The Duran Podcast
UK election campaign begins
All right, Alexander, the elections in the UK have started, right? They're officially underway. And the government, the government resigns, the parliament resigns, everyone. The government formally is still in place. What has happened is that the king has dissolved parliament. So Rishi Sunak is prime minister, but parliament is dissolved, and there is a new election to elect the MPs. But you're absolutely right. The election has been underway, and we can get a sense of where things are going. Where are things going? It is the most useful. Because Rishi Sunak, last week, he was talking about national service, making it one of his campaign platforms. That's absolutely right. It doesn't sound like a winning strategy. Yes, it is his great brilliant idea. Bring back national service, bring back conscription, the best, and the finest. We'll go into the army. This is the boys from 18 to 24. We'll go into the army. All of the others will have to do service in various parts of this civilian governmental structure in the NHS and all of those things. Apparently, the ones in the army will be paid a small amount. It seems the others won't be, which looks like some kind of mechanism. Well, forced labour, if you will. That is not going to win much support from young people. I know that there are opinion policies from time to time suggests that. But Sunak is not looking to get votes from young people, which he is not going to vote for. He's trying to shore up support from the older generation, the over 60s, who traditionally feel that young people need to be brought under control and disciplined in all kinds of ways. And it is the case that for the moment at least people over 60 or some say over 65 look like they're going to vote conservative. But it's nowhere near enough. And it's not going to change the electoral dynamics. And everybody still sees that the conservatives are going to go down to a colossal defeat. But to talk about the election campaign as a whole, apart from this one idea of national service, which isn't an idea at all, it's never intended seriously to be introduced. And I understand that military poses it. But anyway, apart from this particular idea, neither side has come up with anything. Both leaders have shown that they are completely incompetent at electoral campaigning, which neither of them has ever done in any kind of serious way. I think I counted that I've lived through 19 elections in Britain. That might be wrong. I might have misgounded in some respects. But whatever, the first election I have memories of was the general election of 1970. So that tells you how far back I can remember things. This is the most dismal election in Britain. I have ever seen. If you remember, when we were talking about Theresa May, all those years ago during the Brexit war, I said that she had no ideas, no skill in government that under her administration had replaced government. And when, of course, there was the 2017 election, all that showed through. She could completely incompetent as an electoral campaigner, and Labour, which at that time did have policies and ideas, and a political leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who was familiar with electoral elections, and knew how to campaign. Well, they nearly won, despite being 20 points behind them one point. Well, this time, it's as if you have two parties, each led by, you know, clones of Theresa May. It is that dismal. It is one set of incompetent administrators, the Conservatives, up against another set of equally incompetent administrators, the Labour Party. And that's the alternative that the British people are being asked to choose. But this is Kierstammer's election to win, to lose. I mean, he's going to win. He's going to win. So he doesn't deserve to. I mean, we've had a classic example. We've had a classic example of how inept a politician, in some respects, he continues to be. There is a Labour politician called Diane Abbott, a controversial figure with some people. She's an MP in London. She was the first black woman to be elected to the British Parliament way back in the 1980s. She's a standard bearer of the left. She's a popular figure with many people, not, I should stress with everybody. Stalin doesn't like her because she's very, she was very, very close. In fact, she remains very close to Corbyn. And basically, he doesn't want her in the Labour Party. So she was suspended a year ago over an issue, which I don't really understand, was a letter that she wrote to a newspaper for which she apologized. And then there was an investigation, which lasted for five months. Then the investigation apparently required her to go through some kind of a training course, which she did. And then she still wasn't readmitted into the parliamentary Labour Party. And then just a few days ago, when there was an awful lot of outcry, why isn't this person readmitted? Stama and his team decided to readmit her into the parliamentary Labour Party. And then they turned around and said, well, we readmitted her, but we don't want her to stand for Parliament, which is contradictory and makes no sense. Apparently, they were suggesting that she should quietly retire from politics. If you know her, you would know that was never going to happen. She's insisting that she's going to stay. That has created a whole uproar. There are people who are complaining that the Labour Party is going after its first black woman MP, an iconic figure, and all of that. A completely unnecessary rap has been created right in the middle of an election, which a genuine politician, a real skilled politician would never have got himself into. But it's Stama. He tells you the kind of, you know, politically insensitive person that he really is, because again, like Theresa May and Ruthie Sunak, he is just an administrator. That's all he is, and all particularly good one. I get the sense that the Conservatives and Sunak want to throw this election. Is that true? Well, one would almost think so. I mean, you know, I've talked about Stama. I mean, Sunak has run the campaign equally badly, in my opinion. I don't see any sign that he's running things well. Nobody expects the Conservatives to win. All sorts of Conservative MPs, famous people, Michael Gove and others like that. And now saying that they're not going to stand for re-election in this election. And what does almost sense that many Conservatives feel the situation is so bad, the economic situation is so bad, their government is so broken that, you know, perhaps losing the election would not be such a bad thing after all. I say that, of course, it depends on the scale of their defeat. If they go down to say 150 seats, or even less, and some people say they'll go down below 100, I don't know whether that will happen, by the way. But if they do as badly as that, then it, I mean, it's a cataclysm, and I can't believe the Conservatives want to. But, you know, against Starmer, maybe possibly they'll do better than some people think, in which case, being rid of government, being out of government, will enable them perhaps, or so they think, to recharge their batteries, to come back, to reorganise, to get themselves a more popular leader or something of that kind. I don't believe it's going to happen, by the way. I don't believe either party has the ability any longer for that kind of regeneration. And one of the problems is that neither party is coming up with any kind of proposals about how to deal with British, massive problems, the fact that the economy is stagnant, the fact that productivity is low, and perhaps even falling, the fact that there's a general sense of malaise right across British society. There's no one with any serious proposals about how to break through that. And, of course, we have taxes higher than they've ever been at any period since the end of the Second World War. We have a fiscal crisis. We have debt to GDP ratio, which is now over 100. I think it was in the 30s, back at the time when Blair was there. So, that gives you a sense of how far that has deteriorated. We have pothole streets, rubbish that isn't collective, problems growing in every area. The National Health Service is in bad shape. Everybody is talking about these things. But neither party has any plan or proposal about how to turn it round, except I suppose for soonx proposal of reintroducing national service and getting boys and girls 18 to go into these places and presumably have rooms and mocks and clean everything up. And do it for no time. Oh, boy. All right. We'll end it there. At Doran.locals.com, we are on a rumble odyssey, but she telegram rockfin and twitter x and go to the Doran shop, use the code, get ready 15 and get 15% off all merch. Take care. [Music]