PREVIEW： Charting Our Political Future ｜ Interview with Academic Agent
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Summary
Dr Nima Parvini (AKA The Academic Agent) joins me for a chat about the current state of play on the political right, both domestically and internationally, and what we might be expecting to see in the future.
Transcript
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Hi folks, I'm joined by Dr Nima Parvini, otherwise known as the academic agent, who has decided to
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come in and join me for a chat about the current state of play on the political right, both
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domestically and internationally, and what we might be expecting to see in the future.
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It's a pleasure. Right, so what's your lay of the land at the moment? Because just for anyone
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who's watching this, Keir Starmer has just outflanked everyone to the right. He's somehow
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won over a lot of the kind of hard right Twitter folks with his, I think the most important
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part was when he said that immigration had been an unmitigated disaster in Britain, which
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condemns morally all of the people who had supported immigration up until this point.
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And it's had them running around like headless chickens. What are we going to do? Because
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our biggest champion up until this point has suddenly betrayed us all.
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Yeah, no, in fact, that speech by Starmer was notable, being not only a moral conduct, it
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was a thoroughgoing repudiation of the mass immigration experiment, as he described it.
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He didn't just say that it was creating, I mean, islands of strangers that had the headlines.
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He actually took away the economic argument, which has been very central. It's always been justified
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as the link between GDP and immigration and growth, those three things going together.
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And he took that head on. He also, I don't know if you caught this, in that speech, I got a kind of
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deep seated, almost loathing of libertarianism from Starmer, where he said basically, that,
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you know, we have a responsibility to govern. And there were the echoes in that speech of Thomas
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Carlyle. And this sounds ridiculous, right? That a man like Keir Starmer would echo Carlyle.
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But Carlyle talked about the ship of state needing to be steered. And Starmer strikes me as somebody,
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actually, especially in that speech, there's not a liberal bone in his body. Like he is kind of,
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you know, somebody who believes that the job of government is to govern, is to steer the ship of
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state. And I think that this presents a problem for the British right, as it has been constituted
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since Margaret Thatcher. Because they're still even now in reform, for example, or in Nigel Farage,
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or in the Tory, quote unquote, right. They're all involved with the IEA, the ideas about Adam Smith,
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free market economics. And Starmer's just taken an absolute axe to all of that. He has framed
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immigration, actually, as being the result of a libertarian free market experiment,
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which I think was a masterpiece of framing. It's also something that I've talked about for some
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time, this move, this containment move, was telegraphed pretty heavily by certain Tony Blair,
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the Dark Lord. How is it telegraphed? Because he's basically been saying it for the past five years.
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He's been saying, look, the populists have a point. Immigration has got out of control.
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So what we need to do when we're in power is to actually deliver the result, to put that issue
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away. We can't just talk about it. We can't just sound rhetoric. We actually need to do it.
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And this is something that I know a lot of people have been sceptical. I know a lot of people are
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sceptical. I actually believe that Labour are more likely to actually do the job, right,
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than the Tories, or even than reform. Okay? And I imagine a lot of people, this would be freaking
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out. How can you say that? But I just, I mean, how can I put this?
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Let me jump in on this, because I actually do agree with you. Because Labour,
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the Conservatives lack a certain will to power. And they reside in the cockpit of power, by accident
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almost. Because the Labour Party have not made themselves to appeal to the vast majority of the
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population. The further they went left, the less appealing they became. Which means that the
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Conservatives didn't put forward an affirmative programme for action. They said, we are the lesser of
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two evils. And in a way, they're probably right most of the time. But the Labour Party has a strong
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executive spirit within itself. And this was definitely brought, I mean, this was easily
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visible in the 70s, leading on to Margaret Thatcher. And of course, very visible in Tony Blair's
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governance, moving into the 2000s. They have a plan. They intend to do something. Now, the thing they
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intend to do is evil. But they at least want something out of governance. Whereas the Conservatives
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view governments almost like a retirement plan or something. Our job is to do the very bare minimum
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and sort of coast along on left-wing morality until we're forced to do something or the Labour Party
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takes over. And so in this way, they're kind of the, say, uniparty is a bit cliche. But in many ways,
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they are exactly the same organism that is symbiotically moving through the British political establishment.
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So when the executive half of this organism has acted too much and done too much and made too many
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mistakes, people choose the passive side of the organism to just kind of let the problem fade
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away for a bit. And then when they've decided, yeah, okay, maybe we are up for a change now,
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they'll go back to the executive side. We've had this back and forth this whole time. Whereas the
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Conservatives will never step off of that moral agreement. And this is why the Conservatives are now
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far more left-wing than the Labour Party. I also think it goes even a little bit deeper than this. I mean,
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we could say that the likes of Tony Blair, whether you love him or hate him, he's a guy who looks at
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the situation and he says, look, this is what needs to be done. Okay. I've got a plan to do it. And
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somebody says, let's say a lawyer comes up to him and say, Tony, you can't do that. It's against the
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rules. He will say, I made the rules. And he will also say, well, then the rules need to be changed.
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Those rules, they worked for that time. But now the circumstances are different. So we need a new
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set of rules. So he won't let the status quo get in his way because he is somebody who is always
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thinking of the outcome down the line. Okay. Unfortunately, the Conservatives naturally,
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okay. And this is something Pareto talks about, they're a type two elite. They are rule followers.
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Okay. And what late, what happens is the left set up a new set of rules. And just as
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the Conservatives start getting used to following these rules, slavishly, pathetically following
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those rules, Labour come along and pull the rug away. And they'd be like, well, there's,
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guess what? All the rules are going to change again. And look, now you're stuck with Kemi
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Badenoch as the leader. And look at you now, you're still stuck in that work paradigm. And now we've
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take, we've parked all our tanks onto the lawn, which is a move that it was telegraphed a mile off.
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And I mean, just a quick thing there. It was a few months ago that Keir Starmer
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first used the phrase open border experiment against the Tories. And everyone was like,
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oh wow, that's strong rhetoric. But it just, everyone let it slide. It's not that Starmer hasn't
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been edging towards this point already. He seeded this a couple of times now. And so I think you are
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correct on this. Morgoth had a great video on this saying, look, essentially the Tories have
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rubbed diversity in the left's face at this point. And now Starmer is just going to attack
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to the hard right. And in that speech, every point he made, it made like four or five substantive,
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hard right wing talking points. And often Nigel Farage himself is not brave enough to raise.
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And Nigel Farage often raised the economic argument or the sort of the institutional argument.
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But Starmer, by calling it an island of strangers, what he's saying is we've dispossessed the British
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people of their own homeland. And this is why the left reacted going, that's Enoch Powell.
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It's like, they're right. That is Enoch Powell. And it's also the deep relational language that
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Starmer used can't be by accident. There was a few times in that speech where I found myself
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almost involuntarily going, yes, yes. I mean, one of the things he did is he drew attention to the fact
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that the public have consistently voted against this. The public didn't want it. They voted for
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one thing. They got another thing. He called the Tories, basically tracers.
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And he called them out for their betrayal of their own base, which is really strong. I mean,
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there are a few times, Carl, where I thought, have they been watching us, like Labour, you know?
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Well, this is all the talking points we've been making for five years.
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I mean, it's a speech I would have given. It's the speech I would have given.
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I would have left out the diversity as good bits.
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This is the thing that I've been, and I know, you know, my critics have said, well,
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this is a subversive figure. He's secretly working for Labour and so on.
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I know a lot of people believe that. But I'm trying to think, like, I'm trying to think in terms of the outcome.
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What is the situation that will maximise the outcome that we want?
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And the main way of getting there, in my opinion, is to move beyond the kind of flim-flam of petty
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party politics. That is the thing that really holds people back, rather than saying it as this party
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versus this party, this is this party. Instead, taking a wider metapolitical view, where almost
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you're just kind of, like, setting the tempo in a way. And, I mean, let's face it, on this issue,
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I mean, I think Rupert Lowe tweeted out the other day that this was the consequence of the online right.
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And I think in this regard, he is correct. I think if it wasn't for that consistent body of
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influencers and activists driving this issue every day, then I don't think it would have been as
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salient in the minds of the political elites as it clearly has been. And they, I think exactly
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what you say, it's like they're watching our channels. Now they might be, they might not be,
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but the point is, if they're like, right, okay, immigration has gone too far. We need to come
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out with a strong anti-immigration perspective. Well, what suite of policy proposals would you have?
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What suite of arguments would you have? Well, they're right in front of you because they're in
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your comment sections all day, every day. And so you just lift them and go, yeah, this is,
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this is the, the set of arguments that work and they do work. And so even if they're not directly
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watching me or you or whoever, it's our arguments that are percolating through the discourse that they
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had no choice but to accept. Yeah. Another thing that I think that we can learn from the Dark Lord,
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from Blair is the mindset. The future we want is inevitable.
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How we get there, that's still up to the debate, but it is going to happen. And it's going to happen
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in the direction that we want. That ball is rolling. Look at where we are now compared to five,
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five, six years ago. In a strange way, as Forgoth said, Horace is to kind of blame for that because
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of the ridiculous, the ridiculous numbers that we've seen. But another thing that Blair does,
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he always has a plan, right? What we need to be doing is generating plans all the time.
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Okay. Now it may be that they copy them. It may be that they never pick them up,
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but ideally there needs to be plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D, plan E, and all of them have to be
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ready to go or to be finessed or to be picked up because politicians are lazy.
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What really what people need to be doing is, you know, when, I mean, one of the worst things that
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Farage did when he gave that interview, I can't remember who it was with now.
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Maybe it was with Steve Edgington. I can't remember.
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Where he said, oh, it's impossible. It's politically impossible.
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This was just, I mean, he shouldn't have been saying that. He should have been saying,
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actually, it's perfectly possible in these parameters. Here are 10 different plans
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that the government could pick up tomorrow. Okay. So he, in a way, the problem with
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the model that the Tories and Reform have had is that they're always reactive.
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You shouldn't be reactive. You should be proactive. You should have the plan. And honestly,
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think like Tony. I mean, really, because I look at politics and be like, who is the guy
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who's getting results? Who is the guy who seems to always get his way?
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Well, it's Blair. Why? How? Okay. He's got advantages. He was the prime minister and he's
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got backing and so on. But he's got an idea of what he wants.
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But these principles, believing your future is inevitable, having the plan. I mean, these are
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things that we can kind of take inspiration from. Honestly, this is why I'm quite optimistic about
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Rupert Lowe, actually. Because you can see that he has a plan. He knows what he wants.
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You know, how he gets to that position, who knows? Maybe he'll never will, et cetera, et cetera. But
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he's not just a conservative who is prepared to play in someone else's sandbox.
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He's prepared to set the rules. And so, oh, finally, someone on the right. Because I mean,
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Nigel Farage, for all his charisma, is still playing in the left sandbox. We're not the racist. The left
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of the real racist is his genuine boomer core beliefs. And he will always have this.
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I mean, ideally, another thing that we could learn from Tone is getting beyond this paradigm of the
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left versus right. Blair always presented his set of solutions as neutral. Okay.
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And immigration is not a left or right issue. And just to think, you'll notice Starmer did the
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same thing in his speech. He said it just wasn't in the British interest. Exactly. It's the neutral
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position. So the neutral position is, immigration needs to come down. The neutral position is,
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we need to start increasing deportations. Now, the only discussion left to have is how to get there
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and how precisely do we do it. And now, the conversation's a lot closer to, you know,
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Steve Laws. Well, I mean... There really is, though.
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Right. Yes. But what I was saying is, now the conversation's a lot closer to the sort of
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paradigms that Blair sets up in, let's say, for digital ID. Well, the decision's already been
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taken. It's the only question is, how quickly do we get there? Or how exactly do we get there,
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crossing the dots? And so that's one kind of positive development, I think, is that people,
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I think, have kind of disaggregated themselves from loyalty to Tories or even loyalty to reform.
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And if Rupert Lowe did anything, it was showing how, actually, support for Nigel is not automatic.
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Support for Nigel is not de facto. Because people will, if we think Starmer is going to
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get us the results we want, for example, reform can't count on it. So what, I mean,
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if any reform guys are watching this, what can they do? Rather than tacking to the center or playing
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the wet or whatever, they need to be saying, it's not enough, Starmer. Where's your deportation plan,
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Starmer? You know, you're saying you're going to get the numbers down by 200,000. It needs to be zero
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or whatever. Why is the Boris wave still here if you've just said it was a failed experiment that
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betrayed us? Exactly. And that, I think, is actually a very strong argument that should be
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being made at the moment. Hopefully Rupert Lowe will start making it or something like that.
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It's like, these people need to go. And see, ideally, we need to be,
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and this is, again, where people, I think, get caught up in quote-unquote slop. We don't need
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to be worrying about Owen Jones and Ash Sakaas. And that's for the Blairites to deal with. And the
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Blairites will deal with them. We need to be onto the right to actually kind of put the right sort
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of pressure on Labour from the right. Not, I mean, honestly, they were wrong-footed by this. They
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shouldn't have been wrong-footed because many of us, me and you years ago, saw this coming because
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we pay attention. We're not, like, out doing, like, little bits for 50 pounds ago to say happy
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birthday. We're watching what Tony Blair's saying, seeing what plans are coming down the pike.
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Right? And so I feel like they were, reformed, were not prepared. And the Tories, I mean,
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forget about the Tories. Yeah, no one talks about the Tories because why would they?
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But the thing I find really interesting about this, in particular, not just on the speech,
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but the Twitter posts he was making afterwards, was that he is receptive to arguments from the
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