ROGER PARTRIDGE: Why the Left Keeps Misdiagnosing Populism

This column was first published by CapX, the online newspaper of London’s Centre for Policy Studies, on 3 June 2026. It was written for a British audience, but the diagnostic mistake it identifies is universal.

Andy Burnham has one prescription, and he means to fill it, whatever the patient walks in with. The man with the broken arm, the woman with chest pains, the child with a fever: each leaves the surgery with the same pad of repeat scripts, which call for higher taxes on the rich, more generous benefits, and the nationalisation of something.

The Greater Manchester mayor, positioning himself for the Labour leadership, told the Observer that the populist surge across the West is being driven by inequality, and that Tony Blair fails to grasp it. The former prime minister had argued in a 5,600-word essay that Labour should occupy the “radical centre” and resist the temptation to drift left. Burnham, who served in Blair’s government, accused him of misunderstanding the economic causes of populism. But the diagnosis is reflexive, and the prescription is the only one Burnham has ever known how to write.

The trouble is that the disease has changed. If populism really were a revolt against inequality, Jean-Luc Mélenchon would be in the Élysée, Die Linke would be governing Germany, and Jeremy Corbyn would have led Labour to a thumping majority. Instead, the populist energy of Europe is flowing the other way. Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, Geert Wilders, the AfD and Nigel Farage’s Reform are carrying disaffected working voters away from the centre, and none of them run on Thomas Piketty.

The parties actually growing prescribe something different. They speak to the cost of housing, energy and food. They speak to immigration the political class chose to make irreversible without consulting anyone. And they speak to a felt sense among voters that their attachments to nation, family and place are treated by their rulers as either embarrassing or sinister.

The Trump coalition bears this out. The 2024 swing came from middle-income Hispanic and working-class voters who could not afford a house, did not believe the border was being enforced, and resented being told their concerns were bigotry. Bernie Sanders made inequality the organising theme of his politics and twice failed to win even the Democratic nomination. Trump made borders, national identity and elite contempt the organising themes of his campaign – and won the presidency twice.

The grievance voters bring to the ballot box is absolute rather than relative. People are not angry that some others have more. They are angry that they themselves can no longer afford a house, an energy bill, or to be a family on one income, and that the progressive establishment, which signed off on the housing shortage, the net-zero commitments and the mass immigration, also tells them their unease is a moral failing.

A serious diagnosis would prescribe accordingly: free the planning system to build houses, deliver cheap and reliable energy rather than subsidised intermittency, calibrate immigration to public consent, and have the political class defend the inherited loyalties of the people who elect it rather than apologise for them.

Burnham’s repeat script does none of this. Higher taxes, tighter labour regulation, expanded state ownership and another round of fiscal redistribution would deepen the cost-of-living crisis they pretend to address: energy gets dearer when the state directs investment, housing supply stays constrained because planning is untouched, and productivity falls further when employment law tightens. The patient gets sicker, and the doctor reaches for another pad.

The British left cannot see this because its training does not permit it. Material grievance is the only legitimate grievance Labour’s modern frame will admit, and cultural attachment is treated as a sentiment to be educated out of voters rather than a claim to be answered.

Burnham gestures at the right object when he attacks Blair’s “obsession” with universities and his 50 per cent graduate target, which is a cultural-sorting argument dressed up in economic language. But he then reaches for the only prescription the left allows itself. Wes Streeting, the supposed Blairite of the contest who resigned from Cabinet this month to run for the leadership, did the same in his Guardian article with even less cover, declaring inequality “the defining issue of our age.”

Blair is half right and half wrong. Half right that more redistribution is not the answer and that Labour’s drift to the populist left will end up in electoral defeat. Half wrong that the “radical centre” he champions can simply be picked up where it left off in 2010. The centrist consensus that built and sustained it is the soil in which the present populism grew.

Burnham is right that something has gone badly wrong. He is wrong about what it is. The crisis of the West is not principally that some people have become too rich. It is that too many ordinary people can no longer afford the life they thought was normal, and no longer feel represented by the institutions that govern them.

Until the left learns to distinguish between inequality and decline, it will keep misdiagnosing the patient. And patients eventually stop visiting doctors who never cure them.

Roger Partridge writes at Plain Thinking