The Duran Podcast
Fear and panic grips UK establishment
All right, Alexander. Let's discuss Rishi Sunak's meltdown. For lack of a better word, it was a meltdown after the by-election, which George Galloway won. What are your thoughts? A crazy, but a meltdown, a meltdown. It was a real meltdown. Who's advising Rishi Sunak? Who's his media team, by the way? Do you know that that's advising him to do these things? I have absolutely no idea, but I suspect that they're melting down as well. I mean, the entire political class on Friday morning was in meltdown in London. So Rishi Sunak is just the visible expression of this. Can I say that people who are not familiar with British politics. In order to understand what an extreme event this was, we had the by-election results coming through over the course of early Friday morning from the by-election in Rochdale. Rochdale is a small town near Manchester, which is one of the big cities in England. It was the MP who was an old-guard, old-labor person, long history. He deposed the Iraq War, he turned all kinds of things. He was a standard old-guard-dived person. He died, so that this created a place for a by-election. George Galloway, who I should say straight away, I slightly know. I mean, I've appeared on platforms and on programs with him. I don't know him personally. I mean, but I do. I have been acquainted with him, and we have had conversations, but that's as far as it goes. Anyway, George Galloway, who is an extremely well-known political figure here, and who's one of the most important political dissidents in Britain, former labor politician expelled from the party by Tony Blair, because he was outspokenly opposed to the Iraq War. He's a strong supporter of the Palestinians. He stood in Rochdale as an independent candidate for his new party, the so-called Workers Party, which sets itself out as a sort of anti-labor, left-wing, working-class, social-democratic party. So he stood for election in Rochdale, and he won, and he won big, and he won, when I say he won big, he won with more votes than the labor candidate, and the conservative candidate than the liberal candidate combined. Now, there have been all kinds of complexities about this particular. By-election, the labor candidate lost the support of the labor party. We'll come into that, come to all of that in a moment, but I don't think anybody in British politics, in the political class, anticipated the sheer scale of Galloway's victory. Oh, he's a massive victory, and they panicked, and you saw the panic, and what Rishi Sunak did, and this is just an expression of what the political class is up to, is that he announced that he was going to make a public address to the British people. He came out of Downing Street, he spoke on the steps of Downing Street. Now, when British prime ministers do that, that is always that big news. They always do that when they have something really momentous to announce, like, Thatcher telling everybody that the Falklands War had been won, for example. There's one famous example of this, or alternatively, you have prime ministers coming up to announce that there's going to be a general election. That's also a very common thing, but it's a big statement that you come out with. In fact, many people thought that Sunak was about to announce a general election, and instead, he came out with this utterly deranged speech, talking about the enemies within, talking about protests, being out of control. He was clearly referring, and everybody who is aware of politics could see, and he was ultimately talking about Galloway, and had been spooked by the scale of Galloway's victory in Rochdale, and was dropping all sorts of heavy hints about the need for the police to take further action, to control, unrest, and do all those sorts of things. The question is, why is the political class in so much panic? I've discussed this in program, after program that we've done together, which is that there is this massive disconnect now, in Britain, between the political class and its particular obsessions, and the mass of the British people. The situation in Britain, economically, is very bad. The economy is stagnant. It has been stagnant for years. The Brexit war ended without a real Brexit, in the sense that the wars of Brexit, the political class didn't like it. They sabotaged it. That has moved forward, at all, in the ways that people thought it would. The Labour Party has been recaptured by the political class. The Conservative Party has been recaptured by the political class. There is almost no difference in policies now between Labour and Conservative, or at least none that most people can see. There is a widespread sense that the political class has no real plan about how to address the mounting problems that are facing people in Britain. They sense this, and they know that this is not working for them, and they see all these challenges building up. They are aware that the mood in Britain has turned against the war in Ukraine. You never see flags. Ukraine flags anywhere. They understand also that the British public strongly disagrees with the British government's position on the Gaza war, the Gaza conflict. They know that most people in Britain want to have a ceasefire over Gaza. They also know that the British public may not be, maybe not completely united on what they want, but they do want to see significant change in domestic policies. There is a widespread consensus in Britain, for example, that immigration really has to be brought under control, and Galloway, by the way, made a big point about that in the Rochdale by-election. I want to talk about the specifics of Rochdale in a moment. Again, they worked incredibly hard over the last eight years, ever since the 2016 Brexit referendum, and the rise of the Corbyn movement to bring the political system back under their control. They sort of sensed that they'd managed it. They neutered Brexit. They banished Corbyn to the wilderness. They've got control of the two parties, but they are also aware of the malaise. They're also aware of their own unpopularity and now shock horror, even as they thought they'd driven all opposition away. They have this outspoken, extremely skillful orator and debater George Galloway. He's come back. He's in the House of Commons. He's going to be able to talk and challenge them there at the heart of their power. That's why they're freaking out, because they know how unpopular they are, and they don't want to allow any appearance of opposition to themselves, be it from the right or from the left, and now they're faced with it. They really showed their weakness with that Sudan speech. It looked really weak, really panicky. I'm still trying to figure out who's consulting them on their media and their press, because even if you aren't a panic, you just don't come out and give speeches like that. It looked very weak. It looked really weak and really unhinged. What do you think are the goals of coming out and doing that? What are they trying to signal to the British population? What are they saying? Because they are trying to say something. More crackdown, more censorship. What exactly? That's exactly as a panic and fear. Exactly. There was the panic and the fear, but the clear signal from the speech, which noticed, by the way, that the Labour Party is not pushing back against. They seem to be absolutely comfortable with this agenda that Zunak now has, is a further crackdown. Talking to the police about tough policing of protests, one gets the sense that protests are going to become more and more difficult of any kind in Britain today. There's hints about more control on what people are allowed to say. All of this, in other words, we are heading towards an even tighter control of the information space than what we have had previously. Now, the thing that they're bringing up is that there is this danger of violence and they're basically insinuating that a lot of it is coming from within the Muslim community in Britain, which, by the way, is very large. This is a community that has established itself in Britain over many years. Remember, the Indian subcontinent was part of the British Empire. People from India have been coming to Britain for centuries. There was a major increase in immigration to Britain from the Indian subcontinent after the Second World War, in the post-war decades. This is a big community now, and most of it, by the way, votes historically has always voted Labour. And I'm going to say straight away, within this community, you will find, I could say this, I know this for a fact, you will find some people with very extreme views. I want to acknowledge this. Why is this so? Well, partly, it is because the British government itself facilitated it. Now, this isn't something people like to talk about, but the British government, as we know, supported insurgencies. I'm choosing my words very carefully now in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Libya, in all sorts of other places. That meant that all sorts of people came to London, because that was where a lot of this was being organised from, strange and difficult people. And, well, networks were established, and they do exist. But this is a historic problem. It has existed for a very, very long time, and my own sense is that the security services have it under control. It is not something to be confused with the other much bigger question of current immigration, which, by the way, again, to my knowledge, many British Muslims today actually oppose, because, of course, waves of immigrants affect their position, their socio-economic position as well. So, there is this problem, but it doesn't exist in the way that Sunak himself is trying to imply. But they're using it now in order to justify a further crackdown, just as they used fear of Russia before. Now it's fear of a political Islam, which, to the extent that it exists in Britain, is something that they played a role. I'm not saying it's exclusively, therefore, but they played a certain role in creating themselves as I have personal knowledge of. So they're using all of this as a set to prepare the ground for a crackdown, because they sense that they're losing control of the political situation. They were shocked all the way back in 2016, when they began to sense that the British public was turning against them, and they're panicking even further now. And one of the most interesting things about Rochdale, which is that it's a community, which is working class, British working class, and also Muslim. And it seems as if Galloway was strong with both. He was able to win over many Muslim voters to a great extent, obviously, because at the stance he took over Gaza. But also, he was also able to win over many British English working class voters, because at the stance he took on economic issues, he's success in projecting himself as an old-fashioned, old-style, labour, pro-worker, social democrat. So this is what's speaking. Can you explain the association with the far right as well? Because Sunak didn't only bring up, I think he said Islamic extremism, but he said Islamic extremism and the far right are two sides of the same coin or something like that. Where does the far right fit into all of this for Sunak? Well, it doesn't. And with Galloway in this election, where's the far right in all of this? Yeah, when British political leaders talk about the far right, what they're really talking about is people on the right who support Brexit. By the way, I should say that Galloway also is an outspoken supporter of Brexit and always has been. He embodies the anti-EU stance, which was once upon a time, well within my memory, the majority view within the Labour Party. But anyway, that's another thing. But yes, of course, there are real extreme right people in Britain. It exists in every single country. But again, they are not a significant political force. They never have been. They've been trying to sort of establish themselves at various times, but they've never really established themselves. But people who are on the right and are for Brexit and who are also opposed to mass immigration, and there are many people on the right who are, well, they could talk about as if they were part of the far right. So, I mean, what it is, again, is this it's a globalist political class trying to say, you know, people on the left who challenge them from the left, well, they're agents of Putin, or they're engaging, you know, they're in league with Muslim is, you know, people who are out of control and dangerous, and people on, you know, on the right who offer for Brexit and who want to control immigration, where they're really the far right and they're dangerous as well. And he was over us, where he was supporting us, because we are the rational democratic centre. And in order to support us, what he was also doing is support us as we try to control this thing by basically banning protests, controlling speech, doing all that kind of thing as well. That's the that's the final question. Yeah, a final question. Is this the end of Sunak? Was this speech the end of Sunak? Because I thought it was so out there, so bizarre, so panicky, it looked so bad for Sunak that I said this guy's done, is he he is done. Yes, what do you think? Yes, I would assault Sir, I would assault Sir, I would assault these problems the end of Sunak. What is the beginning of the end of Sunak? I mean, we still have an election, nobody I think seriously expects the conservatives to be re-elected this time. But that isn't the issue, because as I said many times, if you're looking at the political establishment in Britain, their preferred candidate has never been Sunak. It's always been Keir Starmer. They think that they get Keir Starmer in with a big majority, he can stabilize the situation and consolidate it, and he he's by no means someone who is averse to all of this kind of rhetoric that we're going we're getting from Sunak. In fact, at times he talks a bit like that himself, just that. So they're going to get Starmer in and they're going to get Sunak out. But it's not going to change anything about the underlying situation. What we're going to see is the same pressures, both from the right and from the left, are going to grow. And if I could talk about Starmer a moment, I mean, we had a very strange situation with Watchdale, where the Labour Party put up a candidate, he was also drawn from the Muslim community, and then suddenly Labour announced that they weren't supporting him anymore, and he turned out that he'd said certain things. I'm not again going to discuss what they are, but they were related to the Gaza affair, and this person apologized for all of that. And anyway, even that apology wasn't accepted. And to be frank, see what he said, I'm not surprised given the mood here at the moment. So anyway, Labour backed off supporting this person, even though he continued to run in the by-election as the Labour candidate, all very strange. Now, another very strange thing about this by-election is that there was very, very little polling. We weren't being given information about who was really leading the race to anything like the kind of detail that I would expect, or at least if it was happening, it wasn't being widely reported in the media. And I have to say, I do wonder, and this is pure speculation on my thought, if what happened was that the Labour Party found from its own internal polling, that Gala Way was going to win the seat anyway, that the Labour candidate wasn't doing terribly well, turnout in this by-election was about average, about slightly better than average, for a by-election in a seat like this, just to say. The vote for Gala Way, as I said, was overwhelming. They didn't want to be defeated by Gala Way in this seat. And so they arranged for this to happen as an excuse for pulling away their support from this particular candidate. So they're now able to say, well, the only reason Gala Way won in Watchdale was because we weren't putting up. We weren't supporting our candidate against him. We would support it on candidate. We would have probably won the seat. I thought that might be the case before the by-election, but when I saw the sheer scale of Gala Way's victory, I have to say, I don't believe that any longer. I think he would probably have won, even if Labour had fully supported their candidate in the seat. This is my own view. Now, I ought to say that Starmer himself, almost certainly, if there was such a plot, and I don't know that there was, wouldn't have been involved, he tried to cling on to the candidate for a while, and that caused him some damage, but it would not put me, it's not, I would not be surprised if some people within the Labour machine took this decision. We can't risk a humiliating defeat to Gala Way in this kind of way. But one way or the other, what this shows to you is how fragile even Starmer's position ultimately is. He might win an election whenever it's held. He might even win big, but he doesn't have a strong depth of support in the country. People, you see this all the time, poll after poll after poll, people don't like him. They prefer him to soon act and who wouldn't, but they don't think in the end that he's the person to give Britain a clear lead and to pull it round. So people are looking for someone to do it. They're looking some of them who are on the left, look to people like Gala Way. Some people who are on the right, look to others, like say Nigel Farage if he comes back on the scene. But one thing that one senses is that the British have completely lost faith in their political class. Rightly so. All right, we will end it there, the duran.locals.com. We are on Rumble Odyssey, but you telegram Rock Finn and Twitter X and go to the duran shop. 15% off t-shirts. Take care. [Music]