In his new book Why Populists Are Winning: and How to Beat Them, British MP Liam Byrne argues that it’s time to go after the “supply side” of populism – time, that is, to curb freedom of the press and the right of individuals to spend money on causes they believe in.
For a decade, you see, the European and British establishments have focused on quashing the demand side of populism. They have employed police, prison, censorship and shame to stop people from voicing anti-establishment opinions, demanding populist policies or voting for populist parties. They have formed preposterously broad coalitions to exclude populist parties from power. They have had law enforcement break down doors for Facebook posts about migrant hotels and they’ve had goons detain people in airports for tweets rejecting the transgender contagion. They have used social pressure to keep citizens quiescent while their economies are deindustrialized, their identities erased and their cities bedeviled by foreign rape gangs.
Despite their best efforts, the establishment is failing. Europeans don’t like what has happened, and what continues to happen, to their countries, and they want something different. So the demand side – or popularity – of populism is here to stay. So what’s needed now, Byrne says, is a choking off of the supply: i.e., the money, the press and the organizational muscle that enables anti-establishment politics to exist.
How much money is being spent to generate all the problems that British populism pledges to fix?
Of course, Byrne doesn’t word it that way. Rather, in a Financial Times piece promoting his book, he claims “we need to look at the web of commercial ventures and financial transactions behind Europe’s populists… These help to bankroll political parties, pay fat stipends to politicians and think tanks, and fund international conferences; they help to build a sympathetic media system.”
In the past, left-liberal politicians celebrated political pluralism – divergent parties, think tanks, conferences and media outlets were considered vital facets of an open society. But Byrne recasts them as the glue that holds together a giant conspiracy. Rich donors, he argues, aren’t backing populist politics because they think London has become unrecognizable to many of its inhabitants, or because British incomes have flatlined for two decades, or because they’d rather live in an independent country than a province of a unified Europe. People couldn’t actually agree with populism. Instead, Byrne claims that savvy financiers are placing bets on market volatility and then manufacturing the political chaos that would cause it, which they can then exploit for financial reward.
“Populism today is not simply a movement of grievance,” he writes. “It is a venture, with investors and revenue models. It thrives on the same forces that have reshaped global finance: speed, scale, opacity and the monetizing of volatility.” To halt this volatility trafficking, Byrne and others want a ban on cryptocurrency-based political donations and regulation of social media algorithms to suppress “divisive” content.
Byrne’s fretting about financial elites pushing populism is comical when you look at the actual figures involved. By his own tally, a total of £173 million ($235 million) has gone from donors to all of the “MPs, political parties, media organizations and think tanks aligned with the UK’s populist right” over the past six years. That’s an average of £29 million ($39 million) a year – an amount that would fund just 386 feet of HS2, the as-yet-unfinished high-speed rail track between Birmingham and London. Byrne thinks this has been enough to hijack the British political system and put democracy in peril.
If Byrne wants to find the big piles of money that are funding British populism, there are more apposite places to look. How much money, we might ask, is being spent to generate all the problems that British populism pledges to fix? Or rather: what is the supply side of Britain’s national decline?
At its peak, His Majesty’s Exchequer was spending £3.1 billion ($4.2 billion) a year housing asylum seekers in hotels – about £8.3 million ($11.2 million) a day. While Byrne frets about his populism supply budget, the British government was spending literally 100 times as much on the single policy that most inflamed the populist sentiment he wants suppressed. The Chagos Islands deal – in which Keir Starmer agreed to hand sovereign territory to a Chinese client state with no reasonable claim to it – would cost taxpayers £165 million ($224 million) in its first year, the same the year after that, and £105 million ($142 million) every year thereafter in perpetuity, adjusted upward for inflation. Britons would pay billions to give away their own territory. One wonders how much populism that arrangement alone is generating.
The notorious Motability scheme, meanwhile, saw a surge of 200,000 new members over just two years, adding an extra £800 million ($1.08 billion) annually to the taxpayers’ bill so the dubiously disabled can receive free vehicles. Applicants have been able to purchase BMWs, Audis and Mercedes‑Benzes using state funds. There have been cases of migrants claiming a car, then getting the British state to pay for taxi services to drive their children to school. The surge in spending on Motability alone would be enough to finance three decades of Byrne’s populism budget.
Then there is the web of charities and NGOs that drive the unpopular policies British populists revolt against. Consider Migrant Help UK, which not only provides direct assistance to asylum seekers but produces pro-migration educational materials for British schools and advocates for pro-migration policies in parliament. Nominally an independent charity, Migrant Help is in practice a government contractor, receiving more than £40 million ($54 million) annually from the Home Office – a single charity, by itself, receives more money annually than Byrne’s populist bogeyman, and there are dozens of other causes like it.
Take the Cohesion and Integration Network, which was set up by an advisor to Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, who is often touted as a potential Labour PM should the party toss out Starmer. The organization has received hundreds of thousands of pounds from multiple government departments and local authorities, including Burnham’s own city council. What does the Cohesion and Integration Network do? It promotes migration and the rights of migrants. For example, the chair of the network’s board of trustees wrote in 2024 that Britain’s then Conservative government was “far right” and “adopting the content and style of the messages of authoritarian populists,” even as that same government was providing state funding to the charity.
The Network also promotes the work of race-baiter Reni Eddo-Lodge, using her writing to tell clients not to seek consensus solutions to racism because that “runs the risk… of trying to ‘prioritize white feelings.’” Read that again: the British state paid a charity, with taxpayer money, to urge public bodies to ignore the opinions of native Britons, the very Britons paying that charity in the first place. What generated more anti-establishment fury: that, or a few pounds to fund a think tank. Not everything need be measured with money, either. Last fall’s NHS report extolling the “benefits” of first-cousin marriage didn’t have a price tag on it, but it is precisely the kind of thing that leads to populism. The report said that it wanted to help people “make informed decisions without stigmatizing certain communities and cultural traditions.” The bureaucrat who wrote it did more to radicalize the public against the status quo than any think tank paper ever could.
Byrne’s plan is not the product of serious thought about what is destabilizing his country. It is the product of desperation, a response to a rising political tide that repeated attempts at censorship have failed to stop. Byrne’s fix for the same predicament is to blame the money. When the populists can’t be shamed into silence and can’t be arrested into acquiescence, one can always search for the shadowy financiers who must surely be responsible for this irrational revolt. It is an old tradition. It is also a losing one.
British political turmoil isn’t being created out of nothing by right-wing TV stations, by Reform, or even by compelling Spectator articles. It’s created every time a migrant criminal evades deportation, every time a grooming gang is exposed, every time a church closes so a mosque can open. For a great many Britons, it’s created every time they step outside and see what their country is becoming. The supply side of populism is real – it’s a supply politicians such as Byrne have spent decades creating.
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