The new Fabian pamphlet, Common Endeavour, has one of the sharpest lines written about populism this year. In chapter 8, Labour MP Liam Byrne borrows the old country music saying that all you need is “three chords and the truth.” Populism works, he argues, because it plays three simple emotional chords: patriotism, nostalgia, and moral combat. Pride, loss, fight. Simple, repeatable, and perfectly tuned to social media algorithms that reward feeling over thought.

He’s right. And he’s honest enough to admit that mainstream politicians have been answering with word salads while populists holler a battle cry. Reform UK doesn’t win arguments. It wins feelings.

But Byrne’s own answer is where it falls short. His formula for beating populism is “optimism plus fairness plus performance.” That’s a strategy memo, not a song. It tells a government what to do. It doesn’t tell a movement what to feel. You can’t knock on a door and sing optimism plus fairness plus performance.

Liberals need our own three chords. Here are mine.

Power. Security. Respect.

Start with power, because that’s where liberals are different. Labour’s instinct is to fix things for people from the centre. Reform’s trick is to offer the feeling of power by handing it to a strongman. One is paternalism. The other is surrender dressed in a flag.

As countless leaders of radical movements have noted, power is not given, it is taken. I believe that’s not only a radical proposition, it’s liberal as well. 

The preamble to our party’s constitution states that power belongs at the lowest level that works. The implication is that the centre must justify each power it possesses, not the other way around.

Yes, the consequences of this are significant at the local level – neighbourhood budgets and planning decisions made by people who live with the outcome. But power isn’t only a local question. 

As a species, we are wealthier than at any point in history, but the people in the bottom half of the economy aren’t feeling it. That’s not a local problem; it’s a national and global failure of power. Who sets wages, who controls housing costs, who decides where investment goes, who writes the rules of the economy, and for whose benefit? 

Liberals may have cracked the local argument. The national one – dispersing economic power, not just political power – is harder. But it matters, and we haven’t begun to answer it seriously.

Then security. Not the cultural protectionism that Reform peddles, but material security. 

For families who have lost this, insecurity is the permanent hum of anxiety that never switches off. Reform claims that this anxiety is caused by immigration. We know that’s nonsense. It’s caused by an economy where wages don’t cover rent and one crisis wipes you out. Reform has nothing to say about that, because its donors don’t want them to (and I fear other parties are in the same boat).

Security is what power delivers. But this is where the comfortable liberal hits a wall. Dispersing political power is relatively easy – it just takes legislation. Dispersing economic power means confronting the people who benefit from its concentration. They will not cooperate. The rules of the economy – who sets wages, who captures the gains from growth, who profits from housing scarcity – were not written by accident. They are written by the people who benefit. Changing them is the hardest thing in politics, and liberals need to say so honestly. 

Finally, respect. With power and stability comes respect. Respect for the views and feelings of people who can’t put their concerns in ‘learned language’ but ‌know, from lived experience, that there are choices and trade-offs to be made, even if they aren’t the ones the elites would necessarily make. 

Respect is the destination. An economic system that treats people as if they mattered, and where they treat each other the same way, because the system is built to make that possible. 

Power. Security. Respect.

The order of those words is important. It reverses the Reform emotional sequence. Reform starts with grievance (you’ve lost respect), moves to fear (you’re not safe), and ends with surrender (give power to the leader). The trio, power, security, respect, runs the same emotions in the opposite direction. It starts with agency, moves through stability, and arrives at belonging. Outward instead of inward. Building instead of retreating.

Three chords. And this time, the truth. 

* Tom Reeve is a Liberal Democrat councillor in Kingston upon Thames