Who benefits from reversing progress?

What exactly is populism? I ask because the term seems to be being used to legitimise the use of language which is frankly both racist and sexist, and to justify an approach to facts and knowledge which ignores the former and belittles the latter.

And I see nothing truly populist in either position.

Rather, none of the people I know, which includes quite a wide range socially, geographically and in terms of age and education, want anything to do with the vile statements made by some politicians and self-proclaimed iconoclasts.

No one wants their future to be secured at the cost of someone else’s family, home and career, which is what happens if we demonise people simply because they’re not British.

No one with any sense thinks that the progress we have made as a society in ridding ourselves of the casual everyday abuse of women, gay people, ethnic minorities, the disabled or those with mental health issues is something that should be thrown away just because a few grasping, wealthy, privately educated men want to promote their personal self interest at someone else’s expense.

Last week I re-read John Le Carrè’s A Murder Of Quality, which is set in 1960 in a small, southern English town, dominated by its immensely entitled public school.

It reminded me of how repressed and snobby and class-ridden the 60s were.

An era when people knew their place, and, if you were upper class, you could be as rude and condescending as you liked to everyone beneath you.

The whole social edifice was propped up by the public school system and its generation of a self-proclaimed elite who went on to run government, business and academia.

And that was a genuine elite, by the way, ‘the Establishment’ identifiable by its accent and dress as well as its conservatism and prejudice.

Almost like the Indian caste system, people stayed where they were born, socially and geographically.

No-one with any sense of perspective would want a return to those repressed, suspicious, class-dominated days.

Thankfully, institutions like the University of Kent and the general air of change in the late 60s were part of the overthrowing of those stifling norms.

New universities in towns like Canterbury and Lancaster, where I grew up, opened new opportunities to students of all classes, and Britain became a markedly more tolerant and pleasant place as a result.

Our new “populists”– and you should check out their backgrounds to see how far removed their roots are from the experience of most English people – would overturn all that, bringing back a system of deference in which, surprise, surprise, they would sit at the top. A real populist position would be nothing like that.

It would begin by addressing the extreme gaps in wealth distribution and aim for a fairer sharing of wealth between those who actually work to deliver goods and services and those who do no more than manage finances and fiddle their taxes.

Real populism would attack the selfperpetuating private school system, insisting that a society that wants equality of opportunity needs to begin with a high-quality education system which is there for everyone.

A real populist would want to ensure that there were enough decent quality homes for every family in the country and actually do something to deliver them, not just wait for the construction industry to decide when that might be profitable for them.

In other words, really popular policies would transform the lives of millions of families, quickly and forever.

They would be positive, affordable, sustainable and for the benefit of the British people. That would be a populism worth embracing.

‘Institutions like the University of Kent and the general air of change in the late 60s were part of the overthrowing of stifling norms’