The Chaser Report - Seeya Stahmer

Episode Date: June 23, 2026

Sir Keir Stahmer is out, and some bloke from Manchester is in, so Charles uses his Labor Party insight to share what this means. And yes, his Labor Party insight does work for other Labor parties. Plus, Dom explains what it means to be a non-Dom. It's more dom than you think!---Listen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, it turns out that Sir Keir Stama, not so popular with the people of the United Kingdom anymore. He's resigned as his majesty's prime minister and is leaving in September. They take a long time about these things in the UK, don't they? In Australia, you get knife by your own party room and you're out within basically a day. going to be a drawn-out farewell. But yeah, the UK has once again caught the Australian

disease and dumped a successful Prime Minister two years into his first term. This is K Rudd 2.0. Actually, no, K Rudd had two versions. This is K. Rudd 3.0, Charles. Yeah, this is... Well, I think the shovel set at best, which is, this is like 16.3 lettuce's worth of prime ministership, the UK. Because Liz Trust famously lasted about the length. of less than one letters. Yeah, you should go and listen to the daily shovel report rather than the Chaser report, actually. I think you'll find some good tax over there. Let's get into what went wrong for Kis Stama though, and who the new bloke is after these ads.

So unless you've got some earlier, some more, you know, up-to-date information, Dom. I don't think it's going to take till September for Andy Burnham to take power. So my understanding is nobody else is going to run against Andy Burnham. No one else is wrong. The guy who we've mentioned before, Wes Streeting has put his support behind Andy Burden. And in that scenario, yeah. It does, I mean, yeah, in that scenario, the weird thing about the UK can't do anything quickly. Like, you go there and, you know, like, you've got to fill in a form to open a door.

Like, it is so fucking excruciating. I mean, the new guy came down on the train. So the process for the Labor Party is that, They're going to open nomination. They know that it's going to be Andy Burnham, right? Everyone knows it's going to be Andy Burnham. But they're going to formally open their nominations on the 9th of July. Of course.

Give it a few weeks. See who's interesting. And then they'll, you know, presumably give it 24 hours for anyone to nominate. And then it'll be like, oh, only Andy Burnham nominated. Then they'll close the nominations. And then he'll be able to take over from Kear's stomach. So it probably will only be maybe two and a half, three weeks or a while. Well, not unless some mate of Stammers.

Yes. Decides to run, just to give him a few more months. Like, just to give him the extra pay and give him a bit of a farewell tour. Yes. So I reckon, because a few loyal mates turned up to the announcement, not many, but a very small number, came at to actually stand by the poor bloke. When he's out of there, Charles, pretty much exactly 10 years after Brexit. So, what an amazing thing to reflect on all that the UK has achieved since leaving the European Union.

I'm surprised that they actually ever got it done, knowing how... Do you remember how long it took? Yeah. It took years to get out of the EU. Like if, even if they wanted to re-enter, it wouldn't happen in our lifetime, I don't think, Charles. So the thing about, let's talk about Andy Burnham, because he's actually got an interesting character, right? And I'm sure everyone has heard other people doing bad. There's profile pieces, but Charles spends time in the UK.

Charles says, on the ground reporting. Have you been to Manchester in the past 12 months? Yeah, yeah. My two points are, firstly, that's very useful to have someone who's been on the ground. Secondly, what earth did anyone ever go to Manchester? The only time I've ever been there, when my flight from Heathrow got cancelled, and they bussed us to Manchester. I saw it out the window for five seconds, and that did me.

Well, this is the thing. Manchester's the booming city in London. It's in the UK. It's literally the happening place to be. It's all trending here. They've even moved the BBC up there. It's sort of where it's got a little TV city town just outside. BBC's World Cup coverage is coming from there.

Is it Southford? Somewhere like that. Southford, yep. And the interesting thing about Manchester is it's also the voiceover capital of England. Is it really? The most trusted accent in England is a sort of northern accent. It's that sort of, I'm not going to rip you off. So I'm sort of buy our products, whatever.

That's extraordinarily, it's straight from the streets of Manchester. That's right. So you can sort of see why this, you know, he's a bit of a word smith. He can spin a good yarn and everything like that. It does come across as more trustworthy because Kirstama, of course, you always felt a bit anxious whenever he spoke because he spoke like this and he was a bit posh and you just thought he was definitely trying to rip you off, but also slightly angry. Yes, he was amazingly boring.

Boring but yet unprepressing. It's amazing that he won in the first place. But this Andy Burnham guy, so he's currently the, well, he was until very recently, the mayor of Greater Manchester for quite a while. He was in national politics before that. I think he was health secretary at one point. And he made several leadership bids that went nowhere and ended up just leaving parliament entirely and going for a job he could actually do, which is running Manchester.

Yes. That's right. And, you know, people go, oh, but he failed before trying to get this job. I mean, let's have a look at the stunning successes that he failed against. He ran against Jeremy Corbyn and came second, I think, to Jeremy Corbyn. Wow. And probably several Millibands. Remember the Millibands?

Yeah, probably. The two brothers, they're like Stanis Bratheon and Renley. Yeah, I think he came fourth against David Miliband fairly early on in his career. So he lost to losers. Lost to losers on multiple occasions. But also, the other thing is, like, none of those politicians were particularly successful. Like, if your whole party rewards ladder climbers, and I'm looking at you, Australian

Labor Party, then it's very hard for non-ladder climbers, like people who can spin a yarn and are a bit ambitious, to actually cut through and get through that process. So actually him leaving that whole institution was probably exactly the right thing to do because he was too charismatic and yarn spinny for them. Yeah, and he's able to get able to like him. He's been there since 2017, and he's, yeah, sure, he's been spinning yarns, but he's also overseen a sort of economic revival of the shithole known as Manchester. Like, who, I mean, as you said in our introduction, like,

who would have thought that Manchester would be the happening place in England? But it is. They're about to build a brand new stadium, 100,000 people. Manchester United, they're going to build this massive new stadium with this three giant masts, that are so massive that they'll be able to see them from Liverpool. They're like, we finally got them. They'll be able to see our stadium from anywhere in Liverpool. That's the mentality.

They're on a roll. I do love it because whenever you meet somebody from Manchester or Liverpool, they always get very territorial and sort of think that the other place is shit or whatever. And it is wonderful just going, oh, so Manchester and Liverpool, different cities are they? And then they just hate you for it. I thought they were both suburbs of, I don't know, Wiggin. Yeah.

Exactly. But Bolton, I think is the real shit. Bolton. Yeah. So, but what I want to, what the commentary has been just in the last couple of days has been that one of the things that you can't get away from if you become Prime Minister of England is England, right? Like there's a whole.

Yeah, that's the dilemma. Yeah. That you have to make as Prime Minister. And the Commentariat have been very, very big on this holiday that, well, the whole decision that he's going to have to make is how to cut welfare in order to pay for more military. Because that's the decision that Keir Starmer failed to make. Like famously, one of the closing problems that sort of brought this all on was Keir Stama released a budget with Rachel Revis's Chancellor where he didn't give what the Defence Department thought of as an announcement. money to the military. And as a result, the minister for the defence resigned and said, look, this guy can't even defend our country. Right. So it's pretty serious charge. And so

all the conservatives are coming in and going, well, hang on. So Andy Burnham's first act is going to have to be to slash welfare and give it all to the military. And to that I'd say, that's a fucking trap, right? That's exactly what Kears Stun. Armour did. I don't know whether you remember, but the first thing that Kirstama did and why everyone thinks he's a fucking asshole over there is he came in and his first act was to cut welfare and in particular the payment to pensioners for heating in winter. And then a whole lot of poor old age pensioners got really cold and I think almost died. I think there were a couple of hundred deaths. The winter as a result of these cuts to the, yeah, yes. It was quite extraordinary.

So you've got to remember, too, the broader context. And I always plug Matt Bevan's podcast, but it did a really good job of explaining the context of this in his, I think it's called Broken Britain, the mini-series that you did, talking about conservative austerity. So for many, many years, the Tories cut everything in and claim that this would fix the British economy. You know, it would all trickle down, all the stuff you know. And, of course, it didn't, as we know now. And so people were absolutely sick to death of austerity and of cuts as a means of trying to fix things. They'd seen that it hadn't worked under successive conservative prime ministers, elected Kier Stama to try and turn it all around and bring back Labor, obviously,

party of welfare historically. And the first thing the guy does is cut heating oil. Literally making grandma cold was his big beard. It was like, it was a very strange. It was kind of the equivalent of if Tony Abbott had done Knights and Dames on day one. It was such a teenyed thing to do because he'd bought into this whole narrative of, you've got to be serious about the economy and bounce the budget. The Chaser Report, news a few days after it happens.

The one hope that I have is that, you know, Keistammer never knew how to spin a story, right? The whole point is Andy Burnham does, right? And the problem is that Keir's Dammer sort of believed all the fairy tales of the conservative austerity program, right? And so he couldn't get out of that story because that's the story that England's in, right? It's still in that story, right? And my hope is that Andy Burnham can start telling a story where actually, you know, yes, there's a lot of debt in, like England does have a huge amount of debt that it needs to sort of address, right? But maybe the story is actually more that there's a whole lot of non-dom oligarchs who don't pay any tax who live in London,

who all have 100 million pound mansions or half a billion pound mansions and that some of the taxation reforms that Mamdami's brought in, Alba's brought in in Australia, they brought in in Barcelona, you know, those Pierre d'Ater taxes, there's all these different sort of ways that actually, and wealth taxes in California, where you start going, oh yeah, you're right, we do need to, you know, tool up in the military, be sure, let's give some more to some drones and do all that sort of horrible stuff to make sure we can kill as many people as possible. But then also, we don't take it from the fucking pensioners.

We actually take it from the other assholes who happen to have all the fucking money. Yeah, it is quite extraordinary. When you walk around London and just see just how many people who don't live in the UK for tax purposes own property in London, I mean, we know that the Russian oligarchs in huge numbers, all the people who basically stole all the wealth from, you know, all those oil companies and so on, trick people out of their shares, the sort of Roman Abramovich's and so on. What are massive amounts of UK property. I'm just looking at this here.

Charles, just to get the stats here, now this is, to be fair, this is straight out of Google Gemini, so it could be wrong. But they're saying there's 90,000 property titles in England and Wales owned by overseas companies. 27% of central London properties are acquired by overseas buyers. and 70,000 or so who are, yeah, non-doms who don't pay tax, and almost all of them located in London. So, yeah, it's a staggering problem. And the thing is, because I'm reading London is falling at the moment. Have you heard about that book?

It's just come out. It's such an amazing book. It's a non-fiction book, but it's about this guy, this young guy who, a teenager, who pretends to be the son of a Russian oligarch. It's a true story. it's nonfiction. Wow. But it gives you a real understanding of some of the social problems that having these,

so non-dom means they're not, they live in Britain, but they're non-domicated. They don't live in Britain according to the tax purposes, non-domiciled, which means that they don't pay any tax. And the Channel Islands, companies in the,

so the Channel Islands is kind of, it's sort of part of the UK, but everyone, I remember someone I know moved to London and had for a big job with international company, and that has immediately set him up bank accounts in the Channel Island. It's just like 101. You go and do a job over there. Oh, of course you'll want a bank account that you want to pay tax on.

It's clearly quite extraordinary. Whereas in Australia, you've got to be Australia of the year like Pat Rastor to get, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, so. I'm most in Bermuda. So there's all these sort of other things that you can tell. But I think there's also a larger story that's becoming apparent, especially in England, but is also relevant to our experience in Australia,

which is that part of the problem with having so many rich, non-tax-paying, essentially, they're basically bludges, right? Like these sort of rich bludges, just bludging off society, not doing anything, is that they then realise that they can actually just slosh their money around into democracy in order to flood the zone with, you know, racist anti-immigrant sort of styles of politics in order to deflect attention away from, you know, actually being taxed and all the actual problems. And reform, look, one of the

fascinating things that's coming up in reform over and over again is these people are not poor. Like, the people who are actually running reform, running restore, which is the further right one, they're making bank. They're making good money. of this. It's a bit of a grift for them because actually there's tons of sort of millionaires and billionaires who are prepared to put up money just to sort of keep the system unstable so that no one ever goes, oh, hang on, wait a minute, all these non-taxed bludges are actually the problem. But Charles, the interesting thing is that, and like obviously some people will object to some of the parties where these votes are going. I mean, a lot of people are worried about

people, obviously, with migrant backgrounds, very worried about one nation in Australia and reform in the UK. But the reality is there is a huge wave of unhappiness and dissent at the status quo that has nowhere to go on the left at the moment in the UK or Australia. There's not, the Greens and Labor are not putting a narrative out that is resonating with the people who feel completely disillusioned by the system. But it's interesting to see, as you say, Zoranamadani in New York City having done this quite successfully and going, no, no, no, we are going to sort out housing, we are going to make public transport, you know, free or cheap or whatever, we're going to make childcare free, we're going to do all these practical things to actually help with cost of living.

There's no one in Australia with that same combination of charisma, strong media skills, but also just the ability to simply say, here is a tangible thing I'm going to do that will make your life better. And Pauline Hansen is doing that. And people might not think that the solutions are palpable. But when she says, you know, she's going to stop people who don't leave here buying, buying property here. That's exactly tapping into what you've just been talking about. She's basically saying non-dom people in Australia, the equivalent of that.

Or it's a little different in that she's talking about people who are not. It's not clear what their policies, whether it's permanent residents or non-citizens. But it's the same sentiment of. She's not talking about rationalogics, Dom. She's talking about poor. I know. Like hardworking immigrants. I know.

I know it's, yeah, but it comes from the same sentiment of there's something wrong. But I kind of disagree with that analysis, don't. Because I actually think that she's not answering some burning sort of anger that's out there. She's creating that anger very specifically and very systematically through really targeted micro messaging. Like it's not, it's a sophisticated social media mobilization campaign. Yes, but the thing I'm saying is similar. It's not born of some sort of organic, sort of like, you know, we're not being served well. It's like, no, you're not being served well.

And here's all the reasons why you should be feeling bad about your life. Yeah, they're building up, but it's the same as reform, right? Like, Pete, they're very similar. They're obviously copying the playbook from reform. I'm not, I'm saying they're taking a bedrock of unhappiness and they're loading. a whole lot of other things onto it that we'll see when it comes the election where people actually buy the kind of superstructure that one nation's putting onto it. But the sense that the economic bargain is not working for a lot of people, I think is

massive. And it's an opportunity for the left as much as it is for the right, really, if they get the messaging right, which is where Andy Burnham is, the great hope of UK labour. Yep. Yep. And in Australia, there's Albo. Oh, no, no, no, we've got our charismatic. lift. We've definitely got a charismatic

lift. And you've seen them? Where? Oh, you know. Oh, you're Jim Chalmers. The budget. Word Smith Albo. Yeah. Adam Bairz? Oh, that's right. He's not in it any more as he. Yeah. And what about, what about, you know, like those sort of

those second tier cabinet ministers like, you know, I mean, people always talk about the charisma of Michelle Rowland. And, uh, And the sheer oratorical power of Jenny McAllister. Charles, can also, can you imagine, Andy Burnham's whole thing was he caught the train. And the rousing, he caught the train down. You're enjoying this. The rousing Martin Luther King Jr. style techniques of Tim Ayers or Murray-Watt. Oh, boy.

No, so Andy Burnham caught the train down from Manchester to London, right? It was this big thing. He came down. The media were there with him. Bernie Burke. And I'm just imagining the Australian version where a politician catches the train to Canberra, try and sweep in from outside, and just gets like lost. Because you know the Canber Railway station's in the middle of nowhere. You literally come out in the middle of a field.

Yeah. But Charles, the one time, they arrive in yes or something. They do. The one cautionary tale, I'd say, is you remember the last time a charismatic mayor swept in, who wasn't actually in parliament, swept in, got themselves a seat and became the new leader and governed? Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson. That's not what I'm thinking of, the Australian version. But Boris is a great case study.

Oh. The Australian version was Campbell Newman, Lord Mayor of Brisbane. Oh, no. Came in, swept in to fix Queensland, one government back. And, yeah, it didn't last very long in the job. So we'll see how long Andy Burnham survives as PM. But look, he probably will be, he probably won't cut the oil from poor people at Christmas. because, hey, Kestan already did that.

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