Transcript: Britain’s Floundering Labor Party Is a Warning to U.S Dems

If you poll British people, “Should we rejoin?” 60 percent say yes. If you say, “Maybe not rejoin, but pursue closer ties”—there’s a spectrum, there’s ways we could have closer ties without fully rejoining—that could poll 70, 75 percent. It’s not a popularity thing. It’s that he knows that if they were to revisit the Brexit settlement, it would mean running into and having to confront anti-immigrant fearmongering from the right-wing press. And their whole political project is geared around not doing that.

So yeah, I’ve been incredibly vocal about the trans rights thing; is that the number one thing bringing their polling down? It hasn’t helped. But no, that’s not the main thing. I would agree, and this is Matt Yglesias’s answer—we went back and forth on this on Bluesky—it’s the economy. But the reason they can’t fix the economy is because of this insistence that we capitulate in advance on this stuff.

Bacon: Let me ask a basic question. In the U.S., if I ask, are people anti-immigrant? I would say it depends on how you frame the question. People want a sense of border control, but they also don’t want ICE shooting people or grabbing kids from houses and so on. Is British sentiment similar? Where are British citizens on immigration broadly? Is it similar to the U.S. where it depends on what the framing is, or is there some coherent sentiment?

Buckle: Yeah, so I would say British sentiment is worse, but then once you dig down below the top line, in both cases there’s a lot of ambiguity with regards to how you answer the question. So if you ask Americans, “Do you think legal migration is good for the country?” you’ll get a pretty sizable majority, like 60 percent or something. If you ask British people the same thing, it’ll be the other way: 60, 70 percent say bad.

But underneath those top-line numbers, there’s a lot of ambiguity. So if you ask, “What do you negatively associate with immigration?” it’s crime. Either people coming here illegally or committing crimes while they’re here. And if you say, “Do you approve of people coming here on student visas?” Yeah, they’re fine. “Do you approve of people coming here on spousal visas?” Yeah, they’re fine. “Do you approve of people coming here to work in the NHS?” Yeah, they’re fine. I mean, there’s a hardcore anti-immigrant who is against all of it, but I think what’s going on in both cases is the median voter’s view of the way immigration works in both countries is factually wrong.

In both countries, people believe that illegal immigration is much higher than it is. Most people in Britain believe that most immigrants are here illegally. Regardless of what estimates you take, that is preposterously untrue. Most people believe that immigrants commit crime at a higher rate. In both countries, we know from every study done on this that first-generation immigrants commit violent crimes at lower rates. People believe very, very strongly in Britain that immigrants are supported by social services, that they’re claiming welfare from the system. Whereas in fact, almost every visa route you could be on explicitly bars you from claiming public support. There is just no way to do that in our system.

It’s actually one of the reasons why the anti-immigration push… one of the many reasons it’s harmed our economy so much is immigrants under our system are very good for revenues, right? Because they can’t claim public services and we essentially tax them double. You have to pay for the NHS once through your taxes, and then a second time through a surcharge. So you’re paying twice the taxes and taking almost nothing out. And so it’s actually, from a purely financial perspective, good to have people come in. And so we’ve stopped that happening.

But anyway, to your question about public sentiment: public sentiment is bad in the U.K., but it’s bad because it’s based on things that are just factually wrong. A really telling example of this is if you ask British people, “Would you like to stop legal migration of illegals?”—no, “Would you like to stop legal migration completely?”—45 percent will say yes, which is an insane position that would destroy the country.

But if you say, “Would you want to stop all inward migration knowing that it would lead to staffing shortages in the NHS, our health service?” only 15 percent will say yes to that. Which I find super interesting because doing that would almost certainly lead to NHS staffing shortages. But that argument hasn’t been made. No one’s championed it. And people like Labour just validate the right-wing lies. And so we’re stuck in this thing where the average voter believes that by kicking out all the immigrants we’ll become wealthier and more prosperous. And we kick out some and they’re like, “Oh, shoot, what do we do?”

Bacon: So to come to the big question here in the U.S. context, basically when you read the U.S. centrists—the Way to Win report or all these publications, think tanks, that all basically say Democrats must move to the right on social issues, they must be less “woke,” and then they will inherit the earth. From your experience, how do you respond to that?

Buckle: Why didn’t it work for Starmer? Why hasn’t it worked anywhere?

Bacon: “Well, it hasn’t worked anywhere” is a good question. Right?

Buckle: Why is it a disaster every single time it’s been tried? Because they used to say, “Ah, look at Denmark.” Their Social Democrats took an anti-immigrant… they just got eviscerated in local elections. They lost Copenhagen for the first time in a century. Why does this never work? Now, I’m not saying you have to take a maximally left-wing view, right?

Bacon: Of course.

Buckle: You have to take positions that don’t offend your own voters.

Now, I know that sounds wild, but actually not being offensive to the people whose votes you need, that’s sort of what politics is. Look, it has not worked. And let me tell you why it’s not worked. It’s not worked because politics isn’t just about policy, it’s about values. Politics isn’t just about how many visas does the government issue. It’s about do we believe that a diverse society is an acceptable thing or even a good thing, or do we believe a society where everyone looks and thinks alike will be better and stronger? That is a values distinction, right?

When you approach an electorate, you’re not just approaching them with, “Here’s the 10 things we’re going to do.” That’s part of it, that’s important. You’re approaching them with, “Here is what we believe.” The values are how voters decide whether they trust a politician or not, whether they will stay with them when times get tough, and if they understand what the politician is doing. If you compromise, you essentially contradict yourself on values.

Right now, Starmer is attacking Reform for being racist, which they are. But on what basis does he say that? On the one hand, he seems to think it’s wrong for Reform to say that the U.K. is being colonized by immigrants. I agree. That seems like a less than nice thing to say.

But at the same time, Starmer has previously said they’ve done incalculable harm to the U.K. Which is it?

And so what you end up with is… if you look at politics in terms of what are the values parties are communicating, what is the story they’re telling you about what has gone wrong with the country and how to fix it, what you end up with is a competition between a coherent story on the far right—that what’s gone wrong is too many immigrants and we need to kick them out—and an incoherent story on the center-left that doesn’t make any sense.

Bacon: I want to finish with two ideas that have been in Liberal Currents content that is maybe not about this reactionary centrism of Starmer, and I’ll end there. One is that… and you wrote this piece that really made me think. You wrote a piece to basically argue that the democratic left in the U.S. for a while was kind of running against the Democratic Party, and winning primaries is not going to be easy for Sanders particularly in 2016. Running against the Democratic Party is not a way to win primaries. A lot of Democratic voters think the Democratic Party stands for civil rights and so on.

And I think you were sort of arguing a better approach might be for the people in the progressive, leftish wing to run as Democrats, but run as Democrats who are going to fight the right even harder than the moderates are. I liked the piece. I think that’s happening. I think AOC is very popular right now because she’s kind of dropped the critiquing of the party—she does some of that, but is more now like, I’m a warrior for defending democracy and against fascism, even more than Hakeem Jeffries. So talk about that, where maybe the leftist, socialist part of the Democratic Party maybe got it wrong, and where they’re improving.

Buckle: Yeah. You summed it up pretty well there.

Bacon: Sorry about that. Maybe I should let you do it first, but anyway.

Buckle: No, I think that’s right. I think there can be a tendency when you’re trying to primary an incumbent to trash the party. I think the problem that you run into is that American political parties are much bigger-order things. So in the U.K., there’s no such thing as a primary and party membership is like 1 percent of the country. Right? You don’t have those big inputs.

But what you can often get, and I think this is increasingly true in American politics, is American politics is a two-teams thing, right? There is a liberal team and a conservative team. And people identify as part of one of those teams. And I think what you can run into is if I run on a message of Democrats suck, I might mean Chuck Schumer and the party leadership, but what a lot of people in the primary electorate are going to hear is, “You suck.” And guess what? To be honest, sometimes the far left has kind of run on a message of “you suck” to the people whose votes they need.

I think there’s also been a narrative that emerged after the 2016 election that this was a backlash not to “woke,” but this was a backlash to economic anxiety. That because of neoliberalism, people were poor, people were unequal, they were sort of turning to fascism because of that.

Bacon: In some ways, that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama created Trump. Their neoliberal policies created Trump, is what the Bernie crowd was kind of hinting at, right.

Buckle: Kind of hinting? Overtly saying. That’s what Bernie said. He said both parties—and I’m quoting him directly in his New York Times interview—he said, “both parties are to blame.” Now, again, one, I don’t think that’s the best narrative, I don’t think that actually is what happened. But two, if you are trying to appeal to a voter who likes Obama, that’s not going to be a great message, is it?

And I think actually we can learn something from Republicans here. When they did the Tea Party, how did they express this idea of we don’t like the leadership, but we need to rally the activist base, the rank and file? They had a brilliant framing: RINO. Republican In Name Only. Right? That’s genius, because what you’ve done is you’ve really navigated that such that you’re saying, Our problem is with the leader, with this specific person, not the team. You know, we’re not trashing the team that we’re all on. It’s just this one person—actually, they’re not really on the team, not like you and me. And so we need to get rid of them for someone who is like you and me.

I mean, put it this way: if you’re a sports fan, right? And you’re going to go see the Eagles or whatever. And someone starts trash-talking the Eagles and saying, Oh, their defense is rubbish, it’s no wonder they lost. Whether or not you tolerate someone saying that will depend on whether or not you see them as a fan of your team. Whether or not you see them as having standing. If it’s someone from the opposing team trash-talking your team, you’re going to be like, Well, F you, buddy. Get lost, get out of here. But if it’s someone you know is a long-term fan of your team and they’re saying it because they want your team to win, then you’ll accept them saying it. If we’re both fans of the Eagles and I say, Listen, we’ve got to change out that player because he just messes it up every single time, because I want us to win, then you’ll accept what I’m saying. But if you’re not seen as being on the team, you won’t accept that.

Bacon: I don’t know if Bernie Sanders and AOC read your piece or not. And I’m guessing they didn’t. But if you noticed in 2024, they rallied behind Biden and Harris in a way to show they were team players. And then in 2025, when they went on that tour, they said “fighting oligarchs,” which was not a critique of Democrats. There are some Democratic oligarchs, but you can see oligarchs as separate from the Democratic Party. And that critique felt like it included Trump and some other people, but did not necessarily criticize other Democrats. And I feel like I’ve seen some polls showing AOC is very popular with Democrats—I wonder if somebody’s internalized a general version of your message and that’s helping. Do you see the left as being smarter about this now, is what I’m trying to ask. Have they advanced on this toward what you’re saying?

Buckle: I think so, right? I think even just last year. I definitely see what you’re saying. I mean, Zohran Mamdani would be another example, because he started that campaign with Cuomo running, saying, I’m going to be the one who stands up to Trump. But by the end of the campaign, Cuomo was urging Republicans to come in and save him. And Mamdani was able to sort of say, I’m the Democrat. I’m the one standing up for our party and not selling us out. And he won. Right. Like in a two-teams politics, the person who is most clearly on your team and will most clearly stand up to the other team will usually win. Right?

Bacon: Win the primary, you’re saying, is probably what we’re getting at. If the left wants to win primaries, they have to be seen as true Democrats in a certain sense.

Buckle: Yes. And to your point, I think they increasingly are. And I think also there is just a shift in the Democratic Party primary electorate. Where at the beginning of this era, it might have been left versus center that divided us amongst Democratic base voters, now it’s fight versus don’t fight. Right? And the fight people are winning.

The people I was critiquing earlier, the sort of reactionary centrists, they exist in elite spaces. They exist in The New York Times, party consultants. Among just your base primary voters, that debate is won. People do not want to compromise. They want to fight. And if you can position yourself as the person who’s going to fight, you’re probably going to win a primary.

Bacon: Final point. I don’t know if this was your essay or not—I should have looked it up—but there was a Liberal Currents essay right after 2024 that basically argued that this idea that Trump is winning because Americans are poor or because there’s economic anxiety is not accurate, because Americans are very well off, and this economic story of Trump’s rise and the rise of the far right in the West is maybe not accurate. And I saw AOC went over to Munich over the weekend and sort of gave another version of the working class is in decline, and wages are sagging, and this is the rise of the far right. I would like that story to be true, because I support socialist policies in an economic sense, but I’m not sure that’s actually true. So talk about what’s your sense of the rise of the far right in the U.S. and in Britain and other places, and the connection or lack of connection to actual material economic conditions.

Buckle: Yeah, I think that was my essay. It was called “A Disease of Affluence.” And I agree. I like AOC generally; I think she’s come a long way from Bernie. I think she does sometimes slip back into that narrative. And I just think it’s not the best narrative. So the data is in on this pretty largely: to the extent that Trump attracts working-class votes, he does so on the basis of social issues, not economic ones. There’s been a lot of empirical work done on this, and I think that’s pretty much answered now.

What I would also point out is bigotry is very often a top-down thing. I don’t think we should get into this view that it’s some property of the working class that we just hate foreigners or something. I think a lot of what you see with anti-immigrant sentiment is… I mean, look at the Epstein files and the way they talk about racial issues and the way they talk about transgender rights. I think transgender rights actually is an even clearer case. Who even knew what any of this was 20 years ago? This is a media panic that kind of cascaded down, and I just think that can’t be the whole story. There are very, very racist people who are very, very affluent. Right?

I think what the 2016 election was about, what the 2024 election was about, is a very, very old story in American politics, which is politicians appeal to people not on the basis that they’re poor or middle-class or whatever. They appeal to them on the basis of, “You will have social inferiors. If you elect us, there will always be people beneath you.” This goes back all the way to the debates over slavery. Calhoun argued against Lincoln. Lincoln said, look, if you do away with slavery, we’ll be more prosperous. And Calhoun said, you don’t even get it, man. You don’t get it. It’s not about having more money. It’s about always being above someone. That’s what I offer the whites, and that’s why they’ll always back me.

And that’s what Trump offers. If you look at his economic platform, it’s at very best incoherent, right? He’s certainly not populist or putting money in workers’ pockets or anything to do with that. No. What he offers you is: Women don’t know their place anymore. Too many foreigners. Black people don’t know their place. There’s all this weirdness going on with transgender people. I’ll put those people back in their place. That’s the message of Trump.

And I think we’re just a bit too polite about it. There’s some elite discourse thing where we don’t just say people are racist. And sometimes people just are racist. I think we’re too charitable to Trump voters, and we tell this story of, “Oh, they’re poor and oppressed, and it’s no wonder they’re effed off.” They’re just bigots, you know? And sometimes you just need to name those beliefs directly as the only way of confronting them, because those beliefs are not unique to the working class.

Bacon: Toby, this was a really great conversation. I feel like a lot of people are going to learn a lot from it. Thank you for participating. Thanks everybody for joining me and take care, Toby. Thank you.

Buckle: Thanks, Perry. Bye-bye.