Hello, my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today, Helen and I are

talking to Chris Bickerton about technopopulism. Why do two words that sound as if they shouldn't

go together in fact help explain contemporary politics?

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Chris, I think most people would struggle to see maybe how technopopulism and technopopulism

go together. So the technop here is not German dance music. It relates to primarily technocracy,

which I think most of us understand as a kind of government by experts or elites, educated

elite people with a claim to a special kind of knowledge. And then the common association

with populism is often the opposite of that that populist politicians complain about the

elites with the special knowledge or at least making those claims. And they push back

with ideas of popular wisdom or folk wisdom. But you argue that these two ideas actually

go together and there's a kind of logic joining them up. So just take us through that. Why

do they hook on to each other?

So I think you're absolutely right. Appearances suggest that populism and technocracy are

odds with one another. We see that in the climate debates, activists tell us we have to listen

just to the science and ignore the politicians as much as possible, especially the populist

politicians. We've seen it in the pandemic about following the science rather than following

a populist tendency to ignoring scientific expertise. Really wherever you look, you find

this opposition. So it does exist in the world and I don't think we are trying to suggest

...