The Duran Podcast
UK Labour takes over. Tories implode w/ Dr. Neema Parvini (Live)
All right, we're live with Alexander Merkurs and we are once again joined by a very special guest, the one and only doctor, never Padavini, doctor, Padavini, how are you? Well, I'm good, as I was just saying, you know, it's because I can be in the pouring British weather, never stops raining in this country, but other than that, I'm feeling well. All right. Thank you, British politics. We just had the big elections. And we are going to discuss what is going on in the UK before we get started. And I pass it off to Alexandria. Let me just say a quick load to everyone that is watching us on Odyssey and rock fin rumble. Hello to all our rumble viewers and YouTube as well and the big shout out to everyone that is on the chat at the deran.locals.com definitely join us on locals, reckless abandoned moderating. Good to have you with us, Alan Watson, good to have you with us as well. And Zarya is also moderating. All right, I think that is those are the moderators. We've got with us Alexander Merkurs, we've got Dr. Parvini, gentlemen, should we discuss what happened last week in the UK, Alexander? I think we should, because I think we've got the best person with us to discuss it with. We did a wonderful program with Dr. Parvini a short time ago in which we were talking about the election in the run up to the election. He was telling us many things about his desire to see the Conservative Party lose all its seats. Well, it didn't quite happen. He'll no doubt have more to say about that. They did do very, very badly. We have a situation where the Labour Party won a landslide on 33% of the vote. Turn out was very poor. The reform party emerged, but Dr. Parvini will have his own insightful take on all of these events. And I think the best thing to do, given always that we have time constraints, is to go over directly to him. So, Dr. Parvini, are you happy with what happened in the election? They didn't get no seats. They did get some. Tell us what you think. Well, we had quite a large campaign which was called Zero Seats. And I said multiple times as one of the people who was spearheading that, that anything above a hundred seats would be a zero seat loss. And the Tories, unfortunately, as they often have done throughout history, it jest about enough to get over that line. They got 121 seats in the end. And in the run up to the election, I said multiple times like I was telling people, "Listen, this is the most successful political party in history. If you look at something about, if you look at the past 200 years, I think it's something ridiculous. Like 120 of them are Tory government. They are essentially the permanent government of the UK, if you want to clear that way. And so what we talked about is even if we got the zero seats, we would effectively need to double tap, right? What that means is, I don't know, I'm showing my age here, but do you know the film Terminator 2? Do you remember there was the T-1000 that they blasted in, they froze him in liquid nitrogen, Astellovista baby, million smithereens, and yet the little bits of liquid metal come back together and the T-1000 is back. And the Tory party are much like that, okay? And unfortunately, with 121 seats, what I desired, which was a breaking of what I call the political kayfabe, is not going to happen now, that is enough for the Tories to be the opposition, that is enough for the punch and duty show of day-to-day politics to continue. And it is enough for the real question in British politics on the right hand side now to be, how are the Tory party going to respond and come back from this. There are a number of reasons or a number of factors that I would blame, or in a more neutral language, I would attribute the late surge, because if you remember at the MRP projections, many of them have the Tories on 60 seats, 80 seats. So how is it that they managed to double that the last minute? And there are really four reasons. One I'm afraid to say is the Mail on Sunday journalist, Peter Hitchens. The original idea for zero seats was actually Peter Hitchens's idea, back in the 2010 election, he wrote a book called The Camera and Delusion, where he basically wrote out all of the reasons why the Tory party need to die, if we're going to get any change in this country, in a kind of conservative direction. He was basically the spiritual godfather of this move to try to get the Tories to zero seats. At the 11th hour, unfortunately, Hitchens decided that no, the timing is now wrong and the prospect of a starmer government is too terrifying. And so he basically rallied to, I mean, he wasn't proactively telling people to vote Tory, but he was saying, listen, you have to, this zero seats thing is silly. We can't have a Labour government. So that was the first thing. And people may scoff at that, but he is a very influential journalist. A lot of people, especially older people, read, religiously read his column in the Mail on Sunday. And I think that if he had got on board with a campaign rather than counter-signalled it, as he did, we could have got below that 100 seat threshold. The second factor is that Boris Johnson came back from holiday and made a last minute intervention. I remember it was the Wednesday before the election. I had to, I had to pop into town and I happened to look at the papers, you know, they have all the papers up on the rack. I counted four out of eight papers, had Boris Johnson on the front, warning of star McGeddin. That's what he was calling him. And you know, whether you love him or hates him, Johnson is popular with the segment of the Tory base. And that last minute fear mungering campaign worked. I saw it with my own eyes. Older people I know, I saw it. They were basically scared, you know, which is a typical Tory tactic, really. You know, okay, we're bad, but the other guys are even worse. So, you know, keep us in, type of thing. The third factor is that Keastama just has no charisma whatsoever. You know, he, I mean, I saw somebody calling him the most boring politician in the world. Alex, I saw your impression of him on your video the other day and I had to laugh. And so unlike Tony Blair, who we'll talk a little bit more about it in a moment, because he's another figure looming in the background, people, you know, labor did not win because people like Keastama. They simply won because this was an anti Tory election. So he was not able to galvanize many people towards him. And as you pointed out, Alexander, and as the, many of the press have pointed out, they actually reduced their number of votes from Corbyn, which is saying something. And then the fourth factor, I'm afraid to say, and this is something that afflicts not just Britain, but America and every European country, and I don't want to alienate too many of your viewers here, but I have to say that it is the selfishness of the boom and generation who basically, the reason those fear campaigns worked is because many older people were thinking of their pensions, their quadruple lock pensions or whatever it is they've got now. And you know, rather than do what was necessary, they were thinking as they often have of their own welfare. And this is one of the reasons why there's such an issue in the system, why we buy, you know, there's a saying that goes around online. Nothing ever happens. One of the reasons that nothing ever happens is because the system basically can count on those people who are 60 and above to, you know, keep the status quo going happen in France as well. So those are the things that got the Tories over the 121 seat line. So really all of the questions that face British politics now are basically still the divisions within each of the two major parties, and the Tory party have a huge, as far as I can see, insurmountable division between the so-called one nation Tories and those who want to go in a more populist direction, that the press are calling it Farargis now, sounds like something from the Spanish Civil War or something, but so that is one question that's going to be decided fairly soon. And then there are lots of more hidden problems on the Labour side, which we can talk about as well. It just depends on what direction you guys want to go in. I'm just going to say a few quick things. I mean, firstly, I actually think that one of the reasons that they got more than 100 seats, I think the main reason was the fact that Labour didn't do it as well as it should have done. I think many of the original opinion polls that appeared to show the Conservatives losing going to be knocked down all the way to 50-60 seats were partly because those same opinion polls were overestimating by a significant margin, the Labour vote. The Labour vote had been stronger and had taken more votes and more seats that way. That would have, I think, depressed the Conservative numbers. One would have to go through and analyse all the figures and go through seat by seat to seat whether that might happen, but I think that probably was a major role. And also, by the way, completely agree with you about Boris Johnson. I think Boris Johnson's late intervention did make a difference. And as with the boomer thing, well, Alex and I have talked about this election several times and I've always said that I've always felt that the Conservatives would hold on where they would hold on would be amongst the over 60s and that they would come to their rescue. But having said all of that, talking about the Conservatives, if you adjust for turnout, they did very, very poorly indeed. They got 23% of the vote on a 60% turnout, 59%, 0.9% turnout. That means that fewer than 14% of the British electorate voted Conservative in this election. Now, that is, I think, a historic and dreadful vote for the party which I can remember, I can remember when I first came to Britain, that it was not just a major political force in Britain. It was a huge social force, though Conservative clubs, Conservative societies, you had the young Conservatives in every village practically and they were almost bringing together all the young people there and it was the great place where you met people and had fun. I think it's not as quite as you say, I think it is actually melting away and they are racked by divisions. They still don't know which way to go, do they go with, you know, Sweller, Gravermann and where she wants to take them, which is towards the more hard-edged, more right-wing position, which I don't think they can do, by the way, or are they going to go for more centrist leftist position, which they have tried and hasn't worked for them? I say, I actually, on the contrary, I think they are in a very, very bad place. I can't really see where this revival is going to come from. They're clinging on because people over 60 still vote Conservative and a couple of people still listen to Boris and Kirsten wasn't a particularly good leader. But I would say, actually, that they are in a very, very bad place. That's my quick take. I mean, I don't want to disagree too much, Alexander, because they are in a very, very bad place, which we can outline in a second, but I mean, I'll just go, but it's like the horror movie, you think they're down, and then at the last minute, the zombie hand will come up. They'll fight, the Tories have this way of finding it. Now, we can talk about why they're in such a tricky spot, which is that another factor in this election, and not a lot of people have talked about enough, in my opinion, is the Lib Dems, who took what is, everybody talks about the Red Wall. There's also this blue wall, which is essentially from Cornwall, all the way to the home counties, whole sway of the country in more well-to-do areas, wealthier areas of the country, which typically have voted Tory. Lots of those seats went Lib Dems this time, and to add insult to injury, they went Lib Dems on the back of a campaign where Ed Davy did nothing but bungee jump, and go to water parks, which, as someone who was into elite theory, it was one of my favourite campaigns ever, maybe all, maybe the sham of democracy can be shown by this, but this presents a real problem because, so Ella Braverman in her analysis is right, that many people in the Tory-based field betrayed, and that if the Tories need to survive, they need to go in a more right-wards direction, or a more anti-immigration direction, or something like that. But the problem is that many of those more well-to-do Lib Dems sort of seats, the politics of those places is basically, I describe them as, have you heard this term nimby, not in my backyard? Well, I am not sure how much other people outside reason have, but anyway. So the politics in these kind of posher areas is basically like, well, we want to have all the trendy opinions and we want to have the nice coffee shops and so on, just not here. We don't want all of the nice policies, but we don't want it in here. And in fact, the way the Tories campaign in a lot of these seats is instructive, because many of them just spend all their time going around saying, you know, I support farmers and they'll go to a little butcher's or a pork pie shop or something, and they'll shake hands with the locals and be like, oh, you know, we're all about local rural life, vote for us type thing, not mentioning all the terrible kind of globalist stuff they do in Westminster. So this kind of, and this is how the Tories actually held on to some of those seats as well. But of course, the Lib Dems basically have become away for middle-class people in the country to not have the kind of stigma that comes with voting labor in some places, but also of saying, well, you know, I'm not an awful, I'm not an awful racist like those Tories, I live them, you know, and this presents a problem, because the Jeremy Hunt's in the party and people like Alicia Kearns and various other Rory Stewart, they will argue that if the Tories go in the Brailleman direction, they will never win back all of those seats. But the other problem is if they go in that direction, they will then never win back all of those working-class votes. This is an aspect of the Thatcher coalition that is not commented on enough, right? It's always painted as, you know, the Tories versus Labor is rich versus poor. Number one, three elections by getting aspirational working-class people. And Boris Johnson, he was able somehow to have a coalition where you got both the kind of nimby types and those red wall types. He kind of, I don't know how, like he was both a weft globalist and a populist at the same time. Johnson was. Now, you can do that for one election, but if you betray those voters, many of them who voted Tory with Richard Teeth in Wales and in the North, well, they're never going to vote Tory again. So this is, I agree with you, Alexander, it's going to take a long time for the Tories to figure out what they're going to do. And I actually cannot see how these two factions of the party are going to come together. Either Brailleman and friends will join the form or the one nation types have to join the Lib Dems. They just don't see how they can keep this current configuration together. And it will be interesting to see what happens in the future. I will say though, those nimby types I was talking about, in many ways they have their beliefs as a result of luxury. And if the realities that are visible in other parts of the country become more visible in those areas, I can see them shifting right as well as has happened in other countries, France being a, you know, bad in that case. So. I should say that many of my friends could be classified as nimby's, as I agree with your analysis completely, I can very easily see these people if they really come under kind of that kind of pressure, swinging right again. But of course, they're not doing that at the moment. And they probably are going to be horrified if the Tory party goes in a swell of Braverman direction. The Republicans in the U.S. through Trump have gone further down the road of becoming a more working class party than the conservatives have yet managed successfully to do in Britain. But at least that's those quick things. Anyway, shall we talk about the other thing which you were talking about a lot in our previous program, which is about the terrible way in which Britain has been governed and the fact that the elites in Britain have not actually been performing very well and that this is one of the factors that the Conservative party has played a big role in given what an important institution in the Conservative party has been in the Britain that we've all lived in and have experienced. What is going to happen now? We have a Labour party that isn't very popular, that has a lot sided majority in the House of Commons. We have a situation where the Conservatives are still the official opposition, but with all of the problems that we've said. And there's this bubbling dissatisfaction in the country that exists as well. Do we have a situation now where the elites can start to sort of readjust, regain control? Or is the situation actually even more brittle in some respects than it was before in the sense that previously we did have a kind of two-party system with two viable parties. But now one of those parties, the more important one historically, is much weakened and the other one isn't terribly popular either. Yeah, my view is that the elites are, at the moment, they need to perform. What our elites offer is technocratic managerialism with a veneer of social liberalism and other stuff. But that stuff is fluff. The key point is you've got to make things work, which at the moment means energy prices coming down, fix the potholes, just stuff work and make the trains run on time. And the Tories have spectacularly failed in that as we discussed. Now Starmer is back and behind him is the ever-present omniscient figure of Sir Tony Blair, who was already, after saying he wasn't going to backseat drive the government, is already on a daily basis backseat for telling Kia Starmer what he needs to do. But essentially Blair is right. Blair understands that if the system does not deliver for people, they will start seeking solutions in other places, i.e., not from the neoliberal center, but from the extremes of the far left, as they call them, and the far right, they'll start turning back to people like Corbyn, or they'll start turning to people like Farage. And what Blair wants to do as a master of containment is to basically make stuff work in five years' time to show a graph. Look, you complained about immigration, we halved immigration. You complained about law and order, we halved law and order. And this is what, I mean, whether you believe them or not, this is what the first new Labour government did. They were able to show lots of graphs saying things are getting better, you know, because we are the managers, we are the experts, we know how this stuff works. Now, the problem that the Starmer government has, and that actually, Sir Tony Blair has, is that there are many people within the Labour Party, which is now a big party for 100 people, who have other ideas. And two such people who have other ideas are people who your audience may not have heard of because they're not front of the camera figures. One of them is called Sue Gray, who is a lifelong civil servant, but she is very close to key a starmer on an operational level. The other person is Morgan McSweeney, who is being hailed as the mastermind behind the campaign. Now, neither Sue Gray nor McSweeney like Blair or the influence of Blairism. And if you think about the Tony Blair Institute, okay, it is now. The biggest NGO by some distance. I think it's something like 10 times bigger than the next NGO down. That's just in Britain. I think it's got over 330 employees just in London and worldwide, it's got 800. You know, I remember when you guys were talking about the situation in Nigeria, who were the first people kicked out of Nigeria, it was the Tony Blair Institute, right? I mean, he has his, what I'm saying is, is that people, and he is not just the former prime minister, he is in many ways the kind of secret manager of this country. And so what he has done, Blair, he has embedded so many of his people, that people like McFadden and Milburn has just been added to the Cabinet. There are many people in the, in the, in the Patrick Valance is another one who you'll remember from COVID. These people either directly work for Blair or have a long history of being loyal to Blair. And one of the things I foresee happening in the near future is that, you know, one of the things I like to say is that power doesn't, can't stand, doesn't like a rival castle. And these figures, Gray and McSweeney, are not going to like Blair, essentially, backseat driving the government. And we've already seen one tussle because on Sunday, that was two days ago, almost what, on day one of the labor of the new labor cabinet, Blair came out and he said, here are all the things you need to do. And the number one thing you need to do is introduce a mandatory digital ID, something he's been singularly obsessed by for the past 20 years. And initially, the labor spokesman said, oh, well, we're looking at all options. And then they saw a backlash on Twitter or whatever, and two hours later they said, oh, actually, we can rule this out. This is not the way we're doing things we reject Blair's proposal. And then on Robert Peston, last night, they had another government spokesman on, and he said, oh, so you're not ruling out digital ID, then, and he was like, no. So it's like, well, this is a problem for any party, right? Because is Key Astalmer in charge or is actually the Tony Blair Institute in charge? And I'm mentioning this because today they had a huge conference at the Tony Blair Institute all day where they basically outlined all of their plans for the country. One of the huge issues on the agenda was, again, digital ID. And these people have huge amounts of financial backing behind them. And I just don't know if they're going to take no for an answer. And I mean, I don't want to speculate too well, Lee, but if the starmer government starts to say, actually, no, we're not going to do all of this stuff, I wouldn't put it past them to be like, OK, star me around next guy in, just like they did to Liz Cross. So anyway, let's go over to you. Well, not at all, because I actually read Blair's article in the Times. I'm sure you did. I was quite extraordinary because he was writing as if he was the person who was actually going to be running the government. It was a most bizarre article, actually. It was like, you know, this is what we need to do. This is how we need to get around and sort it out. And absolutely, digital ID was there a lot and awful lot about AI and about how important AI is going to be in controlling everything and upgrading everything. But it was like a program, a program for the government. And he's not a member of the government in any formal sense. It reminded me a bit of a pre-poot in Russia where you have all these sort of shadowy figures who exercise control without having any actual formal role in the government. And in his own self-conception, he clearly sees himself as now, you know, at pole position, the central person who's in overall charge. His comments about Starmer at the beginning of the article were, I thought, incredibly cursory, very perfunctory, barely acknowledged the fact that Starmer is actually the leader of the Labour Party and the actual Prime Minister of this time. So it's certainly a person to watch. What about the, you know, the rival party is the new party is on the left and the right because you were a bit skeptical about Farash before. Do you're wondering whether he might, in fact, be part of the system or, you know, the Russians again have this really useful expression of system politician and anti-system politician. Doesn't necessarily mean that an anti-system politician is a revolutionary. But as somebody who isn't quite within the inner circle, what is Farash, is he within the inner circle or is he outside it? Well, I mean, as we talked about last time, you know, how much is Farash containment working for the system and how much is he not? I have to say, his comments on Ukraine shortly before the election, to me, firmly put him on the outside because there are a few topics and foreign policies, probably the biggest topic that the regime does not break any dissent on and the fact that Farash started talking up about, you know, essentially telling the truth about the Ukraine more. You know, this was, you know, the media treated that as if he had committed heresy. And I was telling people at the time, you know, all of us, we're used to watching you guys and having a variety of news sources. But you have to remember that over in the media, they only get one side of the story. So I mean, it's like, I don't know, they were calling it revisionism and things like that. So I do think Farash may be more of an outsider because of that than some people may imagine. I think basically his role is going to be, you know, he's going to provide a lot of sound bites from parliament. You know, he's going to give us a lot of dramatic moments where he calls out the human party, essentially, much like Galloway did before he went. I mean, I know he lost his seat and he's going to provide a lot of moments like that. He's also not going to let Labour forget about his commitment, their commitments on reducing immigration. I think the main way to think about Farash is as a single issue politician. He was, you know, his issue was Brexit and now his issue is immigration. Yes, there were other things in the reform manifesto, but the key one is immigration. And as long as he's there, he will, as a threat, basically, the Tories will not be able to relax. I mean, in a way, he's going to drag them, kicking and screaming, to say the sort of things that he is saying, you know, otherwise they are going to end up like the French center lines. You know, that's their destiny if they don't adopt some of these talking points. So that is what Farash will do. Over on the Labour side, they lost a number of seats to essentially Muslim candidates who were outspoken about the, you know, the Gaza issue. I'm not sure how the Labour are going to deal with that. And I also have wondered about whether, with as many seats as they've got, can Labour just say, well, we don't care about that now, are they going to write off the Muslim vote in the short term? I don't know. One thing I do know is that, and the Muslim community will know very well, is that unlike the speculations of some of the right-wing press, the Starmer government is going to be absolutely steadfast in their commitment to Israel. There's just no doubt about it. I mean, they cleared the way for that. They purged the party of any dissenters at all, including, you know, for trivial things like liking a tweet 10 years ago and things like that. So that is going to be, I mean, the best thing to happen for Labour would actually be for some resolution to come in the Israel. In the Israel Gaza conflict in the next five years. So that it's off the table, it's no longer a question. Whether that's going to happen or not, I don't know. But there is something else as well about the Labour vote, which I noticed, to your point earlier on, Alexander, which is that this McSweeney chat, a lot of his kind of behind the scenes thinking in rhetoric was basically that the Blairite center has become too technocratic and out of touch, so it doesn't reach quote unquote normal people. What that meant was that the Labour Party spent a lot of time trying to appeal to disaffected white working class voters in this election. As far as I can see that utterly failed, I do not think that the disaffected working class who've been turned off the Tories went to Labour. I think those were all the reform voters. So it's hard to see like where, I mean, I don't think Labour picked up, didn't really pick up any votes, they just were the default beneficiaries. So that's going to be a problem too, because if Labour do anything to move to appease the kind of Muslim block vote that is formed in the middle end especially, and in parts of London, they will lose those white working class voters. Because politics, democracy especially, does boil down at some level to patronage. What are you going to do for me? What things are you going to, you know, what have you done for me lately? And the fact that they set up the NHS back in 1945 or something is not going to, is not going to cut it in 2024 if groups see other groups getting those goodies instead of them. And the last thing I'll say, I don't want to monologue too much, but the last thing I'll say on the issue of the NHS, I'm turning Blair, is thus I think the left are going to go apoplectic when they find out what Labour are going to do to the NHS. Because they've put Alan Milburn in, Blair has basically already, through his institute, detailed, very detailed documents they produce, their plans for the NHS, which essentially selling parts of it off to Microsoft and Oracle and these sorts of companies to run on the government's behalf, basically semi-privatisation. I mean, this is, you know, if the Tories did that, they'd be a revolution. But Labour, due to various reasons, they can get away with these things. So I do think that when that happens, that's going to be an interesting question too. And people like Angela Rayner and so on may break ranks at that point, you know, when they, because that's a sacred current to the left in this country, the NHS being fully state-funded. So yeah, anyway, there we go. And also I suspect some of those white working class voters, particularly the older ones, who will not be happy if it's used that the Labour Party is handing out parts of the NHS to its friends, which is how they'll probably see it. In your point about, you know, patronage, my aunt, who was a very successful politician in Greece, always made that point to me. She said the politics is 90% patronage. The key is to carry out, to dispense patronage in a way that looks ideologically consistent and which makes your, the recipients of your patronage, feeling that they're receiving something that is, that they're ethically entitled to. She said it much better than I've just said it, but she was, she understood this very well. She understood how absolutely important patronage actually is in the system. What about this other issue, which is one that constantly comes up in comments that I get about the election and about the Star McGovern, which is about Britain's relationship with the EU. Starmer has a history of being a fervid supporter of the EU. He was very, very much at the centre of all the intrigues to try and get a second referendum as it was called. He played a major part, major role in the Brexit wars that were fought out in the, in Parliament after the referendum. What's he going to do? Because he now says there's not going to be Brexit in his lifetime. But much of the Labour Party wants Britain back into the EU. Is he going to go along with them or is he going to hold back? And of course, if he does go along with it, again, a lot of those white English working class voters that he wants to win over are not going to be happy or so it seems to me. Yeah, I mean, I think that he will probably is probably telling the truth where they're not going to reverse Brexit, but IE, they're not going to formally go back into the EU. What I suspect they'll do is basically legislate Brexit into irrelevance, you know, IE passed so much domestic legislation that we are essentially tied to Europe anyway, you know, so we'll get, you know, what they call Brexit in name only, you know, that's what we will end up with, I think. And I think they'll probably make it so that there's just harmony front. You know, the EU rules and the British rules are the same. Right. So, you know, we won't formally reenter any of the old arrangements, but we'll just replicate them, which was something that they were discussing even, even, you know, four or five years ago. I have heard, I mean, in some of the more kind of conspiratorial parts of the left, they believe that Starmer, that Starmer's remain stuff was actually there to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. But, you know, because clearly now viewed from now, Starmer was playing a long Machiavellian game. He was never a Corbynite. And in fact, neither was David Lammy, who's another person who's really surprised me. You know, for me, David Lammy was a kind of BLM supporting, woke, you know, typical, typical, kind of far left type person. I have now discovered that, you know, he is now he's the foreign secretary, God and God help us. But he is, he has reinvented himself as a realist, as a Machiavellian realist, David Lammy. So I was kind of looking into his background and thinking, well, actually know all of these people were playing a long game. They were essentially pretending to be Corbynistas ready to take the mask over, ha, we were, we were playwrights all along or whatever. So there is that possibility that a lot of the strong, starmer rhetoric from five years ago on, you know, remain was, was a deliberate, you know, neoliberal strategy to destroy Corbyn. And in fact, there are, it's not too much of conspiracy, because I remember there was a leak that happened around the time, you know, they were called the labor leaks where there were just locks of people who were meant to be there, helping, helping Corbyn, who were just deliberately undermining him, you know, his own comms team were trying to undermine him. This McSweeney chap, who I mentioned was part of this, was part of a movement, even back then, looking to, looking to gain back control. So yeah, I'd be very surprised if labor formally take us back into the EU. I think they want that issue done and dusted. I belong to the past, you know, by the way, Lamie has just written a massive article for Foreign Affairs, which is in the United States, in which he talks about something called progressive realism, which is quite an interesting concept. But anyway, it's worth the read, actually, it's, there's been already criticism, written all bit by various people, but anyway, he, he's a progressive realist, or so, I don't suppose he was quoting John Meershein, though, was he? No, he was not quoting that. Where are we going from here? I mean, because the Conservative Party is not dead, it's just, it survives, like, as you said, it's, it's there just holding on. The Labour Party is, well, it's in its pomp with its 400 seat majority, but it isn't really very popular. The Liberal, the Lib Dems have made a big inroads in the West countries, in the Western England, as you correctly said, describing the area, which I know quite well, by the way, exactly correctly. I mean, that is exactly what it is, it is like, it's exactly the sort of place where you have middle, middle class people, well, affluent people, look at the middle class, well off, very well off people with their range rovers and their garage and their big houses and whatever, but they, of course, they couldn't really, you know, dirty their fingers with some of the things that the Conservatives have been up to. So, but where are we going? Because nothing looks very substantial anymore, nothing looks very, you know, stable, a government, a Labour government, which probably has its own internal tensions, a Conservative Party, which is weakened and has its own internal tensions. I accept it may revive. We have, I think, a failure on the left, actually. I don't think that any real left-wing party, as such, actually broke through. The Greens did well in a few places, but they hardly did so with a huge upswing of support and, you know, where the Muslim vote went. It was all basically on one issue, which was Gaza. So, what is the future? I mean, this is my difficulty because I don't actually see, you know, a strong, single political force to take things forward. I mean, you mentioned Farage, but you said that he is uniquely successful as a single issue politician, Brexit, immigration, but we don't know how he would manage things if he were ever to achieve power, and it's unlikely on the facts that he will. So, where are we heading? I mean, are we going to, it's like we're treading water in a kind of way. Well, I mean, what I expect the Labour government to do, and I, and you have to take this with a pinch of shock because I barely believe it myself, but what I expect them to do is to, is essentially to dial down the heat on many different issues, to put culture wars issues away. I've said it many times to put the woke away. I noticed, by the way, that when they announced their cabinet, it was an all-white cabinet and David Lammy, and they made a big deal of saying, "Well, the thing is, this is the smallest amount of people in the cabinet who haven't been to public school, so therefore, this is the most diverse cabinet ever." But everybody else was thinking, "All on a second, you're all white." So, this is just an early sign of a lot of that kind of woke stuff that gets people's backs up, that kind of, it's so aggressive and in your face and it turns people off. They're going to stop doing all of that, which is one of Blair's bits of advice in that article as well. He said, "You don't do the woke thing." So that's one thing I expect them to do. Another thing I expect them to do is actually be seen, at the very least, to fix some of these problems, to be seen to bring immigration down, to be seen to fix the potholes or whatever, and if they can show all of that on paper in four or five years' time, that's a scenario where Labour will have been successful. I was listening to LBC on the day before the election and a chap rang in who was voting Labour and he said, "Listen, here, Starmer is a boring bank manager. If he's done well, the next time I ring into this show, we'll be talking about gardening." So that is the win condition, I think, for the Starmer government. The last condition is if the control, the centrist control in the party, is not strong enough and they cannot discipline their more radical elements. They can't stop Angela Rayner from running her mouth. They can't stop Jess Phillips from saying stupid things. They can't stop backbench rebellions from left wingers. They start actually thinking, "You know what? We do have the mandate. Let's do all the crazy left wing stuff." If they do that, their next election, they'll be toast. I.e., they are not going to win another election. This was a unique election, the one that we just had, and it was all about the destruction of the Tory party. If the Labour party has seemed to be worse than the Tories, i.e., more of the same but worse, which is what many on the right fear, or dialing up all of those things that have got people upset or increasing immigration, then I think we'll be facing a Labour 0-6 scenario in five years' time. We talked before about the Liberals going extinct in the early 20th century. I actually think that it could turn around. If Labour do a bad job here, that's rather than the Tories going extinct because they always find a way to come back because they are the permanent government, it will actually be Labour who cease to exist because without the working class, you cannot have a coalition of metropolitan Liberals in London and a non-white population that increasingly doesn't like what you're doing in the Middle East. The situation is existential for Labour, still. Even those 0-6s didn't happen, the same incentives still apply, basically, if Labour mess up, in my opinion. So, there we go. I agree. A government with 33% of the vote on a weakened and a lower turnout is actually in a very fragile position, indeed. It looks strong, but it really isn't. And there was an article I remember reading that saying that this might be Labour's 0-6 moment, that the Liberals won this huge landslide in 1906, in unique conditions. And they didn't manage it well, and 20 years later, they were basically gone. And they were out of power, and they've been out of power, basically, ever since. So anyway, we'll see. Dr. Bovini, I'm going to stop at this point, I'm going to hand over to Alex, I'm sure he's got questions, and if you want to add to your thoughts as well, of course, please do. Yep, we've got many questions. Let's begin with Sparky. Is it easy for an MP once elected to change parties? If so, we'll reform UK, get some more MPs from refugee Tories or from other parties? My understanding is that they can switch, and in fact, that has happened already. We got some before the election, we got some Tory to Labour switches, and it happened around the time of Brexit, I seem to remember, various different MPs, either forming new parties, so they can. And I think Lee Anderson did it as well, didn't he? The reform MP, so it's possible to switch. Right, from G1416, would you three maybe be interested in a stream about elite theory, the Machiavellian's book, writings by Curtis, Yarvin, et cetera, this would be amazing? The elite theory. Well, I mean, I just recommend people read my book, Populist Illusion, other than going over all the things they talk about in there for the hundredth time, you know, if people were interested in such a stream, I'd be up for it, but, you know, if you're interested in elite theory, it's all in there, basically. All the links are in the description box down below as well, too, to Dr. Parvini's books. And yeah, maybe we do something like that. Absolutely. I think we'd be very interested, actually, and I think they'd be very interested in discussing it with you and having your comments as well, just saying. But that's fantastic. Yeah, absolutely. Let's see, Ralph Steiner says, Britain's new foreign secretary said that Marie Antoinette won the Nobel Prize in Henry, the seventh succeeded Henry VIII. How do you see Lamy dealing with Gaza and Ukraine wars for the British Empire? I mean, I don't see Lamy having, I don't see the Starmer government having any difference from the current, from the Tory government on foreign policy. You know, that's why they were allowed to win. I mean, this is, I've said it before, the elites are prepared to trade off domestic policy for foreign policy as we saw with Maloney and Italy. And everything else is on the table to trade up, but not Israel and not Ukraine, as far as I can see. Another brick in the wall says, George Galloway said, "Cure Steiner will make the UK at war within a year, your thoughts." Yeah, do you want to go for that, Alex? I don't think he will, I don't think he's going to bring the UK into war, I don't think this is what he's about. I don't think he has that kind of level of interest and engagement in this. He's going to do exactly, he's going to do exactly the same things that Brishi soon acted in foreign policy, no more and no less. And if you want to see that, read this impossibly long, tedious article that Lamy has actually written in foreign affairs, he says it all out, he says on the one hand, we're not going to have another Iraq war or another, you know, Libya war or anything like, "Oh no, no, no, we can't possibly do any of this," but you know, that's the realism if you like. But everything else, it's more of the same. It's exactly the same as what we've seen. And I think he's not going to take us into war in the way that the Galloway says. I know Galloway slightly, I think on this he's wrong. Ralph Steiner says, "Kierstommer believes in strong immigration policy and hopes to increase the number of immigrants. Do you see this as a future problem for Britain?" I mean, did he say that he's going to increase immigration? Because I read that he was going to decrease it. It's already, I mean, let's be frank, it's already a problem in the UK, immigration. It was, I mean, it was a problem going back five or six years. There was a burst of immigration after COVID, which I mean, I have speculated, I wrote an article a while back called Human Quantitive Easing. I actually believe that the reason we've got this huge burst of immigration after COVID is because they printed so much money to pay for furlough and things like that in every single country that they needed people to soak up that excess money. If that is true, it was only a short term fix and that's why I can see a hardening line on immigration moving forward. Partly that's reality, i.e. they have to do that for things to carry on going. If stammer increases immigration and if they increase immigration in places like France and elsewhere moving forward, there's going to be severe problems. We could even see, you know, the problem will reach a point where we'll be facing like 1848 style revolutions or even 1778 style ones. It says has Lord Cameron become unemployed and what's next for him, will he keep his title, he will be missed in the clown world. What's going on with Cameron? He's no longer foreign secretary, he's no longer shadow foreign secretary either, he's gone away from all of that. But of course he retains his title, he's a member of the House of Lords, he's perfectly well. Don't worry about him. He's still around. I do think this election does mean though that Cameron is dead, it's no longer, it is politically non-viable after this result. I agree. From Sir Muggs game, according to David Starkey, Special Act of Parliament passed to protect stammer's multiple pensions, nice work if you can get it. One of the things that we forgot to mention earlier on when we were talking about what stammer will do when he was in government here, and this is something that Starkey has talked about quite a bit and is true, they're going to move a lot of decision making outside of parliament back to the sofa style government, back to the Quangos, back to these independent bodies, and we were talking about Blair thinking that he's actually the leader. This is what he's got in mind, even in that Times article he said, "Listen, the government needs outside help, i.e. outside help from me and all of my friends, all of those people sitting outside parliament, and they're going to do that more and more, it's going to be a technocratic managerialism from outside of the official avenues, it's going to be this informal style where, in fact, I see stammer making executive decisions, then informing the Labour Party, then informing the government, that informing the public about what he's already decided. Life of Brian says the political class was happy with identical parties and the demoralized public, they are incensed with hold from Farage's political entrepreneurialism and wish going forward to criminalize politics." From Ralph Steiner, "Now that SUNAC has been dispatched, is the Damoclean sword of a forced military draft removed?" I would say yes, I don't know what Dr. Pavini thinks, but I did think that was ever a popular idea amongst young people, really, and I don't think that this is going to happen, but I don't know what Dr. Pavini thinks. I actually think that nothing to do with the military ever happens by accident, and there was probably a psychological operation to get people thinking about recruitment again. The idea of national service was a joke, but now everybody's thinking about military recruitment, the ideas in their hair. I noted, by the way, that the American news cycle had exactly the same story two weeks after Britain, Biden or somebody floated the idea of national service, and they had the exact same news cycle in America where everybody was like, "Care, as if, what a joke." But now it's out there, and I've also noticed that the military recruitment ads, there was a NATO one that was doing around earlier today, featuring young women serving for NATO, presumably against Russia. I have noticed that the diversity-laden ads of a few years back have now receded, and many, many of the people in those ads are recognizably, let's just say, heritage Europeans, heritage British people, heritage Americans, and that means that somebody somewhere is thinking strongly about military recruitment, what that's for, I don't know, but that's definitely happening. Yeah, I noticed that too. You're 100 percent right. Basically Wellfed says, "Labor will be a scourge on the English folk." And Russell Hall says, "The left know their tenants are fundamentally at odds with most people's interests. So they work first to and vigil their way into power and then consolidate." And Ian says, "Will there be amnesty for all illegals under labor and labor putting legal and illegals before the British population?" Well, it's the opposite of what they're saying. I think these are ideas that are American. You get them in America. I do think they're current in Britain's tool. Very mind that in Britain, as I understand it, the great majority of immigration is legal, not illegal. It's the opposite of the United States. And let's do one more. We've got one more from life of Brian, "Political patronage of the civil service left gave the illusion of mass participation. The vacuum on the right hurt the illusion of competition." "Patronage is an immensely complicated topic in terms of politics. All politics, all in politics involves patronage to a very great extent. It can take many forms. It can work through tax policy. It can work in much more direct ways. And it's -- to be a successful politician is to know how to handle and operate patronage effectively." Dr. Praveen? I would just say that it's the patronage question. I know we're talking about the British election, not the French election, but it seems to me that in the French case, it's near-naked, i.e., you've got three -- you've got these three different blocks, the far left, the neoliberal center, and the so-called far right with the Le Pen. Each one of those looks to give patronage to their own voter base. And it's -- I mean, in France, you can see it on the map. You can actually see it on the map. Paris, around Paris, and then the rest of the country. Absolutely. That's exactly what you want. All right. Those are the questions. Thank you. Once again, too. Dr. Praveen, I have his information in the description box down below. I will add it as a pinned comment as well. Dr. Praveen, what is the best place where people can find you and connect with you? Yeah. I'm on YouTube here as academic agent, which I'd encourage you to check out. I actually have a stream later on tonight, so if you know where we'll be covering lots of different things. Another place I have a website called the Academic Agency, where I offer courses in things like the Trivium, the Classical Trivium, rhetoric, logic, and writing. Other topics, I have a shape to be a course coming up. And if you're kind of fed up with a state of education, you can pick up a course there and you can get hold of my details on that site as well. Fantastic. And those links once again are in the description box down below, and I will add those links as a pinned comment, including the link to Dr. Praveen's YouTube channel. Definitely check out his YouTube channel and check out his stream later on this evening. Dr. Praveen, thank you so much for joining us once again. Thanks, guys. Thank you. Take care. Alexander, let's answer the remaining questions. Yes. Let me pull them up. Great live stream with Dr. Praveen. OG wall says, good day. Well, well, yes, thank you for that super sticker and let me see which other ones. Sparky says, speaking of Niger. Never happened with American troops expelled from Niger, whom I heard went to the Ivory Coast. Displacing French troops is caught to every now and American legal colony. This is very much what I've heard that the Americans went from Niger to Cote d'Ivoire, and I think that is indeed where they're going to be. And I think they are going to displace the French. I mean, the French are losing control of their positions in West Africa. They've been squeezed out by every, on every side, the Africans don't want them. The Chinese and the Russians are moving in and the Americans are picking up the pieces. Ralph Steiner says initially, Ralph Steiner says, initially, Kirstammer supported a Palestinian state. But now he stands behind the Zionist Israel. Will this stance damage Britain's pristine image abroad? I think so. I'm going to say something. I think that Kirstammer is not very interested in foreign politics. I think this is a fundamental difference from someone like, say, Boris Johnson, who was very interested in foreign policy, indeed. I don't think Kirstammer is not anything like the same extent. BMK asks, does Alexander do a periodic China related podcast question work? Well, I do, I do programs with Sophie Midkiff, which are published in China specifically, and which often do deal with Chinese topics, yes. And where can they find? We'll put a link to that. Well, this is a very, this is a very new thing. It's only been going for a couple of weeks and it's an evolving thing. So eventually, we'll be having those as well, no doubt. Okay, Miriana, thank you for becoming a member, Feb 18th, 2022, thank you for joining the Duran community. Let's see, we have any more questions here, Alexander. GSP says, I spent my children's, a quote, I spent, I spent my children's inheritance is a boomer bumper sticker, and they're epitaph. Yeah, that's enough. Nick, thank you for that, super sticker. Sparky says, do Brits realize that immigration they're concerned with is driven directly or indirectly by globalists in or connected to the US government and its outgrowth, Brits are so quick to defend Israel. Which Brits do you mean? If you mean the British population, large numbers of British people are very unhappy about immigration indeed, and they are starting to make those connections, some of those connections that you mentioned, that explains why Reform UK has done as strongly as it has in this election. We're talking about the political and needs. Of course, they have a completely different agenda. From Harry C. Smith, either you have to increase wages, benefits and extend free education and access to housing so people can have over two children per couple to sustain working age population, or you need young skilled immigrants. This is exactly what people say in Britain, at least it's the policy in Britain. But of course, the point is that we do get the immigration and gradually all those things that you've been talking about are fading away, they've been wiggled away. And the justification we be offered is that you need the immigration to generate the economic growth to provide the taxes which will pay for those other things, except as I said, they're actually shrinking. And from Matthew Alexander, regardless of who is in power in the UK, is there any end to the Ukraine war in sight? Yes. I think there is actually, a Russian general up to Yallodinov, who is actually churching, who says that he thinks it's going to end this year. If you follow the war very closely, as I do, you can see that we have got through a point now where it's not only clear who is winning, but it's clear that there is no real way that this trajectory of the Russians winning and the Ukrainians losing can be reversed. And that in itself is starting to create its own momentum. It means that within Ukraine, people are losing belief that the war can be won, and they're not fighting in the way that they did. All right, Alexander, I think that is everything that we've got one more from Brula Ham, wonderful conversation with Anima. If viewers are wondering why he is, yaddi yaddi yadda, some on the convote is because he could go in depth for hours, which he does on his shows and books. I hope to see Dr. Parvini on a regular conversation stream with both of you jets. I would love to do that, actually, absolutely. I think it'd be a great idea, yeah. And maybe we will do more things with him in future. I was just explained, by the way, on the Chinese think that I am a guest of Sofia Midge. So, this is an important thing to understand. This is not a joint project. She has her thing and hosts me, and I go on to her show, which is, as I said, specifically focused towards China, and we do it there, but it is an evolving thing. And we're gradually, I think, thinking of developing it and extending it, making it more available to people in the West as well. But as I said, she broadcasts to China and has me as a regular guest. I think that's the best way to understand it. Yeah, and from a round of white wolf, how can EU governments motivate citizens to fight Russia when they won't defend their own people from mass migration? Sure, no. Well, they can't, I mean, all the opinion polls show that people do not want to fight Russia. I think this is savvy, even a very manipulated opinion poll that came out a short time ago showed this. Alexander, what do you make of the security guarantee with Poland? I've discussed it, I have discussed it, I've discussed it at length in my programme for my channel. I use the most ominous and frightening development, I think it's the first step towards trying to set up some kind of no-fly zone in Western Ukraine. I think that Zelensky, who's getting increasingly desperate, is looking for ways and means to draw the West into the conflict, and he went to Poland, he got a task to agree to this. I don't know to what extent the Americans are involved, but I suspect with this situation that we have in the United States with Biden, obviously, shall we say, with other things to worry about, I think that this is happening almost by stealth, and it is very, very dangerous indeed. I mean, it's one of the most alarming things that has happened up to now. I didn't see Tuskas too confident in this plan, he seemed to try and want to walk it back. That's the impression I got. I'll talk to the NATO member. I agree. I think the initiative for it came from Zelensky, and as I said, what he's trying to do is he's trying to draw NATO, first Poland and the NATO, into trying to set up the no-fly zone over Ukraine, and because the Western leaders are so weak and so disorganised and so aggressive at the same time, that this is this idea, which should have been scorched right from the outset, has been taken much further, far more dangerously than it should have been, and who knows, there's a risk that Zelensky might get some of what he wants. Kaepernick says, why don't nations who have de-dollarised sanction the US? Because they are opposed to sanctions in principle. They say that they are against sanctions, and because they are against sanctions, which they consider to be illegal, they are offering an alternative financial and trading system, which will be open to everybody, and which will be sanction proof, completely sanction proof, for anyone who chooses to participate. Alexander, I think those are all the questions and comments. Thank you once again to Dr Parvini for joining us on this livestream. Any final thoughts, Alexander, while I do a final check? I am actually more sceptical about the Conservative Party's future than Dr Parvini is. I personally think that a party that has the support in this election affords 13.8% of the British electorate, which is what they actually got, 13.8 people with the right to vote in Britain, voted for them. I think that's a strong base for a governing party to work with, or a party that inspires the government to work with. There it is. Okay. Tabernach says, "Risk is unnecessary when your enemy is in Zug's Wang." Yeah, true enough. Very true, all right. Thank you, Tabernach. Thank you for everyone that joined us on this livestream. I think it's our moderators, the Valleas, the moderator with the text that has to be "Lady in Blunderland," I think, but I'm not sure. Valleas, thank you for providing Zariel, Reckless Abandon, Alan Watson. Thank you so much for moderating Alice in Blunderland that has to be you, right? Can't read the handle. As Sparky says, "To allay your fears about Biden's mental acuity, I want to point out that he's still the most competent member of the administration." Absolutely. That goes without saying. Totally true. Thank you, Sparky. We will end it there. Thank you to everyone that watched us on Rockfin, Odyssey, Rumble, YouTube, and Vitoran.vocals.com. Take care. [end of transcript]