Liam Evans column: ‘The Left needs the confidence and optimism to dream’

Elon Musk is trying to populate Mars. Trump wants flying cars. Javier Milei plans to abolish the peso and end inflation forever.

The Right are nothing if not ambitious.

But the same can’t be said for the Left.

Progressives used to be the dreamers. Progress used to feel inevitable. It used to be the Right who were the defenders of the status quo.

So why are the Left now the protectors of institutions and stasis? There are good reasons for it. Political strategists have been telling us for decades that we need to prioritise competence, discipline and fiscal responsibility to win elections.

Or perhaps the future now seems such a bleak inevitability, of a deteriorating climate dystopia ruled by tech-bro barons, that the Left has resorted to trying to delay it, finding itself defending a status quo it doesn’t really believe in.

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But if progressives don’t offer hope, what do they offer?

They need to remember how to dream again. And they need to learn from the Right about how to turn a dream into a policy platform capable of mobilising millions.

Remigration: A case study

Some on the Right have a dream: an ethno-nationalist dream of a Britain full of native Brits with collective ancestry. This would end NHS waiting times, solve the housing crisis, end welfare dependency, reverse demographic replacement and make our streets safer, they say.

The policy to achieve it: remigration.

Remigration is a modern case study in how to turn a radical idea into a mainstream political issue capable of mobilising hordes of people.

Step one: make it sayable.

Most dreams start out sounding ridiculous. You’ll immediately be dismissed as a fantasist. So, crucially, they can’t start with mainstream politicians.

In the 2010s, far-right groups in Europe began using the phrase ‘remigration’. Crucially, it sounds more bureaucratic, technical and less brutal than ‘mass deportation’ or ‘ethnic cleansing’.

Have your dream, then give it some branding. The same process turns ‘great replacement’ into ‘demographic change’, ‘ethnostate’ into ‘social cohesion’ and ‘white identity’ into ‘national identity’.

Step two: ride the conveyor belt of respectability from radical fringe to mainstream.

This is where the media, both digital and traditional, come in. Something might sound radical the first time you hear it, but hear it often enough and it can start to sound normal.

Remigration as a phrase was basically non-existent as a topic for most people until late 2024. 

But the groundwork had been laid in the years before. Between April 2012 and April 2019 there were 540,000 tweets using the term ‘remigration’.

An ecosystem of identity groups, YouTubers and influencers helped move the phrase from a niche topic discussed on Telegram and Discord into something that could break through onto GB News and popular podcasts, and eventually become an issue that ‘we need to have an honest conversation about’ in newspaper columns and Parliament.

Step three: get a politician or political party on board.

To do that, you have to focus on emotional truths, avoid confusing moral clarity with political effectiveness and, crucially, create ‘common sense’.

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In 2019 in Germany, the AfD called for ‘remigration’ in its official European election manifesto. In Austria, the FPÖ also called for nationwide remigration. From there, the term spread further across European politics. By 2025 it had broken through into mainstream political debate in the UK and the US.

The Left’s dream

For many progressives, Burnham has already made them hopeful again, and that is the first step towards being able to dream. He has distinctly changed the vibe.

His positive announcements over the summer showed that government can make a meaningful difference to people’s lives, especially on the cost of living.

But that is still only saying: ‘we will make things slightly less crap than they would otherwise have been’.

Where is the dream? Where is the ambition? Where is the imagination?

Progressives need an Apollo programme.

It is now incumbent on the wider progressive ecosystem to build a dream and develop a policy platform that can ride the conveyor belt all the way into No 10.

And there is no shortage of possibilities. In the age of AI, on the cusp of a technological revolution that could bring abundance, replace work with leisure, and transform how long and how well we live, all the Left needs is the confidence and optimism to dream.

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