The Duran Podcast - UK Starmer tries to TAX his way out of decline

Episode Date: November 30, 2025

UK Starmer tries to TAX his way out of decline

All right, Alexander, let's talk about what is going on in the UK. Let's talk about the UK economy. And you have been traveling through Scotland. You are actually in Edinburgh. So you have a lot to say about your impressions of Scotland and perhaps the economy in the UK from an on-the-ground perspective, I guess you could say. So what are your thoughts? indeed, and I'll touch on that first because obviously London, which is itself starting to look like it's sagging, and that's an understatement. It has been, it's been looking increasingly

depressed for some time, but it remains far and away the richest region in the UK. So I was interested to see what things were like when you travel outside London. And actually, the signs of economic distress and economic stagnation are everywhere. And my conclusion is that the railway system in particular, which is important in Britain, is really in the process of breaking down. You're quite right. I was in Scotland. I travelled there by train, which is the way most people do.

If they go from London to Scotland, they usually travel by train. A few people drive there. Well, it was hell on wheels, is all I will say. I mean, there was problems on the tracks. The train was stopped at one town. We were all taken out of the train. We had to travel to another town to take another train and then we had to go from that town to a third town to take still another train to get to Scotland. It added hours to our journey. It was just, it was awful. And I was talking to passengers on the train, and I was talking to people in Scotland itself, in Edinburgh, where I was, and they tell me this is absolutely standard. Now, this goes on all the time that, you know,

the railway system connecting London with Edinburgh, which used to run extremely well, and there was a reason why it ran well, which I'll explain in the moment, but that is starting to break down. And there are, I should say, two railway lines. that go from London to Scotland. One follows the West Coast, and it's always been considered to be rather less efficient than the East Coast, one which follows the East Coast. But it seems that they're both now experiencing more and more problems.

And the reason the railway lines used to be very good was because a lot of wealthy people in London have houses and estates in Scotland, and the way they used to go to Scotland, which they used to take the sleeper trains or the other trains, to Edinburgh or to Aberdeen, and they used to go from there to their houses, their country houses, and their places in Scotland. So for that reason, these particular railway lines always used to be particularly well looked after. Well, that is no longer the case, as I said. It was awful. The train journey, especially the one to Edinburgh, was awful. There were problems with the one coming back from Edinburgh as well. And by the way, I

used both tracks on both of these lines. And when I was in Scotland and when I was passing through, you could increasingly see signs of distress there as well. Again, Edinburgh is not perhaps entirely reflective of the whole of Scotland, because Edinburgh is the capital, it's richer, but again, you could see lots of signs of economic distress as well. So overall, again, a picture of a country that is locked at best in stagnation. I would say it's much worse than stagnation myself. I would say it's spiraling downwards. Now, the government, Kirst Starmer's government, has now unveiled its budget.

And this increased taxes by 26 billion pounds, which right in the United States, that might not sound a huge amount. In Britain, it is a huge amount. That means that the total tax burden people are, in Britain, are now paying, is the highest ever. I mean, there's never been a time when the tax burden has been as high as this. So it is a huge increase in the tax burden. And it's basically all being done to plug holes in the budget. In other words, the fact is that Britain has not been raising taxes, enough in taxes, to meet all of its financial obligations.

And the reason it's doing that, I mean, there are many reasons we'll talk about some of them, but basically the major reason is because the economy is in decline and because the Starma government is finding it impossible to cut spending. And of course, in a time of recession, spending anyway tends to grow. The budget deficit is yawning wider and wider, so they've had to raise taxes. And of course, the taxes are going to make the recession. pressures in the economy even greater. And what the government is doing is it's taxing people by in effect raising income tax and the

major taxes, in other words, and that is going to depress economic activity even further. So it's locking Britain, this budget is going to lock Britain into further decline. We did a program some time ago in which we spoke about the country spiraling downwards. And you can see it if you travel here and the budget reflects that. What Stama and his finance minister, Rachel Reeves, gave no indication of having is any plan of how to get Britain out of this situation. They're just basically surviving now from one week to the next. They're always frightened of what the financial markets might do. They don't want a massive crash of the currency, a huge amount of panic, a financial panic or anything of that kind.

So they're just letting the economy slide downwards whilst raising taxes in order to keep the financial markets at bay. Right. To plug up holes from the money they've given to Project Ukraine, and to plug up holes from the sanctions that they've gone along with the rest of Europe against Russia, against Russian energy. Yes. Those are the big holes. Yes. You're completely correct.

But of course, nobody says that. There might be other ones too. I mean, there are lots. Maybe I'm simplifying it a lot, but. There are lots of things. I mean, if we go all the way back to the financial crisis of 2008, as we know, Britain, like every other big Western country, bailed out its banks, and that massively increased the debt levels. I mean, they doubled from around 36% to over 70%, the debt to GDP level.

And that was the biggest increase in debt. And then it's also true that we had COVID and all of that, the lockdowns and that added to all the problems. and we also now have an exploding welfare bill. But again, people always talk about welfare, but what people also need to understand is, yes, there are people who go on welfare because they want to or because they think this is the way to, you know, this is an easier life than others.

But one of the reasons welfare budgets tend to explode is because the underlying economy is poor. And that means that there's less, people, there's pure openings of people to work and they fall into the welfare system. There is a lot of that also going on. And then there's, of course, migration. And the government has completely mismanaged that one as well, because they are completely unable to get a grip on this problem because, of course, they run always into opposition from, you know, the various electoral constituencies that still support them or suggest that they might support them.

And they can't handle that one either. So, and then, of course, there is project Ukraine. Give money to Ukraine, five billion pounds a year, supposedly. I believe it's an awful lot more than that. You have the highest energy costs in Europe. Some of that is due to the government pushing the green transition as has happened in Germany. But more of it is because we're not, we're disrupting global energy markets by our sanctions, our economic war against the world's biggest single energy producer, which is, of course, Russia.

So all of this, all of these things, this is the proximate cause. for the economic downturn. There were the other things, the financial crisis of 2008, the pandemic, other things. But the proximate cause, why things have turned down with

so suddenly, so fast, over the last four years, is the war in Ukraine. But no one, no one wants to discuss that, talk about everything else but never talk about that.

Is it true that the UK public is very supportive of Ukraine? I was reading a poll the other day, which claims that the UK public is still very supportive of Ukraine and they're very concerned about negotiations with the US and Russia. Yes, I'm sure that that is what the polls say, because nobody in Britain hears any alternative. argument. There are a few sites like ours which push back on this, but the entire media supports the war. All of the political parties, including reform, support the war. Nigel Farage

briefly pushed back against it, which he was basically forced back into line. So it's not as if people in Britain are being provided with any alternative view on this. It's not like, say, Iraq back in 2002, 2003 when there were powerful political figures in Whitehall in Westminster, who argued against Iraq and there was dissent about it in the media. The entire political class has closed ranks completely on this one. And beyond that, obviously, the costs of the war are never being explained to people. Nobody, as I said, knows that we, in the middle of a budgetary crisis, we transfer huge sums to Ukraine. Nobody makes the leak between high energy costs in Britain and the war itself.

I mean, these things are never discussed in Britain in that way. So, of course, if you ask people in Britain, given that they have no other sources of information or news, partly, you know, there's few who go on to the internet and take their views from there. But if you go to people and ask them, do you support Ukraine? They say, yes. If you ask them, do you, are you hostile to negotiations with Russia? They say yes.

But what the polls never indicate is that for people in Britain, this is a very low priority indeed. They may say, you know, they may say, you know, we support Ukraine. We want, we want, we don't want negotiations. We want more support for Ukraine. But it's not something that if you knock on the door and you, you, it's, you know, it's, during a campaign as people do from the political parties and ask them, will you vote for me? People will never say to those people, those, the campaigners, yes, provided you support Ukraine. They will say, no, I will vote for you if you can reassure me that you will provide me with housing, jobs,

do things to bring prices under control and energy costs. kind of things. Those are the things that really interest people in Britain. What does the UK do to get out of this mess, this spiral? Well, does it take the route of Mertz and Macaron actually? Both are taking the route of militarization in order to get out of the economic troubles that they have put their countries in? Is that the plan from Stommer? Well, there's a lot of talk about that, and there's a lot of talk about, you know, rebuilding the armed forces and all of this.

But bear in mind that, you know, this isn't working in Germany, and Germany has an industrial base, the one that is shrinking very fast. Britain's industrial base is much smaller, and because of the energy costs, it's shrinking, what there is of it, is shrinking even faster than Germany's. So how do you do this? How do you spend money on defense when you have a budgetary crisis? And who is going to turn out all the tanks and drones and machines that you would need to wage a war? So the rhetoric is there, but there's no practical way of doing any of this. So militarization is not really any kind of option. How does Britain get out of this? Well, I think that, first of all, you do need a complete change in the political system. I mean, nothing can work. There's no way out whilst we are stuck with the political system that we have. Perhaps if reform were to win with a landslide, that would open up the scope for debate. We would have people rethinking Ukraine and rethinking all of that.

And then we could start thinking about other things. But the way that Britain gets out of this is by doing those things in which Britain is strong. And that is by opening itself up for business to the world, which is what it used to do. In other words, provide all the financial and banking services and all of those things, attract input investment, provide specialized. specialized industrial and manufacturing skills, which we still have, by the way, quite a lot in Britain. I mean, we still lead us, for example, in the audio industries and things of that kind, build up on the still strong university system,

which is also sagging, by the way, and which is whittling away, but there's still residual strengths there. What that means, of course, is doing away with sanctions, opposing sanctions, trading with the world, opening up to Russia, opening up to India and China and everywhere, and taking a completely different change, of course. And also, and I have to say this, focusing on people in Britain, not trying to deal with your labour issues by importing cheap workers. that ought to be one obvious thing, but also education, focusing on education, education system is in decline, addressing that, and carrying out a root and branch reform of the entire administrative system in Britain, which is in a profound state of decay. Now, all of that sounds enormously difficult. In fact, some would say insurmountably difficult. But actually, because we are a relatively contained country, if you had a government that was united and determined to do all of this,

I think it could be done. It would take about five to ten years to actually, you know, really carry through the complete transformation. But it could be done. But it could be done. And again, because we are relatively small, people would notice a difference fairly quickly. There would be a re-energizing of the country and a return of confidence. But of course, to repeat again, with our current political class whose priorities are completely different, whose priorities are Ukraine, preserving Britain's position as they think as a major power in the world, In other words, looking outside Britain rather than Britain itself, we're not going to achieve any of those things. It could be done, but will it be done by the current political class or even the up-and-coming political elite.

Well, indeed. Well, indeed. I don't see it. You know better, but I don't see anyone on the horizon. There is no one on the horizon. I mean, what we need, I mean, can I just say quickly at the end? I mean, we need, first of all, the established parties, Labor, conservative, by the way, the liberal party is just the same. I mean, you know, we need to sweep them away.

Reform has many people in it. Some of them are not very different from the people of the political class now, but there are other people. And if it breaks through, as I said, that might start opening up the, window and it might start to let light and air in. And then, then perhaps, things might start to happen. All right. We will end the video there, the durand. Dotlocals.com. We are on X on Telegram and on Rumble. We are also on substack. So check us out there and go to the Duran shop. Pickups of merch. There's a link in the description box down below. Take care.