For not understanding why "populism" is seen as such a bad thing

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Is the point of democracy not to have popular support?

Just pointing out there are not 2 main parties. It's a 3 way split.

@BIossomtoes Can you really not imagine any schemes that could encourage young people to take seasonal jobs? I can think of improving pay, providing transport, allowing people to do it with friends, making easier to match workers with jobs via a national website, providing training to set them up for a career in agriculture etc etc. You can also invest in machinery to reduce the labour needed. These things are harder and more expensive in the short term than just importing people, but in the long term you are investing in the skills and productivity of your population.

Populism is generally about winning elections by promising the impossible and Brexit is a prime example.

It is easy answers to difficult questions and you can be a right wing or left wing populist.
What they share is stoking emotional responses and offering painless solutions which will never actually achieve their goals in put into practice.

Completely agree. It's such a disingenuous argument to state without immigration there would be no one to pick crops, care for the elderly or work in the nhs etc. That's the leftie populist view. how about more bursaries for Drs/ nurses, increased wages/ conditions for care staff for starters? No country should rely on overseas workers to run it's services and it's depleting other countries of their trained staff as they come here to work.

Can you explain what you mean? What is the ‘tyranny of the majority’?

Isn't Democracy basically tyranny of the majority, if the vote doesn't go the way you want it?

I would describe myself as a populist. The problem I have with politicians is them not following through with what the people want in the end.

You make it sound as though anyone who calls for less immigration is misguided, as though immigration is the only solution to the problems of care workers etc. It clearly isn’t.

Of course it isn't. But the populist leaders of Brexit didn't get any further than ban immigration, everything will work out better without them and cheap slogans about more money for the NHS.

If they had stood up and said we want to reduce immigration and cheap overseas labour therefore we need significant extra taxes to cover much better wages and conditions for UK care home workers they wouldn't have been populist and wouldn't have been successful either.

An important part of populism is the lack of personal pain that is offered to followers.

@NinnyNook But those policies are not on the table. Because they involve raising taxes. The absence of a clear strategy is what makes it populism.

Populism is the political equivalent of the Disney Dad.
It rarely provides a sustainable solution to anything and it usually harms the people it claims to be supporting.

I like the example Socrates presented. He also thought of voting as a skill that should be taught and learned. He invites us to imagine an election debate between two candidates, one less skilled- a sweet-shop owner and the other very skilled- a doctor. The sweet-shop owner would manipulate the audience saying: ‘this man is of no good; he works evil on you, hurts you, gives you bitter potions, and places restrictions on your eating and drinking. But I will serve you feasts of many and varied pleasant things’. How effective could the doctor respond? Intuitively, the true answer- ‘I cause you troubles and go against your desires to help you’ would cause uproar among the voters. To Socrates, those who should vote are those who have thought deeply and rationally about it.

I agree but I would say that very few politicians are willing to fess up to the pain we will endure as a consequence of their policies, especially at election time. Populists promise bigger and explain less perhaps, but they are all on the same spectrum.

I'm getting quite tired of ignorant people shouting the loudest and leading us down a path that is damaging to the country. Brexit was a prime example of this. Brexit has damaged our country and those suffering most are people in poorer communities who voted for Brexit. Yet many feel the country has gone down the pan due to immigrants, asylum seekers. This is populism at play. This is the danger of populism. Blame minority groups for the problems we're facing and people are distracted from the real issues. Now I hear Reform are leading in the polls yet I can't believe they are the answer to our problems.

Now. Lots of time to go.

None of which helps the farmer whose cabbages are rotting in their fields now.

Dictatorships are typically more populist than parliamentary democracies. Mandate etc.

Look! A three year degree in Politics condensed into a couple of sentences.

Popular == populist.

Populism has a bad rap because it seems so entrenched in racism and xenophobia.

One problem with 'populism' is that it pretends there are easy answers to difficult questions, or that problems can just be ignored.

For example - increase in pension age and WASPI. A populist government may well have said - sure, retire even earlier with a bigger pension.

For an extreme example - Mugabe in Zimbabwe got more and more populist (giving 'free' money to all veterans, taking land from the rich white farmers and giving it away for free. Both very popular (and populist) but it very quickly destroyed the economy

Well you are naive if you believe politicians. They all do exactly what you said these days. It is only called populism when is the party you do not agree with.

No but this has been a problem for decades. They could have sorted out all these schemes during the planning for Brexit.

The country benefit from a diversity of immigrants not all from the same low skill low education countries. In this sense yes the country went to the pits. Being on denial on this it is at your own country peril. We lost amazing people with Brexit. It should have been approached differently and it was a missed opportunity. I did not want Brexit but the outcry and lack of proper leadership was the biggest issue.

Oh you won’t get one anyway. They want to abolish it. Also, why not help people here to have kids but doing what it needs to incentivise people having kids.

It helps if you understand that the root of the word populism is from populus - ie people. It refers to a style of politics that claims to represent ordinary people (usually setting them against another group), it does not mean politics or policies that are popular.

Populism is promising people cheese from the moon and then labelling scientists as the enemy elite for explaining the evidence of there not actually being cheese on the moon.

Tories were in power 14 years
Prior to that Labour were in power 13 years
Prior to that, Tories were in power 18 years

Each particular Parliament may only be 4 or 5 years, but there's a real trend in recent decades in the UK for each party to win 3 or more general elections in a row, so it IS possible for politicians to plan for the longer term.

Because populism is simply opinion without any real thought,or analysis or practical ways of implementing the policy.