The Duran Podcast - UK election campaign begins

Episode Date: June 8, 2024

UK election campaign begins

All right, Alexander, the elections in the UK have started, right? They're officially underway. And the government resigns, the parliament resigns, everyone. The government formally is still in place. What has happened is that the king has dissolved parliament. So Rishi Sunak's prime minister, but parliament is dissolved, and there is a new election to elect the MPs. But you're absolutely right.

has been underway and we can get a sense of where things are going. Where are things going? It is the most... Because Rishi Sudak, last week he was talking about national service, making it... That's one of his campaign platforms. That's absolutely right. Doesn't sound like a winning strategy. Yes, it is his great, brilliant idea.

Bring back national service, bring back conscription. The best and the finest will go into the army. This is, you know, boys from 182. is 24, we'll go into the army. All of the others will have to do service in various parts of the civilian governmental structure in the NHS, all of those things. Apparently the ones in the army will be paid a small amount. It seems the others won't be, which looks like, you know, some kind of mechanism, well, you know, forced labour, if you will. that is not going to win much support from young people.

I know that there are opinion polls that from time to time suggest that. But Sunak is not looking to get votes from young people who are not going to vote for him. He's trying to shore up support from the older generation, the over 60s, who traditionally feel that young people need to be brought under control. and disciplined in all kinds of ways. And it is the case that for the moment at least, people over 60, or some say over 65, look like they're going to vote conservative. But it's nowhere near enough, and it's not going to change the electoral dynamics. And everybody still sees that the conservatives are going to go down to a colossal defeat. But to talk about the election campaign as a whole,

apart from this one idea of national service, which isn't an idea at all, it's never intended seriously to be introduced, and I understand that the military opposes it. But anyway, apart from this particular idea, neither side has come up with anything. Both leaders have shown that they are completely incompetent at electoral campaigning, which neither of them has ever done in any kind of serious way. I have, I think I counted that I've lived through 19 elections in Britain. That might be, I might be wrong, you know, I might be, I might have miscounted in some respects. But whatever, I can, the first election I have memories of was the general election of 1970. So that tells you how far back I can remember this. This is the most dismal.

election in Britain I have ever seen. If you remember when we were talking about Theresa May, all those years ago during the Brexit war, I said that she had no ideas, no skill in government that under her administration had replaced government. And when, of course, there was the 2017 election, all that showed through. she put completely incompetent as an electoral campaigner and Labor, which at that time did have policies and ideas and a political leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who was familiar with electoral elections and knew how to campaign. Well, they nearly won, despite being 20 points behind at one point. Well, this time, it's as if you have two parties, each led by their, you know,

clones of Theresa May. It is that dismal. It is one set of incompetent administrators, the conservatives, up against another set of equally incompetent administrators, the Labour Party. And that's the alternatives that the British people are being honest to choose. But this is Kirstammer's election to win, to lose. I mean, he's going to win. he's going to win though he doesn't deserve to i mean we've had a classic example we've had a classic example of how um inept a politician in some respects he continues to be there is a labor politician called diane abbott um controversial figure with some people um she's an mp in london she was the first black woman to be elected to the british parliament way back in the 1980s she's a

standard bearer of the left. She's a popular figure with many people, not, I should stress, with everybody. Stama doesn't like her because she's very, she was very, very close. In fact, she remains very close to Corbyn, and basically he doesn't want her in the Labour Party. So she was suspended a year ago over an issue, which I don't really understand, is a letter that she wrote to a newspaper for which she apologised. And then there was an investigation, which last for five months. Then the investigation apparently required her to go through some kind of a training course, which he did. And then she still wasn't readmitted into the parliamentary Labour Party. And then just a few days ago, when there was an awful lot of outcry, why isn't this person

readmitted? Stama and his team decided to readmit her into the parliamentary Labour Party. And then they turned round and said, well, you know, we readmitted her, but we don't want to to stand for Parliament, which is contradictory and makes no sense. Apparently they were suggesting that she should quietly retire from politics. If you know her, you would know that was never going to happen. She's insisting that she's going to stay. That has created a whole uproar. there are people who are complaining that the Labour Party is going after its first black woman MP, an iconic figure, and all of that. A completely unnecessary round has been created right in the middle of an election, which a genuine politician, a real skilled politician would never have got himself into. But it's Stama.

It tells you the kind of, you know, politically insensitive person that he really is. Because, again, like Theresa May and Brissy Sunak, he is just an administrator. That's all he is. And not particularly good one. I get the sense that the conservatives in Sunak want to throw this election. Is that true? Well, one would almost think so. I mean, you know, I've talked about Starmma.

I mean, Sunac has very much. run the campaign equally badly, in my opinion. I don't see any sign that he's running things well. Nobody expects the Conservatives to win. All sorts of Conservative MPs, famous people, Michael Gove and others like that, are now saying that they're not going to stand for re-election in this election. And what does almost sense that many Conservatives feel the, situation is so bad, the economic situation is so bad, their government is so broken that, you know, perhaps losing the election, would not be such a bad thing after all. I say that, of course, it depends on the scale of their defeat. If they go down to say 150 seats or even less and some people say they'll go down below 100, I don't know whether that will happen, by the way, but if they, they, do as badly as that, then it, I mean, it's a cataclysm. And I can't believe the Conservatives want it. But, you know, against Stama, maybe, possibly they'll do better than some people think,

in which case, being rid of government, being out of government, will enable them perhaps, or so they think to recharge their batteries, to come back, to reorganise, to get themselves a more popular leader or something of that kind. I don't believe it's going to happen, by the way. I don't believe either party has the ability any longer for that kind of regeneration. And one of the problems is that neither party is coming up with any kind of proposals about how to deal with Britain's massive problems. The fact that the economy is stagnant, the fact that productivity is low,

and perhaps even falling, the fact that there's a general sense of malaise right across British society. There's no one with any serious proposals about how to break through that. And of course, we have taxes higher than they've ever been at any period since the end of the Second World War. We have a fiscal crisis. We have debt to GDP ratio, which is now over 100. I think it was in the 30s back at the time when Blair was there. So I get a sense of how far that has deteriorated. We have pothold streets, rubbish that isn't collected, problems growing in every area.

The National Health Service is in bad shape. about these talking about these things, but neither party has any plan or proposal about how to turn it round, except, I suppose, for Sunak's proposal of reintroducing national service and getting boys and girls of 18 to go into these places and presumably have brooms and mops and clean everything up and do it for no pay. Oh, boy. All right. Well, ended there, the durand. Dot locals.com. We are Rumble Odyssey but shoot Telegraphen, Rockfin, and Twitter X and go to the Grand Shop, use the code. Get Ready 15 and get 15% off all merch. Take care.