The Duran Podcast - UK political revolution. Australia elections mirror UK trajectory

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

UK political revolution. Australia elections mirror UK trajectory

All right, Alexander, let's talk about some elections that took place over the last couple of days. We had the UK local elections. They're local. That's what they're called, right? Local elections. Okay. So we had the UK local elections. And wow, what a result.

We had the elections in Australia. We also had the first round of elections in Romania, which we'll talk about in a different video. We'll get into that. It was the first round. Either way, it was the first round. And everyone knows the results of those elections. Simeon, he came out on top of 40%. So we're going to wait for the second round as well.

But that definitely has shaken the European Union, the results in Romania, given that the person that came out on top has aligned himself with Gorgiascu. So that's got to make NATO and the European Union nervous. But let's focus in on the UK. local elections and the Australian elections, which before we recorded this video, you said the elections in Australia are as if you were looking at the UK elections from five years ago or 10 years ago. That's kind of the result of what happened to Australia is akin to what happened in the UK

five years back or 10 years back. So I guess we could see the direction that Australia is heading in. given the results of what we saw in the UK the past couple of days. Correct. It is impossible to overstate the importance and significance of what happened in the UK last week. This is a political revolution. Now, let's first deal with some raw figures and understand what the elections was. These were elections for local councils across England.

England, at some extent, Wales. They were not across the whole of the UK. They were for local governments. And there was also a parliamentary by-election. A British Parliament MP, a Labour MP, had to resign after he got into a brawl with one of his voters and beat him up, basically. And the result was he was forced to resign. That meant that there was a parliamentary election.

election, by-election, to fill that vacant seat in a place called Runcourt. Now, this Runcorn is a rock-solid Labour seat, or historically has been, always has been. As far as I can remember, the Labour Party in the last election, which happened all of 10 months ago, 1,52% of the vote there. So, you know, rock-solid, old Labour seat, impossible to imagine any other party. party, but the Labour Party winning. Now, what happened across England in these local elections is that the government, the Labour government, lost pretty much everywhere. I mean, it held on in one or two places, but very unconvincingly, and mostly because local, local candidates who were standing for re-election, started to criticise the

government and the Prime Minister, Kirste Stama himself. I mean, there was a mayoral election in a town called Doncaster, for example. And the local, the winner there, who was a Labour person, has been very, very critical of Kirstama and the Labour government in London. So across the UK, in Labour held councils, Labor lost and lost badly. They lost also rung corn by just six votes, but they still lost. And this is, you know, extraordinary and one would certainly not expect such an outcome

so early in a parliament, as we call it in Britain, so soon after a general election, which the Labour Party won supposedly by a landslide. but what makes this election unique? I mean, we've had other situations where the government, the sitting government, the sitting party has done very badly, though rarely as badly as badly as this. But what makes this absolutely unique is that the official opposition, the Conservative Party, did, if possible, even worse. Now, we have never had that happen in British electoral history before. We've had situations where the government party has done disastrously, but the people who benefit mostly are the official opposition. This time, it is the entire political system that is in crisis.

Both wings of it, Labour and Conservative, have been massive. rejected. Now, the beneficiary, the party that is winning everywhere, it is winning in labour seats amongst working class labour voters, it is winning in conservative seats, affluent, rural areas where the conservatives were always successful. The party that is winning and breaking through, and breaking through in a very, very big way is reform. Reform UK led by Nigel Farage. There have been opinion polls, which have now been released since that election. They're not completely consistent, but basically what they show is labour on about 25, 24%, unbelievably low for a party that's recently won an election. Conservatives still falling since their

election defeat 10 months ago. Some put them at about 22%, 24%, for the first time, opinion polls are clearly showing Reform UK in the lead. Now, that is, as I said, revolutionary. Now, the closest parallel that people are drawing is with events that took place in the early 1980s. when a breakaway centrist faction from the Labour Party established what was called the Social Democratic Party, which then allied with the liberals. And for a short time, they were actually making winning elections and appeared to be polling as the most popular party. The point, however, about that party was that it was a party of the political class. It was completely establishment. Its primary purpose was to pull the Labour Party,

which at that time swung somewhat to the left, back towards the centre. This situation is completely different. This election is a repudiation of the political class right across the board. Both left and right, both conservative, and Labour. I say left and right, whether the Conservative and Labour parties today could be defined in those terms is another question. But this is a revolution. It is a bigger revolution than what happened in Britain of the 1920s when the Labour Party replaced the Liberal Party. Because at that time,

though one left-wing party, Labour Party, replaced another centre-left party, which was the the liberals, the conservatives remained stable. In fact, at that time, they were strong. This time, the conservatives are as weak as labor is. So it is an absolute crisis. It is a political crisis without any parallel that I can think of in modern British history. Does Kirstehmur and labor, do they care? Because he just seems completely focused on Ukraine. It seems like he didn't care at all about the results. Well, I don't think he understood them.

I don't think he does care about them, actually. I think he's completely lost at sea. You know, I think people who might have seen what he said after the election results came in. We'll have seen the Kirstama that I see every day. complacent, pleased with himself. He always comes across as very pleased with himself, unable to grapple with the realities at all.

And I think he still believes that he's a genius, that he's managed to put Reform UK on the back foot. And they're apparently now already preparing a major campaign against Farage on the basis that he is a puppet of, Vladimir Putin. I mean, they're going to try and churn that one out all over again. You know, you vote for Farage and you'll get Putin, that kind of. And where have you heard that one for?

So, I mean, you know, I don't think he does get it. I think there are some people in the Labour Party who get it. I don't know that many of them do, at least not in the leadership group or in the parliamentary party. because these people have become so separated from the true current feeling across the UK in Britain, amongst British people, amongst the British public, I do think they have that sense of contact with wider British society that the Labour Party one symphatically did have. I mean, once upon a time,

Labour Party anchored in the trade union movement, anchored in all kinds of societies and, you know, working men's clubs or whatever it was, they absolutely did have their finger on the pulse. The same was true, by the way, the Conservatives. I don't think they are like that anymore. I mean, you're talking about, you know, a group of apparatchiki

that basically get appointed to say, safe seats, go to Parliament, vote for the government, get promoted into cushy jobs after they leave. I don't think they have that real sense of the extent to which the country, the wider country, is turning against them. And I think they still believe that this is somehow going to, you know, this is a flash in the pan. There's going to be a swing in this direction to reform, but then it's all the pendulum is going to swing back again. I don't see that at all. I should quickly say that, of course, we have had situations where parties that Farage has led in the past have appeared to make electoral breakthroughs.

But this has always been, basically, if you look at it, in European Parliament elections when we were still part of the EU. The point is that nobody in Britain took European Parliament elections at all seriously because European MPs had no real effect on how people lived their lives in the UK. So people always felt you could vote for Brexit party or UKIP or whatever it was. And you know, you'd show how you feel, but it didn't really matter. When you vote for your council, you are voting for the people who will administer your you know, the locality where you live. So voting for Reform UK on the scale that has just happened

for local councils is, as I said, something that has never happened before on this scale in recent history. And it's important to say that control of local councils plays a very, very big role in British politics in creating the organisational base that parties need in order to break through and win elections for Parliament in Westminster. So this is a huge step in that direction. And there is, as I said, no modern precedent for it in British electoral history, None that I can think of. How important were these elections?

I mean, there were local elections, but how representative are they of where things may be heading with the next parliament elections when they do come? I've read analysis say they're super important. I've also read analysis saying that these elections are really not that important. They're being overstated. Where would you place that? They are not being overstated. They are very important indeed. To repeat again, and we were talking about the European.

Parliament elections in which, you know, say Reform UK got 80% of the vote in the European Parliament elections when we were still in the EU. It probably wasn't that important because you could argue convincingly that that was a protest vote. This is much more than just a protest vote. And clearly is, it's creating right across the UK, the building blocks for a new electoral political alignment. And at this point, anyway, where the government was so unpopular, you would expect the support to be coming, the support to be going to the official opposition, which is the Conservatives. but they look completely at sea, completely discredited. Nobody takes their leader, Akimmy Badenok, at all seriously. There doesn't at the same time seem to be any real concerted steps to replace her.

There isn't any clear idea of who should replace her. So people are already speaking. Even some Labour MPs are saying that come the next general election, it will be a battle between Labor and Reform UK that the Conservative Party is now fading from the picture. But of course, the Labour Party, as of now, does not look in good shape to take on Reform UK. Where is Australia heading with these recent elections? You had the Liberal Party. You had the Labor Party. In Australia, the Labor Party is considered.

Center left. The Liberal Party is considered center right. It's a bit confusing, actually, but the Liberal Party got completely hammered. They got completely hammered in Albanese. One re-election, you could say. He won re-election. is party won. And a lot of people are saying that the Australian elections are basically where the UK was many years ago. I think that's exactly correct. I think if you want me to make a direct comparison, it's most similar to the British general election of 2019, the one that Boris Johnson won, if you remember with a landslide, I mean, you know, almost was it, 80-seat majority that he came out of the election with.

And of course, what happened in that election is that the conservatives were able to frame the Labor opposition as being wobbly on Brexit, which they were, and led by a political extremist who was Jeremy Corbyn. And that made, produced a great show of power. It meant that lots of people came to the Conservative Party. They didn't particularly like the Conservative Party. Many people had their doubts about Boris Johnson and all of those things. But the They were not at that time prepared to experiment with more radical alternatives because there was still a lingering trust in the political class. There was enough still sense that the political class,

to which Boris Johnson was apart, somehow, you know, other people who can still govern, who can deliver Brexit, it. I say you go on and vote for a political class party, which is the Conservative Party. It's under new management. Theresa May is gone. Boris Johnson is there. So you still trust it. People have lost that trust in the UK today. They don't trust Conservative. They don't trust Labour. The same thing has played out in Australia as we saw in 2019, in the sense that, again, Albanese ran as the candidate still of the political class

you may not like me very much I may not be particularly popular you might not trust me but I still look like the safe pair of hands the person who can get the thing the job done and as for my opponents

well you know they're all in it's not Jeremy Corby this time it's Donald Trump who is indeed in Australia he's all the way in the United States but you know he these people are radical, they're dangerous, you can't possibly allow them into government. Who knows what terrible things they might do? And people hold their nose and vote for the Australian Labour Party and re-elect Albanese.

Except, of course, that Albanese is going to disappoint them. And eventually political trust will go away exactly as we have seen in person. And Australia, from what I understand, they do have actually a couple of parties that are outside of the establishment that are making significant progress. So there is light at the end of the tunnel for Australia if those parties can do what reform has managed to do in a way. That is exactly correct, because that was exactly what happened with Britain. I mean, you know, we had way back in 2019, we had the Brexit party in those days. But these parties, those parties were small. They weren't particularly well-organized.

They were still an emerging force, a work-in-progress, if you like. They hadn't come together in the way that Reform UK has just done in Britain. Today, Reform UK, as I said, looks like at least in England, a nationwide political force. It's going to attract more members. It's going to attract more donors, which obviously plays a role. And of course, it also now has local councils, which it could use as building rocks to create an electoral coalition. So, as I said, it is looking like a potential contender for power. All right, we will end the video there.

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