Why populism keeps winning: Britain's elites still don't get it

When Reform UK narrowly overtook the Conservatives in Runcorn this week, many in the Westminster and media class responded with derision. “Populism,” they sighed — the usual shorthand for political views they neither share nor wish to understand. And in that single word lies the deeper problem, not just of Britain, but of much of the Western world: a ruling class that treats its own people as an inconvenience.

Populism, as it’s wielded today, is not a descriptive term. It is a moral judgement. A convenient label slapped onto the foreheads of dissenters. It connotes ignorance, irrationality, even danger — the emotional backlash of the unwashed masses against the cool rationalism of their betters.

But what if the reverse is true? What if “populism” is not a pathology, but a symptom — a signal of democratic distress? What if it is not the cause of instability, but the consequence of a political class that has systematically ignored, ridiculed, and misrepresented the people it claims to serve?

The voters who backed Reform — like many who supported Brexit before them — are not, for the most part, extremists. They are ordinary citizens who have watched, often helplessly, as their towns changed beyond recognition, their concerns dismissed as xenophobia, and their institutions captured by ideological obsessions that bear little relation to everyday life. They have seen their patriotism mocked, their economic struggles belittled, and their moral instincts inverted. And when they finally raise their voice at the ballot box, they are met not with humility or self-reflection, but with elite scorn.

This is not uniquely British. In the United States, the word “deplorables” did more to elect Donald Trump than any policy platform. In France, Emmanuel Macron has shown flashes of brilliance but also a technocratic hauteur that makes swathes of the country feel invisible. In Germany, as with Britain, immigration policies championed by elite consensus have sparked discontent on the ground, spawning movements and parties that are then caricatured, rather than engaged.

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In each case, the reaction is telling: a refusal to engage with the possibility that the electorate might have a point. That the social disruption caused by mass immigration, or the alienation wrought by globalisation, or the erosion of meaning under progressive technocracy — that these might be legitimate grounds for political realignment. Instead, the people are recast as the problem. Their resistance is seen not as reasoned opposition, but as a kind of cognitive defect. Their speech becomes “hate.” Their votes become “threats to democracy.”

This, ironically, is the very posture that fuels the populism it seeks to extinguish.

Philosophically, it speaks to a deeper tension in democratic life: the conflict between expertise and representation. Plato, of course, distrusted democracy for precisely this reason — the people, he believed, would be swayed by demagogues, incapable of reasoned deliberation. But that was a philosophical abstraction. What we see today is a mutation of Plato’s fears into technocratic contempt. It is not demagogues leading the people astray, but elites refusing to listen at all.

The irony is that democratic health does not come from silencing these voices, but from hearing them — truly hearing them. Not every populist claim is right. Some are reckless. But they often arise from real wounds — economic, cultural, existential — that the current order refuses to address.

When elites talk of “defending democracy,” what they often mean is defending their monopoly on it. But democracy was never meant to be owned. It is not a managed process. It is a living conversation between rulers and ruled, a messy but vital negotiation of values, interests, and identities. When one side stops listening, the other side starts shouting.

The rise of Reform, like the rise of Trump, Le Pen, AfD, or even Syriza, is not a glitch in the system. It is the system flashing a warning light. Mocking these movements may feel good in a Guardian op-ed or a Radio 4 soundbite, but it solves nothing. If anything, it deepens the divide.

The question for today’s political and cultural elites is simple: do you want to govern a nation, or merely manage dissent? If the former, you must listen — not just to the polished voices of your peers, but to the raw anxieties of those you represent.

Because if you don’t listen, eventually, you will be replaced by those who do.