Populism and Nationalism

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Bruce, for his opening speech. I agree with much of what he said. I surprised myself by finding myself agreeing with the opening statement by the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat: that a lot of this is due to our failure as politicians and as political leaders of this country. To be popular is good, even though I have worries about populism, and to challenge the elite is also good. To some extent, that is why I am proud to be a Member of this House: because we have that challenge function. However, we are living through catastrophic times—and it is not just the outcome of the referendum in this country, the outcome of the US presidential election and the rise of the far-right across various countries in Europe. It was summed up in Michael Gove’s famous statement that people have had enough of experts. Unfortunately, I think he might be right. Understanding and exploring that is part of our challenge, but it presents a catastrophic challenge for us in trying to make decisions if the expertise upon which those decisions are made is no longer given credence. I have never felt more disfranchised by politics than I do now. The only reason why I continue to be here and to be part of the political party to which I belong is that we are so well led in the House of Lords by my noble friend Lady Smith. We have an absolute absence of leadership nationally, internationally and almost everywhere I look in popular terms.

Why do I think there has been a rise in populism? To an extent, I want to turn to neuroscience, which it is relatively fashionable to do. In an episode of the BBC’s “Four Thought”, Katz Kiely, whom I know, talked about two natural states we have as humans. One is a reward state, which has evolved to keep communities together by making us social, collaborative, creative and able to concentrate to make good decisions. It is in our interest to be social and to work together, which is why we have that reward state. However, we also have a threat state, which evolved to escape predators. It makes us stressed, angry and resistant, and our memory and performance are impaired. We find it difficult to make good decisions in the threat state. Since threat is much more important to us because it is about surviving attack by predators, and being social is a bit more of an add-on, we are six times more likely, in terms of our neural pathways, to be in a threat state than a reward state. It appears that that is what some of our populist politicians are playing to in creating that sense of threat and division.

Much of that threat is because of people’s fear of change. There is huge economic and societal change. The noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, spoke well about the change in the nature of work, the future of work and how we are seeing these larger disparities between rich and poor. For me, the biggest failing in the international liberal order is that we have not updated and understood the failings of an economic model that came through in the 1980s and has persisted ever since. The value balance between investors, consumers, workers and society is out of sync. According to the latest Stock Exchange reports, investors are doing well. Consumers are also doing pretty well. We are getting quite a lot of free stuff digitally and we are very demanding about getting next-day delivery from Amazon, yet that is at the expense of the 1.7 million workers in the logistics sector, most of whom are being horribly exploited by the supply chain that starts at the top with us wanting instant delivery and cheaper prices. Society is struggling with climate change and health services crises, and an education system that seems to be educating creativity and genius out of people rather than universally educating them to make a good contribution. We are also seeing a commensurate increase in poverty and the income gap.

The shared society is an interesting concept, but I suspect it will go the same way as the big society. As the international order meets in Davos, I hope it will think about how we can reinvent our business management to rebalance value across the four themes I described. We need to look at public service design and a sharing society more precisely and, most importantly, give the majority of people a sense of efficacy over the decisions that affect them; and we need to rebuild trust, which is right at the heart of the crisis we are talking about today.