The Collapse of the Centre
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Summary
In this episode, Dan and I discuss the collapse of the Labour vote in the recent council elections and how it points to a growing tendency towards the centre-left. We talk about the reasons why this might be happening and why the Greens are emerging as a viable alternative.
Transcript
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Hi folks, welcome back to another one of these current events political chats that Dan and I
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have decided to start having because there's a lot that's going on in British politics at the
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moment but it's going on under the surface and so I don't think as much attention to it is being
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called upon as is warranted because a lot of things have happened but they're small things
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but they're indicative of trends that are I think at some point going to kind of erupt out of the
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political environment and someone to talk about them so let's talk about some of the council
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by election results that come in recently as you can see here this is in Exmouth Halston in East Devon
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where the Labour vote just completely collapsed. So when you say things are under the surface are
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you talking about the Tories and Labour's prospect of ever forming a government again? Well yeah
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actually that's I actually do think we might be looking at the last Labour government and I was
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tweeting about this the other day because it seems that the coalition that made up the Labour Party
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is just completely fractured at this point. The Labour right as they call it made up of you know
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managerial Blairite types were able to corral the working class and the radical student politics types
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into the same coalition but that seems to have just completely been a blister. Well that's an interesting
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question I mean who are the extant Labour managerialist Blairites I mean I can think of Andy Burnham but
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after that I kind of come up short and he's not actually even in the Parliamentary Labour Party at this point.
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Well we'll talk about the Parliamentary Labour Party in a minute but the question really is who is
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their constituency and the answer is civil servants and NHS workers. Well and immigrants and well but they're losing them.
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Well exactly it's it's not even the immigrants right and it seems that basically Labour were trying to pull in
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too many various parties into the coalition that were too contradictory. So it's one thing having the
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working class base and then the sort of student politics and the managerial elites all in the same
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party that's quite a rough coalition and you can see how the you know liberal managerial elites are in
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direct opposition to the working class base who are themselves deeply parochial whereas the elite
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elites are international and frankly oikophobic. And then having the radical woke sort of student
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politics crammed in on that well you're going to have to make a choice do you want the radical woke
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stuff that wants infinite open borders and immigrants or do you want the working class base
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and the liberal elite chose the ones that they felt most comfortable with which are the radical students.
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And in addition to that they thought okay we're also going to be the party of Islam
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reform and immigrants which I think really sealed the deal for the working class base and it turns
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out the working class base was millions of votes. Yeah. Turns out that was huge. I mean to be fair
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they did win the last election but I mean how did they do that they they did it then by having the
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immigrant vote. Well they did it by luck because reform came in and smacked the Tories. I mean they
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still did get enough votes to form a government and and that would have been the immigrant vote which
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as we're I'm sure we're going to talk about is is peeling away from them because they've got a more
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pure form alternative. It was the old left because I mean there was a certain age of which people just
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never changed their vote. Yeah. Old lefties but then there's also the sort of student lefties as
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well but I mean they're a fairly unstable coalition. I mean one because they're zoomers and they don't
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care about the shibboleths of the past. There are a lot of millennials in that as well. Yeah a fair number
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but they're in the process of growing up as well. They are. But also these people tend to at some point
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you know these these university lefties they want to grow up and they want to get a job and eventually they start
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looking at their pay packet they start looking at their children and they're thinking what's my
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future here? What are my kids future? You know what I I actually I actually think that a lot of them
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are actually going more left-wing because yeah but I and I I have experience of this in uh in people
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I know personally who are diagonal leftists always voted Labour but now going up to the Greens just
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because Labour are too right way. Right. Labour have admitted that they're committed to reality
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right. The dream is off the table for Labour and so they're like oh I'll go to the other party that
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sells me the dream then and that's why the Greens are doing. Well I guess they're peeling away in both
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directions then because I mean I was thinking of somebody like Aaron Bastani who's um may you know
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maybe our age maybe a little bit younger um but I mean he's an example of somebody who's who's on the
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left very committed built a brand as being on the left but started paying taxes and having children
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and looking around and thinking what the hell is this is giving to them so you get that natural
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peel away as people start to experience life they start to leave the left but you're talking about
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the true believers. I'm talking about the sort of Ash Sarkar types who otherwise would have been
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committed to the Labour Party but have decided the Labour Party far too right wing is now peeling off to
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the Greens right so it's the the Labour coalition is just completely collapsing everywhere and these
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these by-election results were a great example where reformers have just eaten the entire Labour
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votes in East Devon there. The Conservatives are like you say the the people who'd never changed
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their vote well that's 25 percent boomers and the Lib Dems being Middle England who are struggling a
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little bit there you'll notice that they've lost a bit too they're losing ground because reality is
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slowly but surely catching up even to East Devon one of again one of the most homogenous parts of the
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country and a true sort of English Arcadia still. I mean at first blush I'm kind of confused that the
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Conservatives are holding up as well but then I suppose this is against the last election which
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was an absolutely crippling year for the Conservatives. Yeah but also Devon is still an
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edil you know where nothing ever happens. It's the Shire. It is genuinely it's like it's going to be the last
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Shire as well probably because it's so far to the west. But then you have Middlesbrough which is another
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interesting result in which reform gained from the Lib Dems which is very interesting. Yeah.
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So obviously the majority for non-US viewers this is this is more northern this is more working class
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much more so than the last one. It is but it was still a Lib Dem council seat and as you can see
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reform have eaten the Conservative and Labour votes but also a bit into the Lib Dem vote because like I
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said like we talked about in the last episode of this the Lib Dems and reform are actually the same
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constituency just differentiated on the size of their gardens. Yes. They're both Englishmen they're
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both English voters it's just how prosperous are they and the fact the Lib Dems are going down
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indicates their prosperity is going down also. So this is another interesting move and then in
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Labour heartland such as Liverpool well the Greens are chewing them up. Very northern very working class
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I mean this is. Liverpool's kind of its own thing I wouldn't even call it northern you know it's
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like Liverpool's got its own personal identity but it's always been just Labour stronghold for decades
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decades. Grievance culture. Oh yeah. Funny accents all that sort of thing. Yeah we're not English we're
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Scouse. Yeah. But even there reform are on 18 percent and the Conservatives dying out Lib Dems no hold
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because they're not really an English city. And the Labour Party getting absolutely crushed by the
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Greens. So the Greens are interesting to me because I don't know you're lumping reform and the Lib Dems
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in together because they're the same type of person to look at. Yeah. Grant you that. But ideologically
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I'd say the Greens and the Liberal Democrats are probably closer because both of them are parties which
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are basically just fundamentally unreality. So not really right. So the Liberal Democrats for them
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they believe in the how to describe it the radical traditionalism of England right. They assume all of
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that in the same way that the reform voters want all of that. But the Greens hate all of that right. So
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the Greens would if Ed Davey and a Green were sat there and the argument was should there be loud
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noises on the train the Green would say sure it's part of their culture. It's what immigrants are
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like. Ed Davey would put on a swastika and start goose stepping around the stage. Right. I think
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that's an interesting way of framing it. The Lib Dems just assume everything that reform want. And that
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strikes me because I live in an area which is very very Lib Dem. Yeah. And you know these people are
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living in this sort of fantasy land that perhaps once existed but they assume it's 1950s and they
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haven't mentally progressed on from that. So that's what I mean by they're living in unreality. Yeah.
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Which strikes me for the Greens as well. But yeah there's some interesting parallels there.
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And so for the Liberal Democrats they can adopt a kind of progressive liberal worldview that isn't
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insane and radical. It is dinner party peacocking politics. But for the Greens they truly believe
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in this radical agenda. Yeah. I mean as we talked about last time you know back in the back in the
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early 90s when you saw an immigrant they were generally quite high value though your local GP or
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something like that. There was very few of them. And if you if your neuroplasticity died it's
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somewhere in the 1990s and you've been unable to absorb any further information. Yes. I can
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understand why you might feel that immigrants are just necessarily a good thing because they
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fit into the community and they add value and all that kind of stuff. And yeah that's a Lib Dem for
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me. That makes sense. You're thinking of Mr. Omar who runs the corner shop or the local Indian and
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he's an absolute dream. He's completely polite. His family are all polite. His children are well
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adjusted and they fit into the local school because they're the only Indian family or Pakistani
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family or whatever in the in the village. And you don't think any further about it. And that's
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fine. That's fine. I'm glad that you're happy and he's happy and he fits in and everyone's good.
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But that's just not the story elsewhere. And the Greens represent that radical fringe of the student
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left and the immigrant coalition which we have seen already breaking down in your party.
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So it's it's interesting how the Greens are basically just an insurgent force to destroy the
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Labour Party, destroy the Labour Party coalition. They can't last on their own. Like how many Muslims
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are really going to be happy to be led by Zach Polanski in the long run? And this is already
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we'll get to your party in a bit actually. They polled at 1% in the national poll the other day which
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I thought was... The other thing I said about these numbers is thinking back to when we did our election
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coverage. One of the striking things about that was yes Labour won and they won you know their
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their large majority, their super majority and all the rest of it. Yeah.
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But the striking thing for me was just how thin all of those majorities were.
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And it used to be the case when I when I first got involved in politics in the 1990s,
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if you had less than maybe 20,000 maybe even 25,000 votes you were considered a marginal.
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Whereas these days you can't apply that standard because nobody has a majority greater than about
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4,000. You're considered to have a safe seat if you've got 4,000.
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I mean, there are Labour politicians currently sitting who have literally hundreds in votes
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above their opponent. Well, famously, was it Jess Phillips who had to...
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400 or 600, something like that. Yeah. And she had to don the headscarf, she had to wear
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the long skirt and go to the Muslim community and basically beg them to continue supporting
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her. Exactly. And so this is another, again, remarkable that the insurgent parties are doing
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so well, frankly. And so this is an aggregate of the local by-elections since the 2025 election.
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And one thing that we notice is actually that for all the sound and fury, the Green Party is not doing
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You would think that the Green Party would have had dozens and dozens of these. They've only gained two.
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Yeah. I mean, to be fair, I mean, it is a feature of our political system that you can be making strong
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gains and it doesn't actually show up in the results for quite a long time. So Farage had this for a long
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time with UKIP and then, well, whatever it was, the Brexit Party and their reform.
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Considerable increases in votes. But there's like a tipping point and then you just break through.
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Yeah. And that's what's happened with reform here, as you can see. But again, what are we seeing here?
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The reform party has gained over 50 seats. The Liberal Democrats have gained 20 seats.
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Labour and Conservatives, of course, lost considerably. Huge numbers, in fact, you know,
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literally like they're down to a sort of quarter of their seats. There have been a few independents,
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but not that many. This goes back to my thoughts on the map, which we'll come to in a minute,
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which is this is the consolidation of English thought. It is the English consolidating into
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their classes, the Liberal Democrats being the affluent middle class, reform being the angry
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working class, and then picking their champions to lead them into the future, into the uncertain
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future of foreign coalitions or the previous Blairite paradigm.
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I'll give Ed Dutton credit for this, because again, going back to the last election stream,
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one of the first things he said when he saw the results was this represents the,
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oh, I forget the word, the ethnalization or whatever it was of English politics.
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The moment that you've got, because that was the moment when we got openly Islamic
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Yes. And he said, the moment that happens, you have to, you have to become a secretarian
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Yes. And I think that's what these things represent. The Liberal Democrats representing
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the upper class or well-to-do middle class. And like I said, reform representing the angry working
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class. So I think that is what is happening, a subconscious ethnic alignment in politics.
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Yeah. Which I think the mainstream is blind to because they always speak in terms of policy
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and ideology. And again, this holds up perfectly with what I see in my area. Lots of Lib Dems,
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but they're all older. Every Lib Dem activist I see is...
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All of the Lib Dems I see around, and I do see quite a lot, because I live on the outskirts
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of Swindon. And so there are a lot of, like, I'm not actually in the Swindon constituency,
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I'm right on the border. And so I get Lib Dem leaflets all the time. And every Lib Dem
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activist or counsellor is someone about my age, frankly.
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And they're people who have lived in the Shires their whole lives.
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And they're like, yeah, but I know what the true liberal values are.
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But I mean, but conversely, every time I speak to a young person, they're all about reform.
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Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. So anyway, this is the devastating poll that was released
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the other day. And you've got to enjoy it, really. You've just got to take it in for a moment.
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So for anyone who's just listening, reform are on 31%, which has been a pretty damn consistent
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rough share of the poll. But what's really interesting is that actually does align quite
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well with the percentage of the country which is working class English. About 30% of the country
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is working class English. The Conservatives, 20%, well, that roughly represents the Boomers,
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actually, because they are about a fifth of the population and they just don't change their votes.
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But the interesting thing is how the Green Party is on 18% and the Labour Party is on 14%.
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Now, I mean, I don't ever recall seeing a poll with the Labour Party on 14% before.
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In fact, probably not since they were founded, frankly.
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Yeah, it's really, really difficult to imagine. And what I love about this is this is the dying
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days of the managerial regime that stole the Labour Party from the working class.
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Because again, we've talked about the natural constituency of the Labour Party has just moved
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to reform. They've just thought, OK, I don't like this. And so now, and the student politicians
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are moving to the Green Party and the immigrants are moving to the Green Party. And so the Labour
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Party literally just represents the international managerial order. And that's the percentage of
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the population that's basically committed to that. The thing is, I'm expecting that to go lower.
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Well, yes. And it's bringing back for me, back in the Tony Blair years, Labour used to be having
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this debate all the time. You have the old-fashioned lefties and the new Blairite era managerialists.
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And the old-fashioned lefties would be raging at them saying,
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you know, you're taking over my party, you're turning it into a managerialist party.
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Yeah. And they were right, yeah. And I also remember going to, because I was working in
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the city back then, I would go along to the annual May Day protest, because I used to find that quite
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interesting. And I would always try and find, because you'd have these sort of sad, lonely,
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For anyone who's not aware, May Day is basically some communist holiday where they celebrate unions and
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you know, communism. So it was very parochial to the Labour left.
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Well, they would go into the city and they would make a lot of noise and fury and protest
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against capitalism. And my boss would hang out the window and flick 50-pound notes at them to
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Right. But anyway, I would always go out and find the sad, old, lonely, old leftist and have a word
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with him. And this was in the Blair years. And universally, I mean, they turned up because they'd
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been doing it the whole life, turning up to the May Day protest.
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Absolutely. And I would say, how do you feel about Blair? How do you feel about the Labour
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Because they knew these guys were in the ascendancy. They were clever. They had an ideology that they
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could use to advance themselves through the Labour Party. And the old left types, well,
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they were yesterday's men. Like the Soviet Union had collapsed.
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That they were taken for granted in the same way that the Tories and perhaps not so far down the
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line reform will start doing is they take their core audience for granted.
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Correct. And the Lib Dems, of course, are consistent in almost every poll because about 11% of the
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And they're focused in the Southwest. So that's just, I mean, that is a devastating poll.
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I mean, this is the poll and this is the numbers. But as we were alluding to just a moment ago,
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there are certain tipping points with these numbers in our system that have a devastating outcome
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Yeah, I do. This is a seat estimate of Labour down to four seats.
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Four seats. I'm just going to, so, I mean, what do you make of that?
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I mean, just, I mean, I've been watching politics for a long time, but I've never seen anything like
00:19:01.720
Just to be clear, in the history of the Labour Party, the worst result they ever got was in the
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they got above where the Liberal Democrats usually are and then stayed there and have been consistently
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Yeah. I mean, in the first national election, they got two seats, but ignoring that, since 1945,
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This is absolutely astonishing. I mean, you've got to hand it to the Conservatives. They made themselves
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absolutely hated by their own votes. They're widely regarded as traitors. But it did take them
00:19:48.440
Like, the Labour Party hasn't really done anything. Like, I mean, obviously, it has, but like,
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with the Conservatives, you've got the Boris Waver, which is a very clear and unquestionable betrayal.
00:20:01.400
But the Labour Party have always been able to frame everything they're doing in terms of benefit for
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the country. And the Conservatives just were not able to do that with the Boris wave.
00:20:08.920
Well, I think Labour have done something. They've very clearly signalled that they're
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against the country. They're against the people of the country.
00:20:18.760
Well, yeah, absolutely. And even then, those people don't believe the Labour Party.
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yeah, I'm just going to start deporting people.
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Exactly. The Labour Party are committed to these structures.
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So the Labour Party are the party of the system.
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And everyone knows that they're the party of the system.
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I mean, I thought the Tory wipeout of the last election was bad, which it was.
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But 407 seats predicted to go down. And the thing is,
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The Labour Party are acting like a party that is blind to this.
00:20:57.320
Yes. I mean, they're speed running of abandonment of...
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Any constituency. I mean, it is genuinely impressive. I mean, if you put you and I in charge of the Labour Party...
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...and told us to destroy it as comprehensively and quickly as possible, we wouldn't be able to get close to this.
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I mean, I could turn this around, but it'd get really racist really quickly.
00:21:21.720
I'm saying if we were deliberately trying to destroy the Labour Party, we couldn't have done anything like as well as this.
00:21:28.840
Yeah. No, absolutely. And this is a long time coming as well, because you could feel in the early 2000s, I'm sure you felt it, the discontent that the working class had with the Labour Party, right?
00:21:41.400
Like, Tony Blair, he won his first election quite handily, but he barely scraped through on the second election. And he had his own line phrase, like, well, people are happy and so they don't turn out for the election.
00:21:50.440
It's like, no, that means people aren't actually that happy. And you just kind of scraped that through. You didn't increase your share.
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The difference between then and now is that you didn't encounter the opposite view, because the media class, the BBC, the press...
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They were all in love with Labour. They all endorsed Labour, even the BBC.
00:22:12.840
Yeah, exactly. And so you had this sense inside of you that something isn't right, but you couldn't find any voices. I mean, you didn't start until whatever it was, 2013, maybe, something like that.
00:22:25.360
Yeah, exactly. And so you just simply didn't encounter somebody articulating the opinion. So you thought that this is just...
00:22:34.480
Well, I didn't think it, but a lot of people just thought, oh, this is just a naggling doubt inside of me, but it's just me.
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And 20 years on, complete collapse. And so, I mean, I genuinely don't see how Labour are going to come back from a result like this.
00:22:51.880
Well, you've already said, but they're not going to do that.
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I don't think they are. And yeah, exactly. I don't think they can. Right. I think the people who currently constitute Labour are the, you know, the true believers in the NHS.
00:23:02.920
You know, the people who would die for the NHS, would literally fight wars for the NHS.
00:23:06.500
I mean, they literally will because it's an appalling service.
00:23:09.900
They literally will. They'll be put to death by the NHS if the end of life bill passes.
00:23:17.440
But the point is, I think this is basically the end of the Labour Party. I don't see why anyone would want to go back to it.
00:23:24.000
But what does it have that can attract its own constituency back? And there's not really anything.
00:23:28.560
Well, I mean, let's say, I mean, let's say they do double this and they get eight seats.
00:23:35.420
Let's concede that. I mean, or even 10 times it, they get 40 seats.
00:23:39.440
Yeah, that's still a devastating defeat. But the thing is, that's probably more likely, right?
00:23:44.020
It's probably more likely they'll get about 80 seats.
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But I mean, I mean, who is going to be interested in them? They're just a spent force. There's no energy behind them. Nobody's enthusiastic about them.
00:23:55.440
I mean, as we heard from the last Labour conference, one of the MPs was overheard saying, I hate going out on the doorstep.
00:24:03.220
They just scream at us, tell us to F off and slam the door in our face.
00:24:06.800
Yeah. And it's been like that since the days of Corbyn.
00:24:09.720
Well, I mean, I think it's got a lot worse since basically Southport.
00:24:16.020
Yeah. I mean, was it Corbyn lost the election by getting more votes than Labour won with this last time?
00:24:26.000
The only difference is that he didn't, is that Theresa May didn't have reform splitting the vote.
00:24:30.720
Exactly. And Nigel Farage was basically standing down during that period of time.
00:24:35.200
One of the many times he likes to stand down in favour of the establishment.
00:24:38.720
And you know what? I can understand the argument that, look, we need to get Brexit done.
00:24:43.940
So Nigel Farage does step down and then for Boris's big win.
00:24:50.700
In fact, let's, Conservatives at 48, that's atrocious.
00:24:54.540
Again, if you think about 380 and Boris on 50% approval when he comes into office,
00:25:03.080
Down to 48 seats. That's atrocious. What are you doing?
00:25:16.680
But because they've adopted the Blair mindset so completely,
00:25:20.860
they can't do what is obviously the right thing to do.
00:25:24.480
I mean, for a start, in an era where immigration is the top issue,
00:25:28.940
don't have a Nigerian first-generation immigrant as your leader.
00:25:39.940
only at a minimum women, but normally women plus ethnics,
00:25:45.840
are allowed to be based in order to get through selection.
00:25:50.340
So I went to Parliament the other day to talk to a Tory grandee
00:25:56.180
about what could be done about the Conservative Party.
00:26:02.280
because I guess he finds me an interesting person.
00:26:04.920
Did you tell him resignation, suicide, and maybe a written apology?
00:26:13.320
But we were talking about the current political environment,
00:26:18.980
okay, look, how is it that, like, from the outside,
00:26:21.880
it's difficult to perceive how power actually flows
00:26:32.760
basically all power is concentrated in the leader,
00:26:43.680
regardless of any of the sort of bureaucratic processes
00:26:48.540
where you have a very complex and rigid structure
00:26:56.620
like, cabinets or chairs or whatever they call them,
00:26:59.060
you know, that the students can infiltrate and begin...
00:27:07.180
Like, they've got a much more formalised structure
00:27:10.060
So he didn't talk about the 1922 committee at all?
00:27:20.020
You have to be on the cusp of a sort of cultural wave
00:27:23.000
in order to just capture the Conservative Party,
00:27:35.820
Oh, no, look, I know lots of Tory MPs back then,
00:27:45.220
the way he was describing the Conservative Party,
00:28:45.940
It's all relational to the other fish around them.
00:28:54.520
And it's essentially what you're describing here
00:28:58.760
And I just came away from that very interested,
00:29:06.940
between the Conservative Party and Rupert Lowe,
00:29:28.680
They're just being completely eaten up Bristol,