The Duran Podcast
Sunak's collapse continues
All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation in the UK as we are getting close to Independence Day, July 4th, also known as the elections in Britain. So we have a number, we have a number two party now in the form of Nigel Farage's Reform UK. They have replaced the Tories as the second most popular party, according to a U-Gove poll in the UK. Big news, Labour, from what I understand, is still way ahead, polling at something like 37 or 38%. So what's going on in the UK? Well, what we are witnessing is the complete implosion of the government in a way that I have never seen happen before. I remember the 1997 election which resulted in Blair's land slides and a major conservative defeat. And there was also the 2010 election where Gordon Brown's government also skid to defeat. But this is on a completely different scale because both major and Gordon Brown were able to adjust about whole things together, especially Gordon Brown was. And though the share of the vote of those two previous governments fell massively, it's not the kind of collapse that we're seeing at the moment. And the reason this is happening is because the Conservatives haven't got a proper campaign going. They do not have a proper election campaign underway. It's become completely clear that Rishi Sunak is completely out of his depth in real electoral politics. He's never conducted an election, a proper election in his life. He was parachuted into the Prime Minister's job. He's not got any real programme that is at all attractive to the British people. And to be fair, I do think he's even very interested in campaigning. I get the sense more that he's going through the motions of campaigning than he is actually campaigning. So the Conservative Party is collapsing. I mean, the scale of the collapse is remarkable. And what is so interesting is that by every conventional measure of British electoral politics, Labour is also conducting a dreadful campaign. Stalin is completely dull. People though, particularly like him. There's no sense that people are warming to him at all. They produce the Labour's manifesto, their programme for government, which is essentially a blank sheet of paper and they're getting what he takes it, particularly seriously. It's got hardly anything in it that is really attractive, or which charts are really confident in compelling course forward, full Britain going beyond the election. And you discussed Labour's rankings. Well, 37-38% is very, very low for a party to win, an opposition party to win an election on. Another vote, another opinion poll that I saw put it slightly higher, 40%. But that also is low. To give a comparison, Jeremy Corbyn lost the 2017 election with 42%. So, you know, Starmer is polling below that. In fact, according to YouGov, significantly below that. And bear in mind that the turnout in this election is likely to be quite low. So, there is clearly little support for Starmer and for Labour. If we had a strong, self-confident, conservative government with a strong record behind it and a dynamic prime minister against an opposition like this, they would be wronging him. They're not because, of course, this is not a strong, self-confident government with a strong record behind it. It has been a terrible government with an awful record and a man who doesn't know, as I said, how politics is actually conducted. And here, I'm just going to finish with the two big parties. We'll come to Farage and what he's doing in a moment. But we can see what the fundamental problem of, let's call it, the establishment or the globalists or whatever you want to call them, the fundamental problem they have when they try to control politics. Because it was the kind of people that they put in positions of power, who they have as prime ministers. Because they're not real politicians at all. In actual elections, they fall short. They're not attractive to voters and voters turn away from them. And that's what we saw with the Liberal Democrats, with Nick Clegg in 2010. That's what we're seeing with Sunac now. And I predict that at some point in the not so different future, we'll see the same with Starman when things go wrong with his government. And he doesn't know how to deal with that and we'll probably see him implode as well. Because none of these are real politicians. And the parties that they're leading now are not even real parties. Once upon a time, the Conservative Party was a right-wing Conservative party. It represented business. It supported free markets. It was supported by the middle-class people and by the nationalist wing of the English working class as a strong base. It had a strong program. It had a strong identity. Labour was the party of the organised working class of the intelligentsia and the student community. It was all about socialism. And it had that kind of profile. It had a strong electoral base, a strong definition. Again, you might oppose it or you might support it, but you knew exactly what it was all about. The parties we have today are nothing like that anymore. You can see so many MPs, Labour and Conservative, and you can switch them from one party to another. And there would be no difference. So we have a politics that is boring and uninteresting, that has no answers. And a government party that is collapsing, because as it seemed to have failed, there is no interest in it. And it has no electoral base that it can fall back to. And a Labour party that is inflating, which is inflating like a balloon, there is really no substance behind it either. And of course, thrown into this mix, we have Nigel Farage. Is Farage now the second party? Is that for good now? No, it's not. I mean, my question is reform has reform established itself as the second party, even as the third party, has it established itself for good now? It has established itself conclusively as the third party, whether it's the second party depends very much on which opinion poll you're looking at. Some opinion polls give it 19%, others give it 14%, it varies. But whatever it is growing, it appears to be surging. And there are now increasing expectations that it's going to win seats. Going beyond that, it is the party that is attracting a lot of the attention. And you can see that from the attacks that are being made against it by the establishment, by both the leaders of both of the major parties. Now, the leader of the Conservative party is supposed to be Rishi Sunak, but the man who seems to be playing the biggest role, believe it or not, is David Cameron. And he's made a ferocious attack on Nigel Farage, to which Nigel Farage has responded with a fiery response. And we see the Labour party and the not so much the party itself, but rather the media outlets that support the Guardian. They've also been attacking Farage. They've been saying he's a dangerous wild, dangerous demagogue and opportune this. He's got no real programme. His ideas are dangerous. He's going to drag Britain towards right-wing extremism, all of that sort of thing. So the fact that they're attacking him in that way is a strong sign that private polling is showing that he is surging. Now, it's important to understand why he's surging. Firstly, there are aspects of his programme which might be controversial with many people, including many people, who support him, who are supporting him at the moment. For example, he seems to be inclined to move towards a more insurance-based system for funding the National Health Service. To say that, his controversial and even unpopular in Britain would be an understatement. He has, if you like, a much more free-market oriented outlook to economics than many people in Britain have. But the point is he comes across as a real politician. He knows how to talk to people. He can meet people in town halls and engage in reparti. He answers their questions. He campaigns. He's got a solid background of support for the big issue, which won over a lot of attention, which was Brexit. He's able to point out that Brexit has not been properly implemented by the Conservatives and that the Labour Party quite clearly wants to reverse it. So he is attracting support because he comes across as genuine and real in a way that neither soon at all starmen do. I think that probably at the end of this process, we will still see the Conservatives as the second biggest party with many more seats than reform. But I think that most of the people who will be voting for the Conservatives are older people who are very, very traditional Conservative voters. They voted the Conservatives all their lives. It's the party they support and that's why they continue to support it. They may have personal reasons for doing so, but it's a sort of loyalty. It's a legacy, if you like, support. Amongst everyone else, support for the Conservatives is draining away. It's absolutely clear who is the dynamic who represents the only party that has energy and dynamism and ideas and a programme in this election. Now he's coming up with his manifesto soon and we'll see what that says. It could be polarising, it could lose some support, but it might win him support as well. Reform UK fills the void of the Conservatives, of the Tories. I wonder who fills the void or who's going to fill the void once… On the left. Well, this is a very good question because at the moment no one is. I mean, there's Galloway, obviously. He was elected a short time ago as MP for Leicester. He's in the House of Commons. So he's fighting as an MP. He's put together. He's left-wing party. The work is party. That sooner or later, especially if the Starmer Government that we're going to have starts to unravel, which it probably will, we will see a challenge from the left as well. At which point the establishment will have a lot of thinking to do and their response to these challenges from the left and the right will be fierce. Yeah, just a final thought. That's the double-edged sword that you have with leaders like Farage and Galloway. They're so larger than life that they can propel a party to make these gains like Reform, UK. But the risk that you always run is that they become the party. And what happens when they go? Can that party operate independent of the man? Well, that's the risk that you run with. I mean, it's great that you have them and that they can draw so much attention and get so much support. And when elections, but on the other side, you have a party that has to survive without these leaders. They have to turn that corner. How do you turn that corner as a party to survive without the big name? There's these huge personalities. Indeed, so, and of course, the electoral system in Britain makes it very difficult, even more difficult than it is in other places. And of course, the establishment will retain enormous leverage and power. It's got all sorts of things that you can do to try to contain the challenge. But it's nonetheless interesting. It's interesting to see how this election is playing out. I mean, it's playing out in much the way I would have expected. But I have to say, even I am surprised at quite how bad the Conservative electoral campaign is turning out to be. It's the most extraordinarily inept electoral campaign I have ever seen. It's even worse than the one the Labour Party ran in 1983, which says something. All right, we will end it there. 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