Thanks for listening to The Restis Politics. To support the podcast, listen without the adverts and get early access to episodes and live show tickets, go to therestispolitics.com. That's the rest is politics.com. Welcome to the restis politics with me, Alistair Campbell, without Rory, but shortly with Liam Byrne MP for the second part in our mini-series on populism.

Liam's written this very, very interesting book about populism, where it comes from,

what it means, how it's exploited.

And we're talking particularly about right-wing populism.

As people who've listened to Part 1, we'll know.

But that was really all about diagnosing the problem.

What this episode seeks to do is to go through how it can be defeated by those who still believe in progressive democratic politics and politics as a force for good rather than the force for exploitation by charismatic charlatans.

So here you go.

A few ideas.

And don't be surprised if you hear the name Franklin D. Roosevelt quite a lot in this episode.

We talked in part one about these five groups, the disgusted disruptors, the left behind

collectivist, the traditional conservatives, the melancholy middle, the civic pragmatist. I want to focus on the bottom two. Yeah. Because you're basically saying the top three, the Tories and Labor might as well, take the battle away and go home because they're not going to come back to them. And they were never, and they were never within reach. Well, they might have been with the Tories, some of them. Some of them were within the Tories.

But, I mean, 70% of reform voters will have not voted Labor for the last 20 years. Well, if you never voted for Tony Blair, you're never going to vote Labor. Right. Well, we know that way. We know that. So, but of that 40%, you alluded to this in part one, but let's just dig into it now. See, I would argue in the approach on immigration,

I kind of understand the politics of it, but I do think the rhetoric of it through this parliament has been, in a sense, about aiming at all of these people. Correct. Right. Which has alienated

a lot of people who you're losing to the left of labor and to the Greens. So based

both on your analysis of all this, but more importantly in a way, your experience as immigration

minister under new labor, what is the right balance between we're going to sort this and we're going to be tough and we're going to stop this and stop that and what's the balance that is most likely to at least get these people thinking differently?

Well, we learn the hard way is that there's basically a double balance you've got to strike. So one, your borders have got to be strong.

So if you think about what we had to do, we had to go to the UK border agency, put people in uniform,

create these kind of offshore checks before people got anywhere near the border.

You've got to have strong borders, and that is why you have to fix the boats crisis.

But the second balance you've got to strike is that people have got to kind of earn their stay, earn their path to citizenship.

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