoops and whistles of merry laughter; the stamping of feet on floorboards; the wheezing, the rasping coughs and the slapping of thighs… yes, Donald and Elon, not to mention Nigel and Zia, have brought a lot of innocent cheer.
This is not simply about great egos falling out: a voyeuristic thrill as the world's most powerful man and the world's richest man traded insults. It also poses a more important question about whether the revolutionary surge by the populist right, which began in America, is starting to collapse, weighed down by contradictions.
After all, in taking aim at President Trump's 'big beautiful bill' in the cause of fiscal sanity, Musk put his finger on the glaring ideological fissure inside today's new right – the gap between traditional fiscal conservatives who believe growth comes from low taxes balanced by tightly controlled government spending; and the performative hucksters, happy to offer whatever the voter base wants, affordable or not.
I'm well aware that this flatters Elon Musk, who has been happy to have his company suck greedily at the teat of federal spending, and who only seems to have seen the light when he realised how much the withdrawal of electric vehicle subsidies in the bill would have hit Tesla. Further, Musk's threats to cancel the Dragon rocket programme on which the International Space Station depends – threats he then reversed – and his accusation about Trump's involvement with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – an accusation he then deleted – suggests a man on the edge.
Some have pointed to Musk's disclosures about his ketamine use. Trump simply taunted him by saying he is 'losing his mind'. Either way, Musk doesn't look or sound much like a traditional Republican. The tech-titan lobby he speaks for is desperate for lavish US government support and subsidy – and, indeed, in its fight with Chinese rivals, has a strong case for long-term federal backing.
If Musk is genuinely gone for good from Trumpland, and it's hard to see a way back, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman will have their thumbs competing for the West Wing doorbell soon. Meanwhile, Musk's Doge, strongly backed in Silicon Valley, so far seems like a damp squib – the tree has defeated the chainsaw.
But let's try to put all that to one side. There is still a fundamental difference between the pork-barrel, 'spend big, promise bigger' instincts of Trump himself, using borrowed money to fling tax cuts to his hugely rich friends, and the genuine anxiety of Elon Musk about a swollen federal budget and debt.
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Does this divide expose the very nature of the Maga movement? It's powered by poorer, excluded Americans who may have deep hatred of 'woke' culture, but who are interested in their own economic position – blue-collar Americans who want factories brought back home, but also want to keep their benefits, and have a deep suspicion of the political elite.
The Trump bill, slashing taxes for the richest while cutting Medicare and other programmes for the poorest, shows whose side he is on; if Musk's campaign to stop the bill by encouraging a platoon of rebel Republicans to block it in the Senate were to succeed, he would be doing a favour not just to the increasingly worried bond markets but also to the Maga base.
Let's turn nearer to home, where the gone, gone-back-again Zia Yusuf, the pinging Reform UK chairman who had floated a British version of Doge, offers a parallel.
Reform faces two substantial policy challenges. One is 'respectability' – how far to go in an anti-migrant, race-inflected direction in order to energise its coalition? The second is economic. Like Maga, Reform has a blue-collar, working-class base and is offering not just huge tax cuts of nearly £90bn a year but also spending increases of £50bn a year on things those voters want more of, such as the NHS.
It says it can pay for this with cuts of £150bn a year. The Institute for Fiscal Studies says the numbers don't add up: 'Spending reductions would save less than stated, and the tax cuts would cost more than stated, by a margin of tens of billions of pounds per year.'
This suggests, as with the Trump bill, that poorer Farage supporters would find their benefits under threat, while middle-class ones wouldn't get the tax cuts they wanted. Unsurprisingly, and after seeing off Reform in the Hamilton Scottish parliamentary by-election, Keir Starmer has jumped on this, comparing the Farage package to Liz Truss and accusing him of making the same bet – 'that you can spend tens of billions on tax cuts without a proper way of paying for it'.
And so we come to this week and the Spending Review. Fundamentally, the fight ahead is about credibility and timing. Populists insist there are quick, almost painless short-term fixes to the long problem of low productivity and growth. They suggest you can slash taxes and simultaneously improve working-class living standards.
Reeves' version of social democracy has an answer to this – the big investments announced this week in everything from nuclear power to transport connections. Invest, long-term and patiently, and the growth will return. It's not a quick fix. Voters must wait. Andy Haldane, the Bank of England's former chief economist, urges Labour to have an understandable 'people strategy' and more power for the regions and nations to give voters hope while the investment arrives.
Because we are not a patient lot, and that is what Reform preys on. Haldane told the Guardian: 'Nigel Farage is as close to what the country has to a tribune for the working classes. I don't think there's any politician that comes even remotely close to speaking to, and for, blue-collar, working-class Britain. I think that is just a statement of fact…'
Well, if so, isn't it an extraordinary one? Farage, an ex-City trader from the suburban south, is more of a tribune than Rayner, Phillipson, Streeting or Reed, who grew up in council housing and on benefits? Able to speak to working people in a way that the government, 92 per cent of whose ministers attended comprehensive schools, can't?
This points to a familiar but catastrophic problem – the strange inability of this Labour government to communicate its cause vividly. By investing wisely, it can bring growth and therefore better times, but meanwhile it needs the fire of a Kinnock, the moral weight of a Brown, the birds-from-trees persuasiveness of a Blair. Yet too often, all we hear are wooden tongues.
The lessons of the past fortnight are twofold. First, the right-wing populist insurgency, both in America and here, is fragile, not omnipotent. As the Musk episode reminds us, there is a difference between radical protest and traditional conservative thinking, particularly on the role of the state. Any coalition big enough to overwhelm social democracy can come apart quickly when personalities go to war.
Although they sometimes run in parallel, American politics and British politics, Brobdingnag and Lilliput, remain different in structure, electoral make-up and rhythm. One must be cautious about those equal signs: the quick peace deal between Yusuf and Farage showed a sense lacking in Washington. Still, the mocking liberal laughter wasn't all ridiculous.
But the second lesson is that, even with a plausible growth strategy, social democracy needs brilliant storytellers to keep a tired and sceptical electorate onside. This is a long fight. Starmer and Reeves are in it for years to come. But they have to become far better communicators. Nigel Farage, after all, is a man used to having the last, loud laugh.
[See more: Reform needs Zia Yusuf]
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