Jon Bloomfield and David Edgar will be talking about their succinct, punchy Little Black Book of the Populist Right, published by Byline Books last summer and proving more prescient and topical by the minute. The book tells you all you need to know about the background, ideology and current prospects for parties now topping polls in Italy, Hungary, Holland and the USA, as well as bidding for power in France, Germany and – via Nigel Farage – here in Britain. Following Reform’s success in the local elections, it’s ever more urgent to understand and counter national-populism’s growing appeal.

Jon Bloomfield has more than forty years experience as policy maker and practitioner engaged with cities and regions in the UK and Europe on the three great issues of our era: social inequality; migration and climate change. For the last five years he has been writing with David Edgar on the dangers of national populism for Byline Times.
David Edgar‘s plays for the Royal Shakespeare Company include Destiny (about the National Front), Maydays (about political defection) and most recently The New Real (about national-populism). Edgar has written for journals including Searchlight, Marxism Today, the Times, the Guardian and the London Review of Books; as well as The Little Black Book of the Populist Right, with Jon Bloomfield.