The Duran Podcast - UK Greens win big. Labour and Starmer suffer big defeat

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

UK Greens win big. Labour and Starmer suffer big defeat

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the by-election in the UK and the rise of the Greens. 40% was their margin of, that was the vote that they got. Their victory over labor, I believe, was at 22% or 20%. Yeah, number two was reform. Yes. Very bad showing for labor. And the Tories got completely demolished. The conservatives got completely demolished and the liberals were nowhere at all.

So, I mean, this is very important. And it's an aspect of this election that very, very few people are talking about. I mean, since every, as long as anybody can remember, since the beginning of the 20th century, Bruton has had three dominant parties, Labor, conservative, liberal. usually if we have a situation where there's a Labour government and it's unpopular, there's a swing to the conservatives. If there's a conservative government which is unpopular, there is a swing to labor. If both parties are unpopular, which does happen or has happened from time to time, quite often, actually, then there is a swing to the liberals. But they are the three parties taken together.

that make up the British establishment. I think I'm right in saying that for the first time in modern British electoral history, at least since the Second World War, we've had a situation where in a by-election in England, in England specifically, neither of the two big parties, Labour or Conservative, came in number two. So the entire British political class, the entire spectrum of parties that make up the British political class have been completely discredited. So this is a desire. Gorton and Denton, right? Gorton and Denton.

I didn't mention that in the beginning. Gorton and that's the name of the constituency. It's a greater Manchester. It's a single parliamentary constituency. though two very different places. So Denton is traditional English working class constituency, the sort of place that used to be bedrock labour. Gorton is more mixed. There's a big Muslim community there.

It's more middle class in some places, apparently. So what you might call the progressive. regions, progressive suburbs in Greater Manchester, which has always been a very left-wing city, Gorton and Denton, the sixth most strongest Labour seat. There's only five other seats where Labour has racked up even bigger majorities than in Gorton and Denton. It would be incredible for Labour to lose a seat like this. Once upon a time, it would be. It would have been unthinkable that they would lose a seat like this. They've crashed. And conservatives and labor have, conservatives and liberals have also crashed. And two essentially new parties,

the Greens came up, came first and reform came second. The Greens won over, won the support of younger people, more middle-class people in Gorton, and also the Muslim community, because they ran heavily on Gaza. And a reform won the older working-class voters, mostly indented. So you can see that both of these kids, young Muslim voters traditionally labor. Working-class voters, traditionally Labor. Labor is experiencing a squeeze both from the right and from the left, both from the reform and from the Greens, and it is imploding. And the conservatives and the liberals are nowhere to, nowhere in sight. So this is a political revolution in the making. And I think that we can talk about Stahman, in fact we should talk about Stama and about

what's going to happen with the Labour government in a moment. But there is a bigger story, here, which is about the fact that the British people are to the extent that they can trying to rebel against the political order that they have lived with all their lives and which over the last 30 years has evolved into the kind of globalist order that we have talked about in many programs. The Green Party winner was Hannah Spencer. Yes. Yeah. Okay. But before we get to Stabber just a very quick question. Are the UK Greens as crazy and nutty? And are they, are they warmongers like the German Greens? Yes. I mean, the German Greens are crazy, batshit crazy, nutty warmongers, Adelina Berbach, Robert Hobbeck. I mean, they were absolutely

crazy. Yes. And there were big time, big time, warhawks. Are the UK Greens the same? Yes, they are the same, though because they are less, they've been less prominent up to now, this has been less visible and they still are able to, you know, reach out to people who think that they're otherwise. One of the things I've noticed, both about the Greens in Germany and the Greens in Britain, is that they're becoming also less of an environmentalist party. I mean, they're obviously very committed to climate change and all of these other things. things, but they're becoming more and more interested in things beyond that, in geopolitics. They have all sorts of views about geopolitics.

They are ultra-uber-Europeanists. This is where perhaps the German Greens and the British Greens are a bit different. The German Greens are not just Uber-Europeanists, but they're also Atlanticists. I mean, they are committed supporters of NATO. they're very close to the Democrats in the U.S. The British Greens, for the moment, are Uber-Europeanists, but more skeptical. They still have a residual skepticism of the United States and of NATO. And, of course, Trump has reinforced that.

So their policy is that, you know, we are as anti-Russian as ever, every bit as anti-Russian as we have ever been. We are fully supportive of sanctions. We want rearmament and all of those things. But we actually don't support NATO anymore. We want to recreate a new military alliance based on the EU, which of course we want to rejoin. And we want Britain to be part of that. So that's their foreign policy.

Now, this is not something they talk about so much. what they did talk about and they ran a very opportunistic and clever, I have to say it, clever campaign. I mean, they ran very, very heavily on Gaza. So they won over Muslim votes by talking a lot about Gaza. At the same time, they ran very much as the anti-reform party, the party that would stop the terrible people on the right. from coming in. And they also ran on all of the socially liberal identity issue positions about which they are even further committed to than the Democrats the United States are. So imagine the most extreme position that the Democrats have on any one of these issues. You know,

this is the identity issues. The Greens and Britain are even beyond that. They are also, by the way, fervidly pro immigration. I mean, they don't basically, as far as I can tell, they're not really about any kind of immigration controls whatsoever. Now, given this package, I do think that in a constituency like Gorton and Denton, if reform had run a better campaign and if they'd have done a better campaign and if they they'd had a more attractive candidate, I mean, more attractive to the local people, I think reform would have done better than they did. They came second, but my own view is that this was a seat

that they might even have been able to win. What they did instead was that they ran with a candidate Matt Goodwin, who is an academic and intellectual. This is a working class seat. Maybe not quite the sort of person you want to put up in a seat like that. Somebody who is obviously not a natural campaigner. Somebody who is extremely pro-Israel, which is not going to appeal to the Muslim voters at all in a seat like this, and talks about Israel an awful lot,

which may be not so attractive to some of the working class voters that you want to talk about. And somebody who's not making as big an issue, maybe, of some of the weaknesses of the green position, on immigration, on all of those other things that I was talking about, that a local candidate who understands the local area, the area there, would have done. Whereas the Greens ran with a local person, a very photogenic, working class, young woman, somebody who immediately is going to appeal to younger people, and she's also by profession of plumber. So that appeals to the working class and constituents voters in that constituency. So I have to say this, and I think this is a thing which,

reform is not really good at. They haven't yet perfected how to run effective by-election campaigns, whereas the Greens have. All right. So let's talk about Stammer. Where's he left in all of this? Well, this is the interesting thing. This is a disastrous defeat for the Labour Party. Stammer came to Gorton and Denton before the by-election. But he didn't campaign there. he met with Labour Party activists and officials, but he didn't dare go out on the streets and meet local people. He certainly didn't canvas on the doorstep because, frankly, the reaction to him is so hostile. So he was hiding even whilst he was there. And so he's incredibly unpopular.

He has no authority in the government at all. Nobody in the parliamentary party any longer believes that he's going to win the next election or he's a vote winner. Nobody thinks that he's wrong and effective government. Nobody respects him. His ministers are going to increasingly ignore him because his authority is so weak. They can't, he can't sack them. He's been very, very badly damaged by the Mandelson affair. you would have thought that at this point in time, the Labour Party would be coming together,

telling themselves this is the moment to get rid of this appalling leader and bringing a new leader. And it was we do have the May local elections, which Labour now looks certain to face a wipeout in. Again, you would have thought that they would bring in a new leader to take charge, to try to hold back the reform and green tide in these local elections to save whoever can be saved. But at the moment, I have to say this, the Labour Party still seems to be unable to get its act together. The reason is that there is no convincing candidate to take over. The one person who is in the best political position to take over is Angela Rainer, Stama's former deputy, who was sacked a few months ago.

The problem with her is that she still has this issue of an big unpaid tax bill and an investigation that's been conducted by the Inland Revenue. And until that's sorted out, she's not really in a position to make a pitch for the leadership. So the Labour continues, the government continues, without any real energy or politics behind it. It just ambles on from day to day, bleeding support, unable to govern the country. even as everything around it falls apart. The one thing, and we've discussed this many times, that they all remain committed to, the one thing that unites them, and the one thing, by the way, they share with the Greens,

is a commitment to Project Ukraine, which they're going to continue to shovel money at. Everyone is committed to Project Ukraine, I guess, in the UK establishment. Yes, yes. I mean, even reform. Yeah, reform, absolutely. I think to say about reform. I mean, reform, in my opinion, as I said, underperformed in this seat. And, I mean, there are some things.

I mean, there is some evidence and some complaints. And this does need to be taken seriously that there was some electoral malpractice that there's been complaints, you know, some of the voting was not as it should be, something which is extraordinary in Britain, by the way, in Britain elections. have always been clean. Up to now, they have not been. Up to now, up to now, they have always been. This time, there are rumours that they have not been. It's not clear who was the beneficiary of this malpractice, if it happened. Some say it was the Labour Party. Others say that it was the Greens. I'm not going to get into a discussion of this. Farage says, by the way, for the record,

it was the Greens. But I think the real problem that reform has faced in this election is that they put up, as I said, a poor candidate. I mean, I'm not saying this person as a bad person. I'm saying it wasn't the right candidate for this seat. But they are starting to look increasingly like the Conservative Party. They have this flood of conservatives coming in. They're being given more and more top positions within reform.

it's starting to look like Conservative Party Mark 2. That means supporting project Ukraine, of course. And of course, it's also not going to play well in a place like this particular left-leaning, Labour voting, former Labour voting constituency. So just to summarize, the more things change in Britain, the more things change in Britain, the more they stay the same. We have a situation where the old establishment parties are collapsing, which tells you that the British people are fed up,

are angry with, or want to see the end of the British establishment. But what they're getting instead are to supposedly insurgent parties, the Reform Party and the Green Party. And the Reform Party looks like the Conservative Party, Mark II, and the Green Party, and I have to say this, looks to me increasingly like Blair's Party, also Mark II. They are not when you unpack them, when you go and look at the substance of what they stand for.

They're not really that different. The only thing that differentiates the Greens from Blair and the Labour Party that he used to lead, as far as I could see, is that he was pro-Israel and they are not. That's it. Right. But if they were to come to power, would that remain? Well, absolutely. I don't think it would.

I mean, from what I can tell, I mean, we would have a government, a green government, which would be very, very like in its attitudes, in its personalities, in the way it looks and feels, very much, in my opinion, like the new Labour government, that Blair formed in 1997. Are people going from Labour to the Greens in the way that they're going from the Conservatives to reform? Are we seeing the same thing, the same pattern? You're seeing exactly the same thing. But you are also seeing some movement, not some, are you seeking significant movement from Labor to reform? reform as well. In fact, what's happened is that Boris Johnson in 2019 broke through, he was

able to, because he was, you know, he campaigned as the Brexit prime minister, working class voters, English working class voters in Britain, in England, voted overwhelmingly for Brexit. And that caused them to switch for the first time in large numbers from Labour to. to Conservative. They don't believe in the conservatives anymore, those voters. So they are now going over to reform those voters that went, Labor, Conservative, Johnson Conservative, they're now going to reform. And other voters, working class voters who previously stuck with Labor, were still voting Labor in 2019, they're now also moving towards reform as well. Yeah. And. And, Okay, well, I guess we'll end the video there.

It just sounds like things are not going to be fixed by going with either of the two parties, reform or the Greens. It's not going to fix the problems that the UK has. Is it more of a protest vote, if anything else? Or is it a way for the UK voters to say, you know, I'm done with the two establishment parties. I don't have much choice, but I might as well vote for these guys, whether you're less. after, right? There is an overwhelming protest element in this, in the sense that they do want to signal that they're absolutely fed up with the two dominant, formerly dominant parties and with the entire UK establishment. But you must be careful about talking about protest votes,

because we've had many protest votes in British elections, in British electoral history, especially in by-elections. But when a protest vote happened, it tends to melt away in a general election and the voters who protest in the by-election then go back to their old parties. This time I don't think they are. What is happening is that political energy is migrating from the old establishment parties

to what I am going to call the new establishment parties. In other words, because reform and the Greens look different. and because they still to some extent sound different and because reform backs Brexit, by the way, I should say the Greens are fervently opposed to Brexit, because Reform backs Brexit and the Greens still manage to package themselves as, you know, the left party, very left, as I said, on all the identity issues that we've talked about. and, you know, they're ecological, they're socialists.

I mean, they talk about that too, some of them. So because of all of that, they're winning over the younger voters, broadly pro-EU voters, by the way, the younger left-wing, middle-class, university-educated voters who used to vote Labor. but they are probably their probable permanent home now is the Greens, just as working class voters, probably their permanent home is reform. But the policies we're going to get from these two parties after the election, when they imagine the dominant parties,

are not going to be so different than the policies we see today. And in the meantime, prison continues to decline. Interesting how it's always a two-party system in the UK. It seems to always move towards two parties. Yes. Even though you have a lot of parties in the election, the voters gravitate towards two parties. They tend to, and people always blame the electoral system for this, but I don't really think that's the full explanation. It is the nature of British politics.

Now, Starrman, as I said, to just come back briefly to him, I mean, he was already hold under the water line after the Mandelson scandal. And I mean, he was already, obviously that he was going to lose his position as Prime Minister sometime already by the second half of last year. It's only a question of time when he goes. So he will go. But whoever takes his place, he's going to be pretty much the same. he was, maybe not quite as, you know, lacking in personality and robotic as Starma is.

But, you know, on all of the major issues, he's going to be exactly the same. You know, I'm reading all the time in some parts of the news media here in Britain about how one Starma goes. Labor is going to move further to the left, but it's already a left-week government. I think all of this is nonsense, actually. I think whoever takes over from Starma will be exactly like Starma. That's my own personal view, at least in policy terms. Yeah, why would they be any different?

Why would they be any different? All right. Doesn't sound like the Greens are any different. It doesn't sound like reform is any different. None of them are different from any of them. They're all the same. It's all the same club. It's all the same party.

Farage, when he was focused on one issue at a time, time was different. Then he did present a genuine alternative. But his strength always, as we said many times, was as an oppositionist. Now he wants to be prime minister. So he's drifting back towards the establishment. If you want me, and I do understand this. If you want me to say this, if you want me to say who in Britain at the moment is making a significant critique of where we are and is coming up with new ideas and is pointing at the problems within the way in which the British state is organised and how it works. Well, Dominic Cummings, who is a significant figure, and is trying to create a new politics. And I have to say, there's people like Dr. Parvini, who we've spoken to

in the past, you will find people like him. They're coming up with new ideas. And eventually, and in time, these might come to center stage. But at the moment, as I said before, the more things change, the more they remain the same. All right. All right. We will end the video there, I guess. The durand.com.

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