{"id":540477,"date":"2026-04-20T04:37:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T04:37:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/540477\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T04:37:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T04:37:10","slug":"what-is-the-supply-side-of-britain-and-europes-decline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/540477\/","title":{"rendered":"What is the supply side of Britain and Europe\u2019s decline?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his new book Why Populists Are Winning: and How to Beat Them<\/a>, British MP Liam Byrne argues that it\u2019s time to go after the \u201csupply side\u201d of populism \u2013 time, that is, to curb freedom of the press and the right of individuals to spend money on causes they believe in.<\/p>\n

For a decade, you see, the European and British establishments have focused on quashing the demand side of populism. They have employed police, prison, censorship and shame to stop people from voicing anti-establishment opinions, demanding populist policies or voting for populist parties. They have formed preposterously broad coalitions to exclude populist parties from power. They have had law enforcement break down doors for Facebook posts about migrant hotels and they\u2019ve had goons detain people in airports for tweets rejecting the transgender contagion. They have used social pressure to keep citizens quiescent while their economies are deindustrialized, their identities erased and their cities bedeviled by foreign rape gangs.<\/p>\n

Despite their best efforts, the establishment is failing. Europeans don\u2019t like what has happened, and what continues to happen, to their countries, and they want something different. So the demand side \u2013 or popularity \u2013 of populism is here to stay. So what\u2019s needed now, Byrne says, is a choking off of the supply: i.e., the money, the press and the organizational muscle that enables anti-establishment politics to exist.<\/p>\n

How much money is being spent to generate all the problems that British populism pledges to fix?<\/p>\n

Of course, Byrne doesn\u2019t word it that way. Rather, in a Financial Times piece promoting his book, he claims \u201cwe need to look at the web of commercial ventures and financial transactions behind Europe\u2019s populists\u2026 These help to bankroll political parties, pay fat stipends to politicians and think tanks, and fund international conferences; they help to build a sympathetic media system.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the past, left-liberal politicians celebrated political pluralism \u2013 divergent parties, think tanks, conferences and media outlets were considered vital facets of an open society. But Byrne recasts them as the glue that holds together a giant conspiracy. Rich donors, he argues, aren\u2019t backing populist politics because they think London has become unrecognizable to many of its inhabitants, or because British incomes have flatlined for two decades, or because they\u2019d rather live in an independent country than a province of a unified Europe. People couldn\u2019t actually agree with populism. Instead, Byrne claims that savvy financiers are placing bets on market volatility and then manufacturing the political chaos that would cause it, which they can then exploit for financial reward.<\/p>\n

\u201cPopulism today is not simply a movement of grievance,\u201d he writes. \u201cIt is a venture, with investors and revenue models. It thrives on the same forces that have reshaped global finance: speed, scale, opacity and the monetizing of volatility.\u201d To halt this volatility trafficking, Byrne and others want a ban on cryptocurrency-based political donations and regulation of social media algorithms to suppress \u201cdivisive\u201d content.<\/p>\n

Byrne\u2019s fretting about financial elites pushing populism is comical when you look at the actual figures involved. By his own tally, a total of \u00a3173 million ($235 million) has gone from donors to all of the \u201cMPs, political parties, media organizations and think tanks aligned with the UK\u2019s populist right\u201d over the past six years. That\u2019s an average of \u00a329 million ($39 million) a year \u2013 an amount that would fund just 386 feet of HS2, the as-yet-unfinished high-speed rail track between Birmingham and London. Byrne thinks this has been enough to hijack the British political system and put democracy in peril.<\/p>\n

If Byrne wants to find the big piles of money that are funding British populism, there are more apposite places to look. How much money, we might ask, is being spent to generate all the problems that British populism pledges to fix? Or rather: what is the supply side of Britain\u2019s national decline?<\/p>\n

At its peak, His Majesty\u2019s Exchequer was spending \u00a33.1 billion ($4.2 billion) a year housing asylum seekers in hotels \u2013 about \u00a38.3 million ($11.2 million) a day. While Byrne frets about his populism supply budget, the British government was spending literally 100 times as much on the single policy that most inflamed the populist sentiment he wants suppressed. The Chagos Islands deal \u2013 in which Keir Starmer agreed to hand sovereign territory to a Chinese client state with no reasonable claim to it \u2013 would cost taxpayers \u00a3165 million ($224 million) in its first year, the same the year after that, and \u00a3105 million ($142 million) every year thereafter in perpetuity, adjusted upward for inflation. Britons would pay billions to give away their own territory. One wonders how much populism that arrangement alone is generating.<\/p>\n

The notorious Motability scheme, meanwhile, saw a surge of 200,000 new members over just two years, adding an extra \u00a3800 million ($1.08 billion) annually to the taxpayers\u2019 bill so the dubiously disabled can receive free vehicles. Applicants have been able to purchase BMWs, Audis and Mercedes\u2011Benzes using state funds. There have been cases of migrants claiming a car, then getting the British state to pay for taxi services to drive their children to school. The surge in spending on Motability alone would be enough to finance three decades of Byrne\u2019s populism budget.<\/p>\n

Then there is the web of charities and NGOs that drive the unpopular policies British populists revolt against. Consider Migrant Help UK, which not only provides direct assistance to asylum seekers but produces pro-migration educational materials for British schools and advocates for pro-migration policies in parliament. Nominally an independent charity, Migrant Help is in practice a government contractor, receiving more than \u00a340 million ($54 million) annually from the Home Office \u2013 a single charity, by itself, receives more money annually than Byrne\u2019s populist bogeyman, and there are dozens of other causes like it.<\/p>\n

Take the Cohesion and Integration Network, which was set up by an advisor to Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester, who is often touted as a potential Labour PM should the party toss out Starmer. The organization has received hundreds of thousands of pounds from multiple government departments and local authorities, including Burnham\u2019s own city council. What does the Cohesion and Integration Network do? It promotes migration and the rights of migrants. For example, the chair of the network\u2019s board of trustees wrote in 2024 that Britain\u2019s then Conservative government was \u201cfar right\u201d and \u201cadopting the content and style of the messages of authoritarian populists,\u201d even as that same government was providing state funding to the charity.<\/p>\n

The Network also promotes the work of race-baiter Reni Eddo-Lodge, using her writing to tell clients not to seek consensus solutions to racism because that \u201cruns the risk\u2026 of trying to \u2018prioritize white feelings.\u2019\u201d Read that again: the British state paid a charity, with taxpayer money, to urge public bodies to ignore the opinions of native Britons, the very Britons paying that charity in the first place. What generated more anti-establishment fury: that, or a few pounds to fund a think tank. Not everything need be measured with money, either. Last fall\u2019s NHS report extolling the \u201cbenefits\u201d of first-cousin marriage didn\u2019t have a price tag on it, but it is precisely the kind of thing that leads to populism. The report said that it wanted to help people \u201cmake informed decisions without stigmatizing certain communities and cultural traditions.\u201d The bureaucrat who wrote it did more to radicalize the public against the status quo than any think tank paper ever could.<\/p>\n

Byrne\u2019s plan is not the product of serious thought about what is destabilizing his country. It is the product of desperation, a response to a rising political tide that repeated attempts at censorship have failed to stop. Byrne\u2019s fix for the same predicament is to blame the money. When the populists can\u2019t be shamed into silence and can\u2019t be arrested into acquiescence, one can always search for the shadowy financiers who must surely be responsible for this irrational revolt. It is an old tradition. It is also a losing one.<\/p>\n

British political turmoil isn\u2019t being created out of nothing by right-wing TV stations, by Reform, or even by compelling Spectator<\/a> articles. It\u2019s created every time a migrant criminal evades deportation, every time a grooming gang is exposed, every time a church closes so a mosque can open. For a great many Britons, it\u2019s created every time they step outside and see what their country is becoming. The supply side of populism is real \u2013 it\u2019s a supply politicians such as Byrne have spent decades creating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In his new book Why Populists Are Winning: and How to Beat Them, British MP Liam Byrne argues…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540478,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[94898,59,57,58,2795,420,118945,50,633,56181,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-540477","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-chagos-islands","9":"tag-gb","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-greatbritain","12":"tag-immigration","13":"tag-keir-starmer","14":"tag-liam-byrne","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-nigel-farage","17":"tag-populism","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom","20":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540477\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}