Britain is on the brink of a new Brexitstyle revolt, and no party has yet seen it

Even Reform UK seems to be underestimating the scale of public fury with a broken political system

When it comes to the prospects for another Brexit-style populist revolt, the conditions couldn’t be more favourable. The country’s political class has failed on all fronts. Almost two decades of ravaging decline has reduced the sixth largest global powerhouse to a “Frankenstein economy”, pock-marked with thirdworld characteristics: the average Brit’s salary after tax is closer to that of a Puerto Rican than a Swiss citizen. Britain’s macro-plan for surviving in a globalised world – to offset the collapse of manufacturing with cheap-wage service industries reliant on imported labour – has utterly backfired, as voters protest against the resulting, unprecedented migration flows.

Neither major party has a viable plan for deterring illegal migrants from crossing the Channel. Law and order has all but disintegrated, as knife attacks surge and life-scarring crimes like burglary become virtually uninvestigated offenses. This is not to mention the fact that the NHS is approaching a tipping point, whereby it will soon be both unaffordable in its current form and unreformable due to its sheer size and advanced state of decay.

If anything, when it comes to radical populism, the soil should be even more fertile here than in countries that have seen Right-wing movements swept to power. The UK’S geographical divide is, for example, more acute than its equivalent in Giorgia Meloni’s Italy. Net migration is probably a more severe crisis for the UK than it is for the Netherlands, which handed the populist Geert Wilders a shock victory last November.

And yet, the fascinating thing is that a true populist movement utterly eludes this country. On the contrary, the launch of the new Popular Conservatism (Popcons) project by former PM Liz Truss is perhaps as “out there” as it gets. To be fair to the Popcons, they are groping in the right territory. Their pitch – which tries to combine a tough migration stance with a commitment to pro-growth economic policies – is probably the logical future of conservatism in a nutshell.

Still, how radical are the Popcons really? Though Cameroonian Ed Vaizey has scoffingly branded them “evangelists”, the Popcon leaders might better be described as “born-again” devotees of border control. Mark Littlewood, who will head up the group, is the former director of a libertarian think tank that has long advocated for relatively relaxed immigration policies. Although she was ousted before she had time to see it through, Truss is suspected to have intended to drastically crank up immigration to stimulate growth as PM.

Even if one gives the Popcons the benefit of the doubt, their strategy could well be cut to pieces by the usual establishment vested interests and Tory wets if they are not fully committed to their stated aims. The risk is that a “reformed” Conservative Party would realistically do little to meaningfully move British economic policy to the Right, settling for a few tax cuts and moderate tightening in disability benefits, while the show continues largely as before.

Reform UK should in theory be an alternative vehicle for radical populism. Yet it appears to be designed to act more as a pressure group-style party in the tradition of Ukip rather than a party of government. Its obsessive attacks on “Consocialism”, rather than building campaigns that will appeal equally to disillusioned old-school Labour voters – for example on crime – suggest more of a narrow anti-tory focus. Although its conventionally Thatcherite economic agenda may please disillusioned Tories, the party seems as unconcerned as the Popcons with the unpopularity of many such policies outside of Tory England.

But it should be perfectly possible to build a true populist pro-growth movement in Britain. Yes, the task would be daunting. In some ways, the challenge facing the West is even more acute than in the 1970s. Economies once threatened by the infiltration of Soviet ideology from without are now being corroded by a “post-growth” mindset from within. Amid population ageing and a shift in the global economy’s centre of gravity and core industrial power to mainland Asia, some mainstream economists believe that countries like the UK are entering an unstoppable period of “secular stagnation”.

Rarefied metropolitans, who view GDP as a measure not of progress but as the immoral dividends of an ecologically destructive capitalist society built on historic colonial exploitation and slavery, have responded to such warnings not with alarm but a shrug. And the politics of envy has spread like Japanese knotweed. National politics risks sinking into a series of grasping, bitter rows over how to distribute a shrinking pie.

The antidote to all this lies in building sustainable healthcare and pensions systems, while seeking to regain our competitive advantage by excelling in high-value-added industries like tech – a goal that will require the kind of tax cuts and incentives the Popcons and Reform propose, but also infrastructure and skills drives. There is a way to make a populist argument for this. Rather than getting lost in abstract debates about “boosting GDP”, its main stated mission would be to increase real wages through the creation of more high-skill jobs, particularly in northern regions, where cotton mills have been replaced by call centres.

Truss’s declaration of war against the “anti-growth coalition” was a damp squib because it failed to hit on the fact that Britain faces not just a cultural antipathy to growth, but an even more profound, underlying systems failure. A much stronger campaign would focus on the gobsmacking scandal that the country’s leading experts cannot answer the most basic question in British economics today: why living standards have stopped growing. The case could be made that this staggering failure is down to a crisis of establishment groupthink – a catastrophe that an elite culture that obsesses over racial and gender-based diversity, rather than the intellectual variety, has proved hopelessly blind to.

The great irony is that, while Britain might be ripe for a political revolution, it is set to elect by a landslide a government even more technocratic, and further away from public opinion in many areas, than the Conservatives. That is a damning indictment not just of the “populist Right”, but of the entire political establishment.

National politics risks sinking into a series of grasping, bitter rows over how to divide a shrinking pie