The Duran Podcast - UK political bankruptcy. Labour Starmer Coup

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

UK political bankruptcy. Labour Starmer Coup

All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation unfolding in the UK. The Kier-Stommer administration, Ten Downing Street, is saying that there is a coup against them being plotted by West Streeting, right? And Ten Downing Street is in bunker mode now, though. No one really is quite sure what that means. They're in bunker mode. But anyway, Kier-Stomber is in. bunker mode, there's a coup going on, and it's one of Labor's own. So what's the situation

in the UK? Well, if you've been following our programs over the last year, you would be completely unsurprised by all of this, because we've been predicting that Starma was in big, big trouble. We've been saying in program after program, I was unsure at one point whether he would even be Prime Minister by Christmas. And now the talk is, that he'll be gone by May. First important thing to say about this whole story, you won't understand it unless you understand one very simple thing. What is felling Starmer is the Olensky curse. He came out, he hugged Elensky many, many times. He prioritized Zelensky, Ukraine, over everything else in the UK. We have a major,

a budget crisis in the UK. If people tell you that this is unrelated to Britain's support for Ukraine, then, well, don't believe them because that is fundamentally wrong. Stama has never really been focused on dealing with the underlying serious, structural, economic and governmental problems in Britain. He's always been focused on foreign policy, and that means that he's been focused on Ukraine. And the result is that support for him has drained away. Because even his own party, but people also beyond the party, can see that this is somebody who's not detached from the actual real business of politics. They've been calling him for some time now, never hear care. And well, with one failure after another, was this, with this a non-year,

enormous budget crisis now over the horizon with a sense that the economy is going downhill and that Stama seems both unable and ultimately uninterested in turning it round. It was inevitable that his popularity such as it was would drain away and he's now the most unpopular Prime Minister in British polling history. more unpopular than Liz Truss was. And that gives you some idea of how unpopular he is. He's now the most unpopular prime minister in British polling history. The Labour Party is, I think, the most unpopular governing party in British electoral history.

People have put it at 15, 16%. A governing party would be in trouble if it was below. most 35% in Britain. It's at 16%. So inevitably, people in the, in Parliament, the Labour Party in Parliament are becoming restless and worried and angry and they've been starting to complain. The ministers have been worried and angry and starting to complain and they're increasingly saying to each other, well, if there's any chance of saving the situation, saving our seats, keeping this show of this absolutely broken Labor government on the road, then we have to start thinking about a new leader, a new prime minister. It was bound to happen sooner or later.

Now, what has triggered this one is that we have a major budgetary crisis. We've discussed that in many programs. The finance minister, Rachel Reeves, gave a speech. last week, in which it was quite obvious that the government is now looking at raising general taxes. They won the election last year with a categorical promise that they would not raise general taxes. So they're about to break that promise. People in the party are saying, if we do that, we're finished. People will never trust us on anything. And that's creating a mood of crisis. And some full within Stama's team, probably Stama himself, said, well, we've got to get ahead of this somehow.

The budget is going to mean that Stama is going to lose support within the Labour Party even more. So we've got to go out and say, look, Starma is here, he's going to remain prime minister. Yes, there's plots and conspiracies growing up all around him. We've got to make clear now that if there are these plots, he will see them off. He will remain prime minister. He will defeat West Streeting, who's most likely the person at the center of all of these plots. And, of course, all that they manage to do by, that is that they brought the fact that there are these plots and conspiracies right out into

the open, undermining Stama's position even further, and causing all of the ministers who were accused of engaging in these plots, giving them an excuse to come out and say, plot, me, of course not. It's entirely the bad people around Stama, his entire team, and his entire team in the government and they all need to be sacked, which of course, as everybody knows, would undermine and weaken Stama even further. So a bad, a catastrophically bad political operation, a bad economic and social operation on the part of the government overall. But ultimately, it's because this Prime Minister and this government and the entire British political class have completely the wrong priorities.

The priorities have been project Ukraine and they've sacrificed Britain's economic health and its political stability to that objective. How is he even still in government as Prime Minister Kirstama with that approval rating? I mean, that's amazing that he's at 10% or 15%. I don't think he's at 15%. It's more of like 10%. Probably lower than 10%. Absolutely.

Yeah. How is it that labor just doesn't go to Kirstammer and say, look, man, you're at 10%. You have to go. Yeah. I mean, what's he going to argue? No, I'm not going to go. I'm popular. The people want me to remain in office.

No. So, I mean, I'm trying to understand where is the scan? here. How come the party just doesn't tell him, no one likes you? No one. No one likes labor either, but I mean, no one likes you and what you've done to labor, so you have to go. Well, he doesn't have an argument. Does Kirstammer does not have any argument against that? Well, actually, he has made an argument, and it's exactly the argument he've just made. He says, uh, trust me, I've got it all under control. I won the election. I am the big election winner, I gave us this huge majority. I have my purpose and my mission and I'm going to stay

and I'm going to see it through. And if you try and remove me, I am going to fight and fight and I will hang on. And at the worst, if you try this, you create an appearance of division in the party and instability in the government. And my good friend Donald Trump will be absolutely. Believe it or not, he said that. He's actually said that. He said, my good friend Donald Trump will be upset if I go. And the markets won't be happy either. I mean, that gives you a sense of how utterly delusional this whole thing has become now. But that is what Stama, believe it or not, is saying. It is delusional. And the media, even the part of the media that supports the Labor Party, even the Guardian is basically saying,

that he's a bankrupt force and he's got to go. It's not a question of if, it's just a question of when. And this latest, as I said, political maneuver that he's just engaged in has brought that moment much, much closer. Why the Labour Party doesn't do that is very simple, because they have no one remotely convincing to put in his place. At West Streeting, Arch Blairite, very fluent, comes across well on television with people with neoliberal, neocon and playwright

views, who must be said, make up the political class. The country as a whole doesn't like him. He almost lost his seat in the election. The same election was Starma won with a landslide, but West Streeting almost lost his seat. So no reason to think that he's going to change or improve the situation in any way. He's completely without ideas about how to turn anything round. And the same is true of all the others. People talk about Ed Miliband, Angela Rainer again. You remember she was the deputy leader who had to stand down a short while ago.

People talk about all of these people. But none of them, none of them want to break with the British political class consensus, which is about prioritising Ukraine. And until that ends, and people start talking about the realities of the problems that people in Britain are facing every day, there's no reason to think that changing the furniture, moving and rearranging the furniture, the jet chairs on the Titanic are going to prevent the ship from sinking. Now that's the problem they all face. So they haven't up to now been able to crystallize around an alternative.

And until they do, this story will carry on for a few more days and weeks. But only a few more days or weeks, perhaps beyond the new year and Christmas. But everybody now, everybody can see that Kirstama is sunk. I mean, he's hold under the waterline. Nobody believes it, even the media in Britain all agree that this ship is sinking. Has anyone made the connection about UK's economy, the deficit that they have, the hole that they have in their budget? Has anyone connected that to Ukraine? The inflation, the rising prices. I mean, it's all, it all goes back to Ukraine, or most of it goes back to Ukraine, of what? Kirstama continues to want to send money to. He says money to Ukraine, and he wants to continue to send money to Ukraine. Well, at the same time, his government has huge holes in the budget. We're saying it. We're saying it. Is anyone else making that – does anyone else dare, dare to bring that up?

That's it. I know for a fact that in private it's talked about all the time. I mean, when people talk about never hear care. I mean, that is a way of signaling that they're unhappy about this. But nobody, nobody in the political system has the courage to come out and say it straightforwardly. Nigel Farage doesn't say it. Zach Polansky, the Ugreen Party leader. Far from saying, on the contrary, thinks, as far as I can tell, that Ukraine should be supported even more.

I mean, it's unreal, but that's my own. understanding of it. The conservatives, of course, don't say it. The liberals don't say it. Nobody in the political system says it. To the extent that there is public dissent from this policy, it's a tiny number of people on the left, but not Corbyn. I mean, Corbyn doesn't say it. Tiny number of people on the left and a few more people, a significantly larger group of people on the right I mean, you'll find views like that expressed, for example, on G.B. News, which is, you know, right-wing conservative broadcaster, they say it. You will find people there who will say it and who think it. But generally, this isn't part of the big political conversation. Even on social media, remarkably,

It's said very little. Does anyone ask the question, what do we get out of all this money going to Ukraine? I mean, okay, so Zelensky is getting tens of billions, hundreds of billions, right? Tens of billions from the UK, or not. I think they poured something like 20 or 30 billion into Ukraine. That's a rough, rough estimate, a rough guess, but I think it's something along those lines, maybe more. What does the UK gotten out of this? inflation, a sagging economists and a budgetary crisis.

Inflation for sure, because of the rising prices, which they don't connect to the sanctions on Russia. They refuse to bring that up. They've got this huge hole in the budget. What have they gotten out of this? Their military's been depleted, demilitarized. I cannot myself see that Britain has got anything out of this. I mean, I suppose what it has done is it's given various British politicians and quite a lot of British journalists an opportunity to sit on, you know, metaphorical soapboxes and pontificate and play Churchill.

But that's all I can see. If you're talking about the welfare of the British people. Yeah, how does that filter down to the British people? And the future of Britain. It's achieved nothing at all. Of course, there is one group of people who see this policy over Ukraine as a way to draw Britain back closer into the EU, to the EU system. They say that, you know, this is re-established British, Britain's reputation in Europe. It means that conversations with Ursula von der Leyen and people like that are now friendly web before they were tense.

And it brings us closer to the EU. And remember, for these people, that is an obsessive priority. I mean, they want ultimately to get Britain into the EU. But if you're asking objectively what it has done for, Britain, I could say nothing but harm. Just brought them closer to Ursula van der Leyen. Bravo. Exactly.

Bravo. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. Anyway, anything else you want to add? Yeah, I, I, we are now in that moment of crisis when, I mean, there really is not going back for Stama. And I have to say, this talk again of him holding things together.

until May, my own senses that when you start talking about plots and conspiracies and coups, that is, when talk like that starts, it's going to snowball. And I think again that there's a really good chance that he'll be gone by Christmas, at which point I would say good riddance, though I would not lay out the red carpet where With snap elections or with new leadership? They're not going to think about elections. I mean, if they brought elections about now, they'd be hammered. They will cling on as long as they can.

Their opinion poll positions will sag and continue to fall. We're going to have the whole story that we had with the previous government of replacing one prime minister with another prime minister because nobody can work out anything until fatalism basically clocks in, and they just wait for the electoral meltdown, which they know is going to come. But they will cling on for as long as they can, and the government will decay, and I'm sorry to put it like this about my own country, but people in government are going to be looking at jobs outside, and they'll be looking at how to make money, and how to leverage the positions they have to get themselves into cushy jobs later, and some of them will become effectively lobbyists,

and we're going to see all of that evolve and escalate and grow over the next three years. And that's the sad reality that Britain faces now. All right, we will end the video there, the durand.orgas.com. We are on Rumblex Telegram and also on Substack as well. So check us out on Substack. The link is in the description box down below. Take care.