In this episode of Brokernomics, the lads are joined by Dr. Nima Parvini to talk about all things Star Wars and politics, including the return of the M. Bison chic and the Tony Blair/Angela Rayner conspiracy theory.
00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to Brokernomics. Now, I do believe I have probably reached the age where I can be a grumpy old man and just sort of sit and talk about something.
00:00:07.440And that also applies to my very special guest, Dr. Nima Parvini. Thank you very much for coming in.
00:02:45.080One of those things popped up on Twitter and it was Angela Rayner was apparently making the rounds that she would make a credible left wing alternative to Keir Starmer.
00:09:33.040Now, the fact that Blair is personally intervening and cultivating this relationship with Rainer shows to me that he has spotted a little node, if possible, a little node that may escape his control.
00:09:49.680So, if they can get Rainer onto the Blairite side, it basically means she represents the unions.
00:09:57.540And so, it means that the unions are not going to be a threat to the Blair faction.
00:10:03.160And this is important because a lot of the stuff that the Blairites want to do and the Star Wars do is going to be pretty unpopular with the unions.
00:10:50.560And I mean, the basic idea, I think, is that Starmer is in there to do a job and to be able to face down all of those elements in Labour or on the left that are going to kick up a fuss.
00:11:04.680Now, if it was a Tory prime minister, there'd probably be riots on the street.
00:11:10.740Because as a Labour prime minister, it's going to be harder because the left have got nowhere to go.
00:12:42.760And he had Sue Gray there telling him, look, I'm going to try out all these things.
00:12:47.060And I think what's happened basically is that with Southport and with the farmer protests and the fuel allowance and the 16% approval rating they had at one point,
00:12:58.360which is astonishingly bad for a new prime minister and the more recently, the council elections where reform won 600 seats plus, 600 councillor seats.
00:13:12.160With all of those things, they're saying, right, the Blairites will be saying, look, you're not listening to us and it's going wrong.
00:13:18.380You're not listening to us and it's going wrong.
00:13:20.020The more you listen to these leftists, the more it goes wrong.
00:13:23.260And every single time it happens, they gain more power within the party and also they gain power to say the base things and do the base stuff.
00:13:35.620Because on one hand, I can't help but think that if you're actually in government, you are always constrained by your limited bandwidth, just responding to things.
00:13:43.780And Blair has an enormous organisation of people who just sit and plan.
00:13:51.940You can't trust the civil service to do it.
00:13:54.500And therefore, really, the only people who can do it is Tony Blair.
00:13:57.980So that means you can either accept the wisdom and agenda of Tony Blair and look, you get all these roadmaps, detailed, sophisticated roadmaps laid out for you.
00:14:13.960And the thing is, it's not just Tony Blair Institute is now the biggest by a mile in terms of employees and the size of the biggest think tank in the world.
00:14:23.740I mean, it's certainly the biggest one in Britain.
00:14:38.240There will be other think tanks and other people writing these white papers, coming up with these plans.
00:14:46.980But of course, there's a competition there.
00:14:49.740And what Blair is really doing, is very good at doing, one, because he's Tony Blair, but two, because that network he's built has got so many influential people and powerful people in it.
00:15:00.260They get their plan there first, they get their plan, in fact, ahead of the, you know, I always remember a conference that Blair put on that went on two weeks or three weeks before Davos.
00:15:16.080And it was remarkable to watch it because it was like, we're going to set the agenda at Davos.
00:15:31.040Then in three weeks time, this is what we're going to be taking to Davos.
00:15:34.620And I just thought it was very interesting that they do the agenda setting before, like, it's like a one stage prior to all of these ones that people would have heard of, like Davos.
00:15:46.660And they do the same thing with the government.
00:15:48.400They announce their, they print their plans and, you know, say what the agenda is.
00:15:53.160And then within six months, oh, now it's the government policy.
00:16:34.960But I'm not sure which of those two is necessarily more powerful.
00:16:39.920Well, I honestly think that our best bet is to work almost in symbiosis and with an awareness of the structure.
00:16:47.480So if you think at the moment, Blair and Friends, even though everything they're doing is to maintain their power for pure Machiavellian reasons,
00:16:58.680even if in their heart of hearts, they don't care about immigration, et cetera, et cetera, they're still saying and doing stuff about it.
00:17:09.040So I think that we, on our side of things, need to get into a mindset where we don't really care about who or why or how they're going about these things.
00:17:22.580What we care about is that they are happening.
00:17:25.060Right, i.e., right, now today, that net immigration number came down by half.
00:17:35.960And we've got into a stage where you've got the left, you've got Labour crowing about a massive reduction in immigration as if it's a good thing.
00:17:47.560Right, now we don't need to control anything because the tempo of the discourse has already been set.
00:17:54.720I like that because that is levelling up politics because the naive way that most people never get out of their entire life is I'm going to support a team,
00:18:04.060like a football club or a political party, and I'm going to bet everything on them winning the trophy.
00:18:10.900And then once I win the trophy, all my problems will be solved.
00:18:14.900Whereas in reality, well, okay, maybe sometimes you win the trophy, but once you have won the trophy,
00:19:17.040But there's such a disconnect between people's lives and their lived experience and, you know, the sorts of concerns, woke and all this stuff that they've been pushing, that they've kind of, at least for the time being, they've lost on that front.
00:21:15.600Then that would be good because it would give, it would zero seats Labour next time there was an election because the ultimate aim of zero seats was to break the two-party system.
00:21:27.680Ideally killing the Tories, but if Labour had to die too, fine.
00:21:31.340Or the alternative scenario was they actually, because they are totally the government with an absolute majority, they have to actually think like an actual government with total accountability for the nation, OK?
00:21:48.420Which means that they actually then start to do things to fix the problem, which sounds crazy.
00:21:56.460But those are the incentives if you're actually thinking like a government as opposed to a political party.
00:22:04.920And this is where my interest in Blair is, you know, become quite intense is because in his book, in his power book that he brought up.
00:22:17.300And in all of his interviews, he has talked directly about this.
00:22:21.040He is talking about power in the same way Machiavelli would or in the same way any of the elite theorists would, i.e. it doesn't, party politics is less important than the actual ABCs of governance and power.
00:22:36.380And because they're thinking like that, I always thought that Labour would be more likely to actually do something to fix the problem.
00:22:46.180And, yeah, they had a disastrous start, which made me look stupid, which I didn't like.
00:22:51.700But now it seems like they're course correcting.
00:22:54.920They're saying stuff down there that has blown me away.
00:22:58.460Not just the Islands of Strangers speech.
00:23:02.360You know, Angela Rayner coming out and saying we have to cut any benefits to migrants.
00:23:54.340Because Labour is comfortably the most right-wing party in the country today.
00:23:58.920I mean, obviously more so than Conservatives, who I maintain are the most left-wing party, apart from possibly the Socialist Workers' Party.
00:24:06.120But I'm not entirely sure because I don't...
00:24:08.120It gets to be seen how many millions of third worlders the Socialist Workers' Party would bring in.
00:24:14.380I think they're probably to the right of reform at this point because Nigel Farage has made it very clear, you know, no one's ever going back.
00:24:22.500You know, he's just going to bring in a system where it's one in, one out.
00:24:25.900You know, every time a British person gives up, you can have another Pakistani.
00:24:28.440So Labour's the most right-wing party, but doesn't that just invite the emergence of a reform on the left?
00:24:40.200I mean, Jeremy Corbyn has said that he's going to set up a new left-wing party, which is a little bit annoying.
00:24:48.780But really what should happen is it should realign the incentives for reform and the Tories.
00:24:57.880Now, they're still taking a while to catch up and they're being slow, if you ask me.
00:25:04.480But what reform and the Tories should both be doing is figuring out how to get properly back to Labour's right.
00:25:13.440Right. And you see, I mean, I said this before.
00:25:18.860I mean, again, I don't really want to give the Tory strategy or reform strategy because if you ask me, they're a waste of space, personally.
00:25:26.640I believe that Labour will actually be more effective, as I've gone on record and say.
00:25:32.940But if I was to give them advice, it'd be basically try to goad Starmer into calling you racist.
00:25:39.540Right. What reform should be doing is going hard right now while the paradigm shift has been signalled by Starmer.
00:25:51.160So rather than allowing Labour to flank them to the right, which they are doing right now, they should be seeing how much further they can push the boat in order to basically make where Labour is now the new centre, i.e.
00:26:12.900or maybe even to the, maybe even the new left.
00:26:16.520So that means that any pro-immigration voices are outside of the acceptable discourse.
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