Note to progressive politicians: If you don’t offer real solutions to problems, voters will follow people who offer fake solutions.

@david_chisnall Absolutely, but what if people think that the real problem is that there is too much immigration? Do you still stay progressive if you offer a solution to it?

@VZ Does reducing immigration materially improve things for voters? That's the problem: even if you deliver on that promise, it won't have any effect that people care about (and will probably make a lot of things worse).

Immigration generally improves the economy, but any change in the economy will make things worse for some people. Making sure that the people who are negatively impacted have help, and making sure that the benefits for everyone else, will show people the value of immigration. Saying that you will 'stop the boats' doesn't, it's a no-win situation. Either you succeed (in which case nothing improves for most people and populists can jump on their next 'this will fix everything' claim) or you fail (in which case there's a clear failure for populists to point to).

@david_chisnall But this is the trouble, isn't it? You can't propose any solutions to the problem which isn't really one -- and yet it's also the thing people are most worried about, so you can't ignore it either.

And explaining to people that their problem is not what they think absolutely never works and, if anything, makes things worse for progressives.

So what do you do? In this particular case, build more houses, I guess, but immigration is not the only such "problem".

@VZ Explaining to people what the real problem is and how you will fix it is called 'leadership'. It's a thing that a lot of politicians seem to have forgotten how to do.

@VZ @david_chisnall Do what in being done now.

CREATE distracting problems for people to focus on, then fix it to make them think problem solving has velocity.

Progressives could learn from this, but do it more honestly.

@ShrikeTron @VZ Except that a lot of the rise of the far right (both now and in the 1920s) was due to people having real problems that actually impact their lives. Claiming that it's the fault of Jews, communists, gays, immigrants, or some other scapegoat is easy, but then if you kill all of those people and the problems are still there then you have an unhappy population (the early history of the USSR is a good case study for this: killing all of the undesirables didn't fix the problems, but it gave them time to deploy a secret police to silence dissidence).

Unless you actually present a plan to solve these problems, you are just another snake-oil salesman and the voting public can't tell you apart.

People know that grocery prices have gone up at the same time as supermarkets report record profits. Consolidation across a small number of chains has meant that there's no longer real competition. Empower the regulators to fine them for price gouging.

People see that water companies are dumping sewage in the rivers and, at the same time, paying large dividends and bonuses. Empower the regulator to enforce large fines that can bankrupt the companies and nationalise their assets in the process. Do this once or twice and suddenly banks will be unwilling to lend money to privatised industries that are just going to give the money to shareholders and executives and not invest in infrastructure.

People see that London has good public transport but the rest of the country does not and that trains are a mess. Work out how to join up public transport so that it's easy. As an initial step, ban any elected official (at city council level or above) claiming mileage as an expense. If they have to take public or active transport to work, they have a strong incentive to fix it.

And so on.