The Duran Podcast - Starmer, destroying economy to tighten control

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

Starmer, destroying economy to tighten control

All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is going on in the UK. Things are not looking good for Stommer, and his popularity is collapsing. And he's arresting a lot of people, it seems. That's the sense that I get. Actually, that's what we're seeing, is a lot of arrests are being made throughout the UK for various things, mostly connected to censoring and going after journalists and stuff like that. And the economy is looking like it's in very bad shape. So what is going on with Stommer?

What's going on with his administration? They are off to a very bad start. And they don't seem to want to make things better either. They don't seem to want to make things better. They seem that they're making things worse. What's going on? Well, I think your last comment actually gets to the heart of it, Because this is, in some ways, the most astonishing government I've ever seen.

Because most governments, new governments, when they've been elected, especially if they're coming to power after a long period when the other party, the other side, have been in power. What they try to do is that they try to foster an atmosphere of optimism and hope. They say, look, we're in charge now. You know, the other side may have messed up, but we are going to turn things around.

You can have hope and optimism and things are going to get better from this point on. When Tony Blair became Prime Minister in 1997, he actually had a song, a hymn that we were hearing all the time, which was that things can only get better. I mean, that was the sort of thing that he was pumping out at that time. And by the way, it worked for about two years. Blair enjoyed an extraordinary, honeymoon with the British people. He was more popular than any Prime Minister I have ever known. It only lasted for about two years, but two years is actually quite a long time, if you think about it. Well, Stama and his team, who remember didn't win in terms of votes a resounding victory in the election. On the contrary, the vote share that they got and the absolute vote that they

got was very low. Anyway, they've come in and they have the exact opposite perspective because what they're telling us is that things can only get worse. That's what they're saying. They're going around. They're saying, you know, our economic inheritance is so bad that we have to do these terrible and awful things. We have to raise taxes. We have to cut spending. We have to retrench in every conceivable way that we can, even as we give very big pay rises to people in the public sector, We have to do everything else because things are so bad. And you know what? They're actually going to get worse.

And they're going to continue getting worse for up to 10 years. Which is for most people. I mean, you know, it's an extraordinary length of time, you know, in the life of an individual or a family. And unsurprisingly, the British people are hearing this mood music. and they're seeing what the government is trying to do. And, well, they are losing confidence in this government very, very fast. Now, we've actually had a surprisingly, a surprising short, maybe not a surprising, an entirely predictable lack of opinion polls over the last couple of weeks.

But there was one yesterday, which I read, and it showed that Starrma's popularity. has collapsed. His personal popularity has collapsed and I gather that Labor's popularity is falling as well. Now that is again unprecedented so shortly after an election. Usually when a party wins an election, its support for some time after the election actually goes on growing. This time it's falling off a cliff. And the reason is, as I said, people have been told, well, actually, you know, you voted for us, but don't expect that anything's going to get better for you. It's actually going to get worse. Now, I think that there is some logic to this madness, because politically, electorally speaking, this is a mad thing to do. But I think that there is a kind of logic behind this, which is that if you look at the Labour government's economic programme, its ideas, about dealing with Britain's underlying problems, it has no ideas.

I mean, what it's talking about doing, raising tactics, cutting spending, it might conceivably do something to sort out the budget problems, though I doubt it. What it's more likely to do is to press the economy even further and reduce the growth rate of the economy even further. But I think that the priority for the government and for the political establishment in Britain at the moment is not winning popularity for the current government. It is tightening control

because they do want to do various things. They want to re-establish a very strong connection with the European Union. We've seen that there's been a summit meeting, with Germany. They're now obviously going to harmonise British laws again with the European Union. They're going to do everything in other words. They can to render Brexit meaningless and eventually to reverse it completely. I think that is now all but certain. And they also want further justification for all the various repressive measures that they're taking. And of course the

rationale, the argument that they're making is that any protests that happen are always protests through the political extremes, bad economic conditions, foster protests, so bad economic conditions in some way justify the repression, which is what they want to do. There is a, okay, I see it. I see it. I mean, there are, they're, they're, they're plan is to piss people off just enough so that they can control them more so that they can rebel to the point where it's not a danger to the government, but they protest and rebel to a point where the government can then use that as an excuse to tighten control. Is that how they're working this? So they want to push people to the brink just to the point where, yes,

they are upset with the government. Yes, they protest. Yes, they complain. Yes, they post mean things on social media, but not to the point where it's a danger to their own power, just to the point where they can, where they can exert more power onto the people where they can control more of what the people are allowed to do or what they're allowed to say. I mean, is this the balance that they're trying to create? It sounds very risky. It's incredibly risky. It's incredibly dangerous, but I mean, that seems to me the logic of it. I've never known a government come in taking such repressive positions on so many issues. I mean, we've had, well, we touched on the response to the protests, the recent protests. I've made my own views about the protests very

clear. I think a relatively small phenomenon has exaggerated. Notice that to this day, we have not been given a number for the number of people who actually participated in those protests or riots. I mean, so it might have been as few as a thousand across the entire country.

It would not be inconsistent with the information we have, by the way, that it might have been as few as that. It may have been many more. I mean, I don't know, but they've never given us a number for them. But they've also used the Terrorist Act, terrorism act now,

to stop journalists in the air. There's a man called Medhurst. They hauled him off the airport when he's plane when he arrived and he was held in for 24 hours under police interrogation. And they're talking about doing an awful lot more things of that kind. So I and if you read the newspapers here, particularly the newspapers that support the government, they are all in on further protests, on further repression. And that seems to me that this is what they want. to do. Now, I think you're quite right. It is a very dangerous thing to do. But I think that they believe that they have sufficient control that they can in fact play this game and that things will just remain bubbling at this level of discontent below the surface and that, you know, all the various measures that they're taking will ultimately reshape the political environment. in order to prevent things like the Brexit referendum

or the Corbyn movement or anything like that ever happening again. Because that I think is their priority. I think that is much more their priority now than turning anything around within Britain itself. How much support does Kirstam or Labor actually have right now to accomplish this kind of balancing act? I can't figure out another way to describe it. keep things bubbling, but not exploding? How much support does he have to accomplish this?

I think that you will find that about 15 to 20 percent of the British people, British electorate, will play along with this pretty much no matter what. Now, that may not sound like a very big percentage, but these are well-connected people, they're influential people, they're affluent, They're strongly located in London. They also are probably able to draw in support from various communities. I mean, one of the things that has been a problem for the Labour government, for example, or Labour Party, is that they lost a lot of Muslim support over the Gaza crisis. But using the riots, they can project themselves again as the defenders, the protecters of the Muslims.

Muslim electorate from what they like to project as the extreme right or the far right or whatever it is that they want to call it. So I think that there is a core of people who will stick by them no matter what. And even if in percentage terms, that isn't huge, they probably calculate it's enough to enable them to maintain control. What happens when they reverse Brexit? I mean, what does that mean for the UK? That's a very good question. I don't think in the end, in terms of the actual day-to-day affairs of people in Britain, it means very much. Some people who always oppose Brexit will be very happy because it means that people will be able to come again from Eastern Europe and they want that.

and others people who want to go and buy homes in Tuscany and send their children to European universities, they'll be very pleased. But in terms of the overall economic situation, it really isn't going to make a huge amount of difference because if we're talking about what Brexit, you know, the sort of promises that were made at the time of Brexit of reorganising, recalibrating Britain's economy,

rebooting Britain's economy, doing something about the border, all of that. Nothing like that ever really happened. So, I mean, it's not as if it's, you know, going to make such a big, sharp, radical change in everybody's day-to-day life. What it will do, of course, is make many people very, very cynical,

very, very despondent. It'll make some people very, very angry. But, again, the fact that we're getting all this repressive machinery being created. created is going to be there to be pulled out to make sure that when people do become very, very angry, there is nothing very much that they can do about their anger, because if they try, there will be someone there to make sure that, you know, they're brought back into line very, very fast. Is there money for Ukraine in all of this?

Well, this is the other story. Now, I don't know whether this is exactly true, but I've heard stories. that the British not only have given a lot of money to Ukraine, about £7 billion in terms of direct grants, so I understand, and about £10 billion worth of weapons, which cannot be replaced, by the way, because if we have a budgetary crisis, how we're going to replace all those weapons?

But what I've also heard is that the British have given lots and lots of loan guarantees to Ukraine for various loans that Ukraine has been taking out. And now that Ukraine is defaulted, there are problems with those loans. The answer is that there is no, in theory, there should not be any money for Ukraine. We're in a very severe budgetary crisis.

That's what the British government is saying. We are in a situation where the economy is stagnant, productivity is stagnant or falling, living standards are stagnant. There's been some supposed revival in the economy over the last few weeks. I don't think anybody who lives in Britain on a day-to-day basis has seen it. But anyway, I think living standards probably are falling. So we shouldn't really be in a position to be giving more money to Ukraine.

But again, I think that is a priority that the British government has. and I think they will continue to pursue it. I think that they're more likely to cut spending on things that people in Britain care about than cut spending on Ukraine, because spending on Ukraine is more important to them than spending on those things that people care about is. Yeah, true. Spending on Ukraine is giving themselves. in a way. Okay, we'll lend it there.

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