What is Keir Starmer doing to push back the populists? Not nearly enough. We have a plan to take them on | Chris Powell

The next general election will be no ordinary democratic contest. Not the usual swing of the pendulum this way or that. It will be a key moment in the history of our democracy – and it could be less than three years away.

Be in no doubt: populists represent a new and terrifying threat to the kind of free elections and free society we cherish, but now take for granted.

As Donald Trump declared at a pre-election rally in July 2024: “In four years you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not going to have to vote.” Or, as his fellow populist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the Turkish president, said: “Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”

Yet, here in the UK, where is the urgently needed counter-plan on a huge scale to thwart and head off such an existential threat? It is simply not in place, nor does it appear to be even at the planning stage. We are at a very dangerous moment. We simply cannot afford to allow Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to have a free run, and become established and entrenched as a credible potential government in the minds of disenchanted voters.

The longer they go unchallenged, the more unthreatening and risk-free they will seem to voters. Just hoping that Reform and Farage implode, or that the rightwing vote will somehow fracture, is potentially suicidal for our freedom and democracy.

The Labour party has taken some small steps to counter Reform. Keir Starmer has at last begun to talk about a closer relationship with Europe, and more broadly challenge the disastrous failure that is Brexit. Presentationally, we have recently seen the first decent Starmer videos on TikTok. But it is small-scale and the narrative surrounding this government has more often been about its own failings and internal conflicts than the battle it faces against a populist surge.

If this goes on, the threat will grow. It is already doing just that on the international stage. The new US foreign policy strategy aims to support European populist parties. That is frightening. The 50-year-old Conservative Political Action Conference, reinvigorated by hard-right influencer Steve Bannon, brings populist parties in the US and Europe together to combine their electoral experiences and share initiatives. But what is there from the anti-populist side at European level? Nothing.

In September 1995, Tony Blair and his team met at my home for their first election planning meeting. All the key players were involved. New Labour was ahead in the polls. But we did not just hope that the Tories under John Major would continue to decline. We planned scrupulously for a complete reorientation, to signal a real break from the past by Labour: new strategy, new branding, new policy, new presentation, new organisation. This kind of no-holds-barred thinking is needed. A fundamental reset.

Tony Blair with Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson at a pre-briefing with staff in 1996. Photograph: Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos

For four years, my colleague David Cowan and I have been studying how populist parties operate here and in other countries, and how to counter them. There are certain key lessons. The first is that many populists seem to work single-mindedly on the “we have only got to win once” principle. So survival means adopting an equally ruthless rebuttal mindset within democratic bounds. Prioritising conventional niceties, as Kamala Harris did when refusing to break with Joe Biden, will be a self-defeating luxury. Anti-populists must be prepared to fight fire with fire on messaging, call out lies and expose Farage’s simplistic solutions.

Once elected, a number of populists have faced accusations of rigging democratic political systems to make it nearly impossible for them ever to lose. Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, Narendra Modi in India, now Trump in the US, Robert Fico in Slovakia and Andrej Babiš in the Czech Republic all seem to adopt the same game plan.

Since he came to power in 2010, Orbán has changed the voting system to benefit himself. The judiciary became accountable solely to him; they appear to freely throw opponents in jail. Last year Erdoğan jailed his presidential opponent, Ekrem İmamoğlu, who was ahead in the polls, and demanded he serve a 2,000-year sentence.

Some populists have been accused of meddling with national broadcasters, by appointing cronies to their board. They deny opposition parties equal rights to promote themselves, so they have no chance. This is the populist playbook. What chance then for our elections, our free speech? How will the BBC and independent media fare? An independent judiciary?

The second lesson from our research is that Starmer needs to fundamentally change the way he approaches voters and his way of interacting with them. Voters are fed up, think nothing works – and some are simply angry and feel ignored. Our work shows that populists are best taken on when their opponents can somehow demonstrate that they are on the people’s side. This is how Kentucky’s Democratic governor since 2019, Andy Beshear, won out in a deeply Republican state. He has relentlessly spoken out in plain language on bread-and-butter issues: jobs, roads, schools, prices.

And third: Labour needs a top-to-bottom media and communications overhaul. The populist right in many countries operates a coordinated, emotionally driven media machine across social platforms, leaving the mainstream left’s ecosystem looking fragmented, reactive and constrained by an outdated broadcast mentality. To compete, Labour needs a two-front strategy now. Tactically, it must create a semi-autonomous digital narrative unit whose sole mission is to wage and win the daily war for attention. The goal is to ensure that when a voter scrolls, the populist narrative is no longer the only one they hear. This also requires a long-term cultural overhaul to recruit and elevate authentic communicators willing to talk on platforms like popular podcasts, as traditional media is no longer reaching disengaged voters.

To achieve this, a shift will be needed from a national media “air war” to a permanent, hyper-local “ground war”. The solution is a local action network, a permanent organising infrastructure modelled on the ground-up success of Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Its mission would be to listen, act and communicate – identifying local problems, launching campaigns to fix them and publicising every small win.

The current situation in the UK is a textbook case of an establishment party caught in the headlights as its populist opponent expertly reacts to voter pain and disenchantment. Relying on containment or a rational “hold-your-nose” vote is a strategy that will eventually fail. Labour needs a comprehensive action plan, now. Time is a luxury it can’t afford.

• Chris Powell is an election strategy analyst and advised the Labour party for more than 20 years. David Cowan, who co-authored this article, is founder of Forensics, a data and consumer research consultancy. They are co-founders of winningagainstpopulists.com