Absolutely positive

Anyone who has spent time with politicians knows that most of them are geeks. Which should be a good thing, except that it often manifests as awkwardness rather than expertise. Liam Byrne, though, is the right sort of geeky. When I ask him about trade with the EU and US, for example, he leaps out of his seat and over to a bookcase, returning with Charles P Kindleberger’s 1973 book, The World in Depression 1929-1939. He reminds me of a university lecturer, except more invested in my education.

It’s no surprise that he’s spending time thinking about international relations at the moment; his role as chair of the business and trade select committee puts him right on the frontlines of the brewing trade war. What will such a dramatic shift in US foreign policy mean for the world?

“Kindleberger basically argues that you can’t build an effective peace without a hegemon,” Byrne says. (A hegemon, in this context, means a state with a preponderance of influence and power.)

“But Robert Keohane [another scholar of international relations] says, actually… you can have harmony after the hegemon has left.

“He says you’ve got to look at the demand side for stability. And right now, the demand side for stability includes us, the European Union, Japan, Australia, Canada, the Gulf, India. Actually, there are a lot of people who need safeguards against anarchy and a multilateral system that checks the power of China and re-contains Russia.

“What you’re seeing now is the hegemon retreat, and the United Kingdom has to lead this push for harmony [now that] the hegemon has left. And the lesson of Robert Keohane is that this is perfectly possible, and we should be optimistic and bold about it and lean into it.”

After weathering one of the more heinous stitch-ups in British politics – David Laws, his successor as chief secretary to the Treasury, publicised the traditional tongue-in-cheek note Byrne left, which infamously read ‘there’s no money’ – Byrne is now enjoying a much more  positive kind of prominence. His book, The Inequality of Wealth, has been republished in paperback. And his select committee role has seen clips of him dressing down representatives of companies like Amazon, Ticketmaster and Shein rack up views on YouTube and TikTok.

It sounds, then, like Byrne believes we can have pax americana without americana? “Pax post-Americana,” he says. So he doesn’t think we can rely on the US returning to the fold in four years’ time?

“Definitely not. The United States has now become a profoundly polarised society.

“There was someone at the European Commission who said this to me last year. He said: ‘look, even if President Biden wins again, it’ll be a truce. But not peace.’ Americais now such a divided country that I think it is going to be really difficult for them to lead the world in the way that they have for most of the years since the since 1944, and so we need a degree of what the Europeans call strategic autonomy.”

This analysis, of course, assumes that we aren’t headed in the same direction as the US. Does Byrne think we are any safer from a Musk-style coup?

“I do, because I think our institutions are stronger and older than the Americans’.

“But I do think that there is a lot of complacency about the ceiling on Reform. There [is a] widely held view that it would be really difficult for Reform to go beyond 25 percent. I think that’s wrong.

“Unless Labour really strengthens its appeal to the working class, there is a risk that bigger numbers of the working class leave us. That’s why the Employment Rights Bill was so important.

“Angela Rayner, I think, is doing such a terrific job at driving and articulating that kind of argument. And Keir has actually been very effective at communicating about this, and the realities of his childhood.

“We just need a lot more of that, because what I’ve come to learn in politics is that people need to understand your motives more than your plans.”

Not that Byrne is short of plans. His book, The Inequality of Wealth, floats a range of policies – many quite radical – to address the uneven distribution of resources that he argues is the source of many of our problems.

“I’m absolutely convinced that wealth inequality is the rocket fuel for populism, and you can see around the world voters who have had a really challenging time for the last 10 to 20 years. They’re now looking at the future and feeling really pessimistic. And [a] combination of pessimism and impatience makes people feel, look, I’ve just got to press the reset button.”

“And so unless progressive parties can really understand that we have got to help people – [that] we’ve got to democratise wealth creation…[then] people are going to continue to vote for radical alternatives. Now I’ve set out in the book lots of ways in which we can do that in a practical way. But unless we clock this reality, we will keep losing to populists.”

Byrne takes it for granted that populism is something we have to defeat. But how far from populism is his own agenda? If I told you it was Zarah Sultana who’d written a book setting out the case for a wealth tax, a sovereign wealth fund, and universal basic capital – which, in its most radical form, might involve giving £10,000 to every 25-year-old – you’d probably believe me. Of course, if it was her name on the cover, it wouldn’t sport glowing testimonials from Ed Balls and Matthew D’Ancona. Why? Is the difference merely aesthetic – a divergence of style rather than substance?

“It actually goes back to an old idea pioneered by Roy Jenkins all those years ago, which was the notion of the radical centre. And at the beginnings of the New Labour era… we were passionate about this notion of a radical centre. The idea that you could be realistic about money, but radical about power was an idea that we thought was right.

“But times change. And so what the radical centre means today is something different to the New Labour days. What I think you’ve got now is a wide sense that the top 0.1 per cent’s fortunes have just soared, [and] corporate power has concentrated, and this means that the options and freedoms that ordinary people have to earn a good life are much more limited.”

Which still sounds pretty populist to me. When he was going round the Rolls-Royce showroom and the Monaco yacht show, did Byrne ever experience the populist urge –a little bit of righteous anger?

“Yeah, because when you’re looking at how a superyacht is made, a million person-hours of work goes into it – a million.

“And they are engineering masterpieces. So the reality is, you’re slightly in awe of what you’re seeing.

“But then you just think, how on earth is the ingenuity of so many people going into pleasing the proclivities of tiny number of very rich people? Surely that is wrong. Surely something is malfunctioning in our society, where the genius of so many is basically at the service of the absurdity of affluence.

“And so, yes – when you work in a constituency like mine, where your food banks keep running out of food, and then you go and see a million person-hours being poured into creating a superyacht, you just think: how on earth have we allowed our society to go so badly wrong?”

An even starker contrast with the opulence Byrne saw during his excursion into the lives of the super-wealthy was his experience working with homeless people. It is something he frequently brings up, both in interviews and in writing; did it have a profound effect on him?

“Yeah, it did. After my dad died in 2015 after what was a lifelong struggle with alcohol, I was in quite a state. I’d become profoundly affected by the level of homelessness in Birmingham. I spent a lot of time talking to homeless people about their journeys, and the thing that their stories always came back to is that there had been a twist of fate that had knocked them down.

“And my dad was hit by a twist of fate: he lost my mum when she was 52 to pancreatic cancer. But as a family, we’d done our best to catch him. The people I met sleeping on the streets of Birmingham didn’t have nets to catch them. I found that really distressing.

“I think the political lesson that it really helped me see is that… it’s only through collective action that you can build security for each and every one of us in a world where we get knocked down often in life.”

For Byrne, liberty in the broadest sense is a central concern, as outlined in his 2022 Fabian pamphlet, Reclaiming Freedom.

“How much freedom is there for someone who is sleeping rough on the streets of Birmingham? Zero. Literally zero. They are trapped in a tyranny of poverty, and the only way that you can help people out of that kind of tyranny is by joining arms and lifting people up. And that’s something that we do together.”

Such idealism is refreshing at a time when Labour ministers are trailing what looks very much like a return to austerity. I get the sense that Byrne, who would once have been considered an arch-New Labourite, might now find himself closer to the centre, or even the centre-left, of the party. I’m interested to know what he thinks about the direction of travel. Surely, we can’t cut our way to prosperity, I say – so why is that the message coming from the government?

“I think the messaging coming out of government [needs to be] a lot clearer about what it is we’re trying to do. And that’s not a novel critique – that’s something that’s kind of widely felt in the parliamentary Labour party.

“What we’re trying to do is to help people earn a better life, because we want them to have far greater control overt heir life, their options. We want to give people agency and freedoms that they don’t have today.

“And there’s a really interesting new book that’s coming out by Ezra Klein.” (He’s talking about Abundance, which has since been published.) “The argument he’s making is that, actually, there are all kinds of options that are opening up ahead of us.

“If you think about the revolution underway now in genetic medicine or green energy, global gigabit connectivity, the rise of the global middle class, the next few years could be extraordinary.

“When Kristalina Georgieva [the head of the IMF] did her keynote speech in Cambridge last year, she made the point that living standards could multiply 13-fold over the course of the next century.”

This sanguine vision strikes me as an implied criticism of our more-grey-than-red administration, although Byrne doesn’t necessarily see it that way. He is keen to point out that The Inequality of Wealth was “deliberately written as a two-term project”.

He hasn’t let go of all his New Labour instincts, either: in true Blairite fashion, his book includes the results of specially-commissioned opinion polling on the policies he floats. Taken together with previous research, it paints a striking picture: British voters are pretty radical. It seems there is broad support, for example, for a wealth tax targeting the rich. Does Labour perhaps need to have a bit more faith in the public?

“I think two things here. There are 10 different permutations of [a wealth tax], everything from taxes on net household wealth, to capital gains tax equalisation, through to National Insurance contributions on investment income.

“And my first bit of advice is, stop talking about a wealth tax. We’ve got to get into the specifics of what kind of tax where we’re talking about.

“I think the second point is that we have definitely got to take the public on a journey with this.”

But do we need to take the public on a journey? Aren’t they already there?

“So, I would say probably they are, but I think you’ve got to pressure-test this argument with the public. It now really needs stress-testing. And I think there’s a number of organizations that are going to do that work this year.”

I suspect Byrne might be being overly cautious. There’s an odd reluctance within Labour circles to accept that voters share our values, even where there’s good evidence that they do. Yet at least Byrne is willing to think outside the box first and ask the public what they think second. This seems more logical than taking for granted, as the party’s strategists often seem to do, that the average British voter is irretrievably right-wing.

Byrne has already mentioned that he’s embarking on his own project on populism. What will this look like?

“Bits of it are secret at the moment,” he says. “But basically, there’s a number of us who have come together to run a big project on the causes of populism.

“We’re basically trying to map what I call authopop – authoritarian populism – [which] is quite a weird combination of traditional and techno- libertarianism, authoritarianism, and plutocracy.”

Byrne highlights Peter Thiel, the billionaire founder of PayPal and Palantir, and vice-president JD Vance, Thiel’s former employee, as key drivers of this syncretic project. He also draws attention to the writing of Curtis Yarvin, otherwise known as Mencius Moldbug, a far-right, neo-monarchist blogger who Vance has publicly cited. “They’ve got a couple of things that they really major on – extreme free speech, extreme privacy, an obsession with cryptocurrency – but they’re also quite autocratic,” Byrne says.

“They hate democracy, and they’re all for plutocracy, because they basically want to shut down the state and stop paying tax.”

The influence of science fiction is evident, Byrne says. “Look at the two books that are particularly influential in this community – Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Neil Stevenson’s Snow Crash.

“[The latter] is the book that pioneered the idea of the metaverse, but if you kind of combine Neil Stevenson and Ayn Rand, what you get is the kleptoverse – this world where might makes right, where you’ve got extreme inequality, and where you’ve got a kind of a breakdown of society as we understand it today.”

So these alt-right kingmakers read Snow Crash, a dystopian novel, and thought: ‘that sounds great’?

“Yeah, exactly.” He chuckles. “It’s basically a philosophy that is written by, and appeals to, boys who spend too long in their bedrooms. It’s a strange philosophy, but it’s potent, and it’s real, and the vice president of the United States is amongst its chief cheerleaders. So it needs to be taken seriously.”

Exiting Byrne’s office is a shock. Across Parliament Square, an off-kilter rendition of Sandstorm by Darude, played on the horn of a protesting tractor, jolts me back to dismal March 2025. At least someone in Westminster still has hope. I pray it’s infectious.

Image credit: Liam Bryne via flickr