1Ivor Crewe and David Sanders are internationally renowned scholars: until 2020, Crewe was the Master of University College, Oxford and President of the Academy of Social Sciences, while Sanders is Emeritus Professor at the University of Essex (Department of Government). This book is dedicated to Canadian-born Anthony King (1934-2017), a Professor of government at the University of Essex for fifty years and a broadcaster known to the general public for his BBC interviews during each UK General Election night from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s. An influential and authoritative figure, King never sought elected office himself but nevertheless sat on a number of advisory public bodies, such as the Nolan committee on standards in public life (1994) or the Wakeham commission on the future of the House of Lords (1999). A Gaitskelite throughout his Oxford years, he later advised, along with Crewe, the Social Democratic Party in its early stages. The book comes in the form of a substantial edited volume of just over 310 pages and 19 chapters. Most of the contributions stem from a conference organised in memory of Anthony King at the University of Essex in May 2018, under the chairmanship of John Bercow, the then colourful Speaker of the House of Commons and a former student of King’s.

2In a nutshell, the book focuses on the nature, the sources and the likely consequences of populism: the topical tensions between authoritarian liberalism and liberal democracy lie at the heart of this volume. The preface aside, the book consists of four main parts, preceded by a thorough general introduction (1-12). The first three parts are entitled “Populist Movements in Major Liberal Democracies” (13-138); “The Liberal Democratic Response to Authoritarian Populism” (139-240); “Anthony King’s Contribution to the Study of Liberal Democracy” (241-286). The fourth part is a comparatively short general conclusion written by the two co-editors. The volume mostly has an Anglo-American flavour, with five chapters devoted to Britain (chapters 2; 3; 4; 15; 16), four to the US (chapters 6; 7: 8; 17), and one UK/US comparison (chapter 14). The other nine chapters deal with other liberal democracies, notably European ones.

3The angles chosen by the sixteen contributors (fourteen of whom, men, incidentally) and the analytical tools deployed by them vary: e.g. the multi-wave panel survey used by Joe Greenwood and Joe Twyman in chapter 3; the comparative method mobilised by Michael Moran for his UK/US survey in chapter 14 and by Bartle’s, Sanders’s and Twyman’s empirical survey of authoritarian populist opinion in twelve European countries in chapter 4. However, most authors are political scientists, with the exceptions of a specialist of Russian history, Geoffrey Hosking and a former senior political journalist, Peter Riddel, currently the British government's Commissioner for Public Appointments. In the introductory chapter, the authors retrace and contextualise the trajectory of populism in recent years. Populism used to be invariably associated with the political right: in the mid-20th century, populist leaders, notably in Latin America or in Southern Europe (e.g. Portugal, Spain, Greece) sought to circumvent or indeed in some cases to thrash altogether civil society in order to appeal directly to “the people”, notably when it came to the nation, external perils or left-wing ideologies. As for the authoritarian component, it was derived from the severe repression that was justified by these authoritarian leaders based on what they described as the perils of anarchy.

4Unexpectedly, authoritarian populist movements have gathered momentum in liberal democracies in recent years, fuelled notably by hostility to immigration and more generally by cynicism about human and/or minority rights. The two co-editors argue that this so-called mindset has not yet electorally materialised to its fullest. Episodes such as Brexit (“probably the most significant event in British politics since 1945” (85), as argued by David Marsh), Trump’s election (relying, according to David McKay, on his making a “dysfunctional governing context much worse […] because he knows how to exploit the grievances of a substantial minority of disaffected voters and create his own news agenda” (67)) or the now recurring electoral successes of Marine Le Pen’s party in France may not be the end of the road. Bartle, Sanders and Twyman convincingly (and worryingly illustrate) the existence of a massive reservoir of electoral support for far-right movements and candidates, not least across European liberal democracies (chapter 4).

5Many other very perceptive points are made throughout the book. Thus, Ivor Crewe argues that hostility to immigration has been the most significant and most permanent trait of populism in the UK, a country where populist politics has been comparatively weak, despite the long-lasting impact of Enoch Powell’s inflammatory speech, a watershed in the public’s attitude to immigration and race: “the popular backlash against Afro-Caribbean and South Asian immigrants did not disrupt national politics until Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in Birmingham in April 1968” (18). Immigration occupies a central place in the volume. The approach in relation to migration and diversity is prudent and not particularly progressive. It is consistent with the managed immigration angle favoured by successive governments since the turn of the millennium. In the concluding chapter (chapter 19), Crewe and Sanders establish a clear correlation between what they perceive as the failure to reduce immigration and the rise of right-wing populism, a situation which, they say, could have been avoided had governments taken a firmer stand on immigration. Given the illiberal policies pursued since 2001 in the UK (not least under Conservative or Conservative-led governments since 2010), the US and elsewhere, this is somewhat surprising. That they should totally ignore the Windrush scandal and call David Goodhart’s often unsubtle analyses “insightful” reinforces this impression:

To protect their values and institutions in a world of massive migrations, liberals need to acknowledge that the causal connection between surges of immigration and a flourishing radical right is the closest there is to an iron law of political sociology. They may have to accept that the majority whose interests they seek to serve are, in David Goodhart’s insightful terms, people of “somewhere” rather than “anywhere” (Goodhart 2017) for whom a settled daily way of life and a common local culture are part of the social contract. Liberals may need to abandon their big-hearted internationalist instinct for open and unmanaged national borders and tacit indifference to illegal immigration […] To do otherwise would be to provide the forces of illiberal authoritarianism with an opportunity to advance unparalleled since the 1930s and to destroy the extraordinary post-war achievements of the liberal democratic order (294-295).

6That said, in his chapter on identity politics, Martin Kettle manages to come to more nuanced conclusions. He lambastes certain aspects of Labour and Conservative approaches to diversity and is unambiguously critical of the “hostile environment” that Theresa May pledged to create when she served as Home Secretary (2010-2016):

Many Muslims are socially conservative. Labour is generally careful not to confront this issue. It is therefore vulnerable to liberal campaigns which call on it to confront socially conservative Muslims on issues such as gay rights, and to illiberal campaigns that accuse it of giving socially conservative Muslims a free pass which it would not give to socially conservative white voters. But the Conservative party has a problem too. Conservatives have long tried to cultivate ethnic minority voters, in part because they believe such voters are pro-business, pro-family and socially conservative. Yet, as the recent handling of the concerns of the “Windrush generation” of now elderly Afro-Caribbean voters has shown, Conservative policies on immigration are hard line and, in the government’s own words, “hostile”. This disrupts Conservative strategy, perhaps fatally. In both examples, therefore, an identity political question has, or may have, a decisive effect on party and electoral politics more generally (207-208).

7Overall, though not revolutionary, Crewe’s and Sanders’ timely book enriches the academic literature devoted to populism. One of its main merits is its clarity. In the age of Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, Orban and many other rising perils for liberal democracy, the book is perfectly intelligible and its chapters make perfect sense whether read in succession or separately. Even if one may disagree with certain analyses, this panoramic volume is on the whole enlightening and will allow specialist and non-specialist advanced readers to better grasp the history, mechanisms and consequences of authoritarian populism in the UK, the US and beyond and to envisage what possible responses might be.