The Duran Podcast - Conservative catastrophe. Labour unpopular

Episode Date: May 8, 2024

Conservative catastrophe. Labour unpopular The Duran: Episode 1902

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the local elections that took place in England, in the UK, in various places in England. And the indications are, were that the Tories, the conservatives got hammered. But did it really go that well for labor and Kirstammer? What's your take on the elections that took place? Well, the first thing to say is anybody who has been following our programs and our discussions about the situation, a mood in Britain would not be surprised by the outcome of these elections. First of all, I think this is the worst performance in local elections. These are regional elections for local authorities and local councils. This is the worst result I think that the Conservative Party has ever had, at least in its modern history.

Polling people who studied this, who crunch the figures, think that its vote fell to around 25%. And much of this happened in English areas which are traditionally conservative voting. So conservatives are doing appallingly, but Labor is not doing well. That is the real story. Now, there are blips. So in London, which is very much a Labour city, and I think partly because the conservative candidate, in my opinion, ran a bad campaign, I'm not going to discuss that in detail now.

But Sardik Khan was re-elected. and he did quite well in London. And there was a by-election in a place called Blackpool, where this is a parliamentary by-election, which happened at the same time, where Labour also won the by-election with a big swing from the Conservatives. But if you look at the results as a whole,

across England and Wales, where these votes, these elections are happening, Labor got around 34%. Now, that is a lot of, very good. In the year before the 1997 landslide, which Blair won, he got 51%. So that gives you a difference. That gives you a sense of the difference. Normally, it is expected that a party that is going to win an election and which is going to gain a majority in the House of Commons should win at least 40% of the vote in local elections. Well, Labour is polling well below that level, 34%.

And I understand that in every one of the local elections that he fought, as leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn polled better. In other words, he got more than 34%. So that tells you how badly the Labour Party is doing is his must because whilst the Labour Party is not doing well, the Conservatives are doing catastrophically. So that makes it look as if Labour is actually, you know, doing really well when in fact they're doing very badly. I think this is the first time in local elections, or indeed in any national election, now in local elections, when the largest share of the vote, 37% went to the block of the electorate that chose to vote for whatever party they could, which was not conservative or labor.

So 37% was not Labor, not Conservative. 34% was Labour, 25% was Conservative. So my overall conclusion from this, the Conservatives are going to lose catastrophically in the forthcoming general election. It is highly likely that Labour will win with a majority because the Conservatives are doing so badly. But it will not come in as a popular government. Kier Starrma has a big negative rating. It's minus 18, which again is unique, I think, in the case of opposition leaders who win elections and then go on to form governments.

I mean, I think in modern history, all opposition leaders, in modern recent history, all opposition leaders who've gone to form governments have had positive ratings. Starrma has a very bad negative rating. But again, he looks better than Sunak, whose negative rating is minus 41. So that gives you a sense of where we really are. The British don't like the Labour Party. Well, they absolutely hate the Conservatives. And that is going to give the Labour Party a majority in the House of Commons. But it will be a government that nobody really feels any liking or enthusiasm

and they'll have a prime minister that people don't particularly like, that don't like and don't particularly respect. So rocky times ahead. So bizarre. It's like the people in the UK are forced to deal with Stammer. There's no other option. So this guy's going to be forced on you and you're going to have to have to accept it. And you don't have anyone on the horizon after.

after Stover? We don't. We don't. Who comes after him? Well, this is a very good question. I mean, within the Labour Party, it's impossible to see anybody because all the people

who might have been opposed to Stama from any side, they've been systematically cleared out. And this has been, by the way, a big story of the Labour Party, which, again, we could talk about another day. But what you are starting to see, and again, we've discussed this in various programs,

is some degree of crystallization. of new political forces, both on the right and on the left. Reform UK, which is a right-wing party, it did well in those places where it ran a candidate. It has, however, only ran candidates in one seat out of six that were contested. So it's still not really organised on a national level. And it's increasingly looking unlikely that Farage himself will ever lead it. He seems to have tired of politics, basically. So Reformer UK is there. It is winning votes. In the Blackpool by-election, it won almost as many votes as the Conservatives. I think the difference was just a few hundred votes. So, I mean, you know, it's doing very well in all kinds of places.

and it might eventually break through. But for the moment, that's looking unlikely because of the way in which the electoral system works in Britain. And on the left, you're getting a swirl of parties, not clear whether there will ever be any crystallisation around any of them. The Greens did very well in places like Bristol, Bristol is the nearest British equivalent to San Francisco. You would expect the Greens to do well there.

They did very well there. In some of the more industrial or ex-industrial places, there's George Galloway's New Workers Party. It did fairly well in some of the places where it put up candidates. But none of these alternative parties have critical mass. either on the right or on the left. We're still in a situation of huge flux. Nobody likes the established parties.

Nobody respects any of the leaders of the established parties, both soon as catastrophically unpopular. Stama, very unpopular. But the alternatives are not yet formed and might not be formed. I mean, this is the trouble. I mean, one doesn't really get, imposing personalities

appearing in any one of these alternative parties that might, you know, lead things forward. And, well, the Liberals, the Liberal Democrats, who are, you know, Britain's historic third party with a heritage going all the way back to the 17th century. Well, they're still there. They did pick up a lot of votes. But traditionally, in Britain,

Britain, if Conservative and Labour are both unpopular, it is the Liberals who benefit, who benefit. They didn't do so to anything like the same extent this time. Again, partly because the British see them as another establishment party, very little different from the other two. So there's a strong anti-establishment moved in Britain. There's deep anger in the working close. industrial areas because of the betrayal, as they see it, over Brexit. There's a huge sense of economic malaise across the whole country.

Young people are very angry because they feel that their interests are being neglected. Muslim voters are furious with Labour because of the stance it has taken over the conflict in Gaza. But nothing that really has come together yet. that would challenge the establishment, even though we've just seen how deeply unpopular the establishment actually is. It's really a very bad outcome.

It's difficult to be optimistic about Britain's future because we're going to get at some point over the next couple of months a Labour government, which will be unpopular from the moment it takes office and which will have no real mandate for political change and no desire to conduct any political change

of the sort the country needs to get itself sorted and to get things together. Well, they'll come into office, but they're going to be voted into office. That's the part that always puzzles me about the situation. People are unhappy.

They despise the establishment. But someone's voting these parties into office. I mean, someone's voting for labor and for Kier Stahler. Is this an effect of of the fact that the establishment doesn't let any new new fresh ideas, candidates into the mainstream? I'm sure that that plays a key part in what's going on in the UK. Is it also an effect of what it's like in Greece in a way, where you have, you know, the Greek people, they despise the establishment. They don't like the establishment, but the establishment parties are being voted to enter office because you do have that base. You do have people that will vote that party no matter how bad they are

or who will vote one of the main parties, no matter how bad they are, because they'll never take a chance on a smaller party or a new candidate. So they're always going to vote the establishment, whether it's the left, the right, the center. They'll always vote a uniparty candidate because there's that fear of perhaps looking at the fringes of the political spectrum. I mean, my point is that people are voting for labor. voting for Stommer. They voted for the conservatives, even though they despise labor, Stomber,

soon after the conservatives. You're absolutely, what, the vote may be sharply down, but it is still enough to ensure that we get a labor government. And the reason the reason is, again, I mean, I think one of the things to understand about the Labor Party today is that unlike the Labor Party of, say, 50, 60, 70 years ago, which was a major, political force with strong support across the, in fact, passionate support across the country. Labour nonetheless still attracts votes, partly because it can appeal to that legacy, especially amongst some older voters, but also because it's become, again, very much like Greek parties, a clientage patronage machine. I mean, you vote Labor because, you know,

they will, they say that they will look after you. There is an awful lot of that now. to an extent that we didn't use to see in British politics once upon the time. And with the Conservatives, by the way, it's the same. And that also, because they're the established parties, they have the councillors, they have the access to the levers of power, they have the machinery, they have the newspapers, the media works for them. It's very difficult to take them on and will continue to be for a long time. I mean, they're not going to die tomorrow.

But they are unpopular. And again, we come back to exactly the point that you said. One of the reasons why alternatives have not appeared is because the British establishment has been relentless in destroying alternatives. When you look at political leaders who have emerged in Britain over the last 10 years who've challenged the establishment.

Be they of the right or of the left, the establishment has knocked them all down. It's eliminated them all. I mean, Boris Johnson, Listruss, Farras, Farras, lots of trouble. Aaron Banks, the man who financed the part of the Leave campaign, he's in trouble.

Dominic Cummings, pushed out of Downing Street, you know, isolated from the party. He's not, you know, major forces he once was. And on the left, people like Corbyn and others like him also pushed out too. So they've been very, very ruthless and systematic and successful in doing that. They've created a desert around them. The desert that we see today, there's no great support for the major.

parties but they've made sure that alternatives to them don't exist and it's a sign of how controlled British politics has now become by the way I just wanted to add a few things which is again one of the major reasons for the disaffection and the sense of Malays is because none of the political parties are addressing British Britain's real problems, the underlying inflation crisis, the fact that living standards are falling, the fact that there's a huge housing crisis. There's no real serious attempt to deal with the immigration problem. I want to just say something about the immigration problem because this is much misunderstood, I think, in the United States. And that is that in the United States, the big problem

is with illegal immigration. In Britain, the major vast proportion of people who come into Britain do so legally. So it ought to be an easier problem to solve if you really want to reduce immigration. But of course, none of the parties want to do it. So you see, that there is a sense that there is this sense of disconnection. And I'm also going to say it. There is an issue about that big taboo, unmentionable subject, which is Ukraine. Now, there, where, where, where, where, one place where the Conservatives did particularly badly was a local authority in London called Rushmore, in England, rather, called Rushmore. Within Rushmore, there's a town called Aldershot. Aldershot is the town which is more associated with the British Army than any other town in England.

It's seen as its historic capital. There's a military basis there, lots of military. families live there. It's voted conservative in every election since 1918 when the parliamentary constituency of Aldershot was first created. In these local elections, it voted Labor. Why did he do that? Could it be, just saying, because some British ministers have been talking about sending British troops to fight in Ukraine, just saying? But of course, Nobody wants to say that. Nobody wants to talk about it. Nobody wants to speak about these things.

The Ukraine war, which is a huge issue for people and the effect it is having, is not one that the establishment wants to talk about. The only party that did talk about it, to some extent, is George Galloway's work as far as. All right. We will end it there. The durand.com. We are on Rumble odyssey. shoot telegram and Rock Finn and go to the Duran shop, pick up some limited edition

merchandise. The link is in the description box down below. Take care.