The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - March 13, 2026


The Rizz Is Gone


Episode Stats


Length

58 minutes

Words per minute

196.63779

Word count

11,424

Sentence count

129

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

16

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the political chat, the lads discuss the current state of the Conservative Party, the Green Party and the Reform Party, and the recent defection from the Tory Party by a Tory backbencher.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 hi folks welcome back to another political chat with dan and myself uh we're going to be talking
00:00:04.580 about how the the i nearly said the conservative party the reform party same difference well that's
00:00:11.380 the we'll talk about that uh is is losing its charisma right as the kids are saying it's lost
00:00:16.260 its riz uh and it's beginning to show and i don't think they're going to make it to the finishing
00:00:22.600 line as we were saying previously they're trying to carry the ming vase yeah of course the ice
00:00:27.320 rink yeah and i don't i don't think they're going to do it um i mean the the reform party has had
00:00:33.120 so many conservative defectors as you can see it now has its own wikipedia page and it's it's quite
00:00:40.380 extensive actually i mean this is kind of bizarre because their whole pitch is that the tories are
00:00:46.740 rotten and of letting you down that was yeah i don't know if i don't think that the lotus eaters
00:00:51.700 has a mission statement but if we did it probably would be something like the mainstream media have
00:00:56.400 let you down and they're rotten if there was a wikipedia page which was just full of people
00:01:00.960 used to work at mainstream media and now work at lotus eaters you would kind of think well it kind
00:01:05.820 of undermines the mission statement yeah it would be very bizarre if we hired uh like lewis goodall
00:01:12.200 and beth rigby and yes various people from various different mainstream media are trying to make the 0.80
00:01:17.960 case that we're fundamentally better than them and also that we're we're renegades outside of the
00:01:23.000 system yes that doesn't doesn't wash no and this is the same thing and then of course uh they decided
00:01:29.740 to take in some labor defectors oh that actually happened while i was away it did do you want to
00:01:35.480 do you want to hear his opinion on refugees basically anybody who is lawfully here who's
00:01:41.220 a british citizen is a british citizen a british citizen is not determined britain citizenship
00:01:47.200 is not determined by the colour of the skin
00:01:49.880 or the name they use to worship God.
00:01:52.520 Anybody who is here legally is a British citizen
00:01:55.400 and entitled to the full support of the British state.
00:01:58.580 Now, I actually am fairly sympathetic towards refugees,
00:02:03.640 towards refugees,
00:02:05.100 not to people who are seeking a better life
00:02:08.680 at the expense of people in Britain.
00:02:11.140 That's a separate matter.
00:02:12.540 but no I mean I would like people to be part of one country one community I I delight in the
00:02:21.700 different colors in here the different colors of people the different cuisines the different
00:02:25.640 clothing I mean that is all good for me I mean I think that so he's making the Piers Morgan Curry
00:02:32.080 argument he is making exactly the Piers Morgan Curry I mean this guy sounds like he's going to
00:02:37.260 fit right in yes he does what's his name is this guy this chap was uh clive furnace clive so so
00:02:44.400 according to clive's logic if i were to move to china and china were to grant me a piece of paper
00:02:50.340 that said you're chinese now he would consider me to be a chinaman correct even though i have a
00:02:55.100 thousand plus years of british ancestry correct and the chinese would be presumably thrilled that 0.81
00:03:01.460 you'd set up a fish and chip shop yes this is just diversity this is enriching the culture
00:03:06.800 this is them you being just as chinese as them and them being just as british as you
00:03:11.460 because again notice what you're saying there well if you get this piece of paper then you're
00:03:15.760 entitled to everything it's like okay that's that's great clive you're currently defecting
00:03:19.720 from the party that gives 260 000 of these pieces of paper out a year and that's just the ones they
00:03:25.500 actually give full citizenship that's not just a visa that's that's to get access to everything and
00:03:30.240 it's more than quarter of a million a year.
00:03:32.180 It's a pound the size of Swindon every year.
00:03:33.980 All those people coming over on boats,
00:03:35.480 the most extreme example of this.
00:03:36.820 I know the big problem is people coming over on planes legally,
00:03:39.720 but even the people who come over on boats,
00:03:41.660 they're being given permanent residency,
00:03:44.280 they're given being a house,
00:03:45.200 and they will get British citizenship in time as well.
00:03:47.600 Yep, the Boris wave with their indefinite leave to remain,
00:03:49.860 that's ticking over now.
00:03:51.400 Shibana Mahmood is moving to make that 10 years.
00:03:53.800 It's like, well, if you don't want them here,
00:03:56.320 which is why you're extending it,
00:03:58.180 why not just send them home?
00:03:59.280 why let them stay here and then in 10 years time it's like oh we're gonna have to extend that by
00:04:03.600 another five years are we just going to extend this until they've all died of old age well it
00:04:07.300 sounds like clive's position is that labor had become too right wing for him so he needed to
00:04:11.280 move to reform honestly a lot of people who support the green party make that precise argument
00:04:17.680 i bet they do right wing anyway so they seem to be actually constructing a physical uni party
00:04:24.440 in the reform party which is a strange thing to do a bunch of uh well frankly failed careerists
00:04:31.400 who are going to lose their seats and uh failed careerists who are going to lose their seats
00:04:36.260 have come together to join Nigel Farage and so it's very interesting that again you don't seem
00:04:42.440 like much of an outsider party if you're the one raising the most money in the British electoral
00:04:48.160 system now you can see here that reform have raised more than the Labour and Conservative
00:04:52.920 party combined or just yeah just just more actually i think i'm terrible at maths but
00:04:58.640 the point is about the same so they're at the top of the lead uh the the leaderboard and so right
00:05:04.400 they're out raising everyone by a significant margin i'm three million more than the conservatives
00:05:11.060 well i can understand why the donors do this because they want they want to go to the people
00:05:14.560 with the power of patronage and it looks like it's going to be reform it does doesn't it uh they uh
00:05:19.400 not only uh the best funded political party which doesn't scream outsider to be honest uh guess who
00:05:26.900 guess who the donors are would it by any chance be exactly the same donors as it always has been
00:05:32.600 it's all formatories so right you you can't see very well because of the way this is but
00:05:37.740 christopher harbourn um bitcoin billionaire in thailand has uh given a ridiculous amount of
00:05:44.840 money 22 million apparently they've got jeremy hosking a former conservative donor uh then you
00:05:51.520 have nicholas he was backing lawrence fox he has given lawrence fox money as well yes right uh to
00:05:57.240 be a kind of wild card yeah in political discourse and then you've got nicholas candy who's uh given
00:06:04.140 him nearly a million uh which again former conservative donors and so it's just very
00:06:09.660 interesting how and then you've got the leave means leave campaign which is also given a huge
00:06:14.640 amount of money so and again they were the sort of tory brexit campaign so the conservative donors
00:06:20.520 are basically moving across to reform so okay well as well as the mps that's not
00:06:26.480 rogue outsiders who didn't previously take an interest and who are now finally the insurrection
00:06:33.160 is here uh no it's just billionaire tory donors who are now backing nigel because the tories are
00:06:39.520 busted flush this looks like terminator 2 where the t1000 has been you know blasted and is now
00:06:46.460 just reforming in a slightly different shape it's exactly that and it's not just the tories either
00:06:51.520 it's labor too having a few labor defectors come over yeah well you'll get that i'm pretty sure
00:06:58.400 there was a liberal democrat council who defected as well but i couldn't find the information on it
00:07:02.820 So I'll skip that for now.
00:07:04.900 And so it seems like it's business as usual, right?
00:07:08.660 It really just seems like business as usual.
00:07:11.160 For example, Quasi Quarteng announced that he's got a Bitcoin company
00:07:16.000 and that Nigel Farage has taken a stake in it.
00:07:19.500 It's like, right, oh, okay.
00:07:21.500 And is Quasi Quarteng going to defect a reform?
00:07:24.640 Is this what I guess we'd call some sort of insider trading
00:07:27.840 where it's like, oh, right, so you think Nigel's going to be the next prime minister.
00:07:32.820 You've got a bunch of Conservative buddies who have defected over already.
00:07:35.800 He then takes a big stake in your company.
00:07:38.320 Are there going to be government contracts involved?
00:07:40.660 Is this a closed loop?
00:07:43.000 In particular with Quasi Quartan, because he's so associated with Liz Trust,
00:07:46.880 who was actually one of the best prime ministers that the Tory had.
00:07:49.280 Not that the Tories had any particularly good prime ministers,
00:07:52.320 but she was still the best of a bad bunch.
00:07:54.840 Because of the association with her, I suspect that Quasi himself won't come over.
00:07:59.340 But that's not to say that he won't get some other thing.
00:08:02.360 i don't know chairman of the bloody tate or bbc or made a lord or something and at the very minimum
00:08:08.760 if reform does do some sort of official government business with bitcoin or cryptocurrency yes who's
00:08:14.960 getting the contract yes right so yes it's business as usual and speaking of business as usual
00:08:21.620 farage decided he was gonna do a lovely stunt in a petrol station in derbyshire where he
00:08:29.940 had the petrol station pimped out in reform colors and said look here are the prices now
00:08:35.900 but when we take over they're going to be one pound 26 rather than one pound 47 or something
00:08:40.540 like that so we're going to we're going to reduce the price of petrol so right this is a stunt
00:08:44.080 this is just a stunt i don't even know how he gets to that because petrol forecourts are price
00:08:49.900 takers not price setters sure uh but he well his argument is he's going to abolish green levies
00:08:56.600 on fuel so right i mean and don't get me wrong great but everyone should be pledging to abolish
00:09:03.900 levies again you can't because these have all been written into contracts so they'd have to
00:09:09.620 tear up existing contracts in order to do this stuff so well these are complex questions that
00:09:15.540 i'm sure that's the sort of answer that in fact robert jenrich would have given say look you you
00:09:20.280 were part of the tory government you're in power 14 years why didn't you abolish the green levies
00:09:23.580 and he'd be like well yes the same music we had the boris wave is because it suited us at the time
00:09:28.880 yeah we couldn't really it was a bit there as you said there are a lot of contracts there's a lot of
00:09:34.140 um intertwining chords that connect all of these things together we can't just cut them all because
00:09:39.720 it'll be chaos so um you know you can say what you like but what was interesting about this
00:09:44.860 is that at this point he has a bit of a meltdown because he's being gently probed by beth rigby
00:09:52.040 on a subject uh she's not in any way impolite or impertinent either but look at nigel's response 0.98
00:09:57.900 thank you for answering that so uh comprehensively you're pledging to cut fuel duty uh and pressing
00:10:04.840 the government to do so but you also pledged or some of your candidates did to cut council tax
00:10:10.920 when they were trying to win elections at local level and that's gone up so how can anyone trust
00:10:16.060 anything you say. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Never once
00:10:19.940 last year in the county campaign, including here in Derbyshire, did
00:10:23.860 I ever say that we can't count. But some of your candidates did
00:10:27.840 and they haven't. No, no. They've put it up.
00:10:31.800 No, no, no. I'll check what the people in Kent
00:10:35.780 said because they've put it up. You can listen if you want to or we can jack it in
00:10:39.960 now. It's entirely up to you. I'm listening. We sent out literature with
00:10:43.840 national messaging which said end net zero appropriately stop the boats and cut taxes
00:10:50.900 that was national messaging on individual county messaging we said nothing of the kind
00:10:56.380 only one party last year campaigned in the locals saying they would cut council tax and they're
00:11:03.060 called the conservative party so we'll stop there but you can see very stressed out well and also
00:11:09.560 So it's not obvious to me why cutting taxes is a bad thing.
00:11:13.720 Well, it's because it wasn't possible, right?
00:11:16.460 Remember in Zia Yusuf... 0.99
00:11:17.360 Oh, a bit like mass deportations.
00:11:19.420 No, no, no. Mass deportations is completely possible.
00:11:23.340 Actually, cutting council taxes is actually impossible,
00:11:26.640 as they discovered when they set up their Doge UK unit,
00:11:30.600 since Zia Yusuf, I think it was down to Kent County Council,
00:11:33.360 and found that they couldn't actually do anything
00:11:35.300 because the spending is mandated by the central government.
00:11:38.120 so you have to have this you have to have that you have to have x amount for redistributive
00:11:43.500 funding and yes all mandated by the central government and then they're like right okay
00:11:49.340 so what does that mean well that means we've got to raise council taxes by five percent
00:11:52.680 so it's it's true that about 80 90 percent of council spending is statute spending meaning
00:11:59.220 they have no choice on it but the point is if you become a government you can change the statutes
00:12:03.760 yes and actually if you look at council budgets the majority of it is it's moving money around
00:12:10.280 from people who work to people who don't it's adult social care it's stuff like that you you
00:12:14.880 can change that you can but the the issue is he can't do it until he is in government right and
00:12:21.600 farage and reform apparently didn't realize this because they did say we're going to cut council
00:12:27.580 waste we're going to cut council spending and notice how he's being very specific well in this
00:12:32.600 place i didn't say it's like okay that's great yes but the implied message that people took away
00:12:38.260 the sort of banner headline is nigel farage is going to reduce council taxes and that's why
00:12:42.520 beth rigby has come to me said but you said you were going to reduce council taxes and he's like
00:12:46.600 yeah uh well actually how about if i reduce i cut taxes by not putting them up as much
00:12:54.180 this is an amazing on the politics last year's local elections promise to reduce
00:13:00.300 waste waste and cut your taxes most of the councils that you took control of are putting council tax
00:13:06.140 up including kent 3.99 so across the country we're putting up council tax less than the other
00:13:11.580 parties where they control councils our average increase is less than the rate of inflation
00:13:16.060 we've made over 300 million pounds of savings across the councils and by the way i never said
00:13:21.140 we cut i never said we your looflet said cut your taxes well which means don't charge the maximum
00:13:28.100 of 4.99%. Those people would think
00:13:30.320 that would be cutting your taxes. Never once
00:13:32.800 in the country ever
00:13:34.000 did I say we would cut council tax.
00:13:36.340 I mean it's literally on the
00:13:38.440 leaflet mate.
00:13:40.040 This is the problem he's getting into. He's trying to run
00:13:42.480 an insurgency message within
00:13:44.540 the uniparty system. Correct.
00:13:46.340 And he's discovering that it is incompatible.
00:13:48.920 And I love this.
00:13:50.320 They've now got the definition of cutting
00:13:52.280 which is the same as the Conservatives
00:13:54.340 old definition of cutting which is not putting up as much
00:13:56.560 used to i remember years ago i was in i was in the house of commons having dinner with a conservative
00:14:00.840 mp and he he was running a department he was telling me about all the cuts he's having to make
00:14:06.100 and i'm saying to him you do realize that your spending is still going up and he's like no it's
00:14:10.640 not and i said i i said it is your spending the whole government spending including your department
00:14:15.360 spending is going up and we argued about this for 20 minutes in the end we we got up and we went to
00:14:19.400 the house commons library and we dug out the um the treasury book and i showed him there and he
00:14:25.040 was like and he couldn't believe it and i said what what you've mistaken is is that they were
00:14:29.080 scheduled to go up whatever it was like four and a half percent and they're only going up 3.9
00:14:33.360 percent and and that's what you that's why you're having to make cuts because the cost of everything
00:14:38.480 is going up um but you think you're having to make these a few cuts what you're doing is rearranging
00:14:43.420 where the increase goes due to inflation and and he and he looked at me like he just i'd blown his
00:14:48.480 mind entirely but this is the point doesn't nigel just sound like one of the old guard here yeah he 0.85
00:14:53.920 he is exactly what the tories were correct and his party is full of tories yes and it's backed
00:15:01.260 by tories and now he sounds like a tory and so you can't help but feel that uh no amount of
00:15:07.960 stunts in front of uh blinged out petrol station is going to change any of this uh but the thing
00:15:14.880 is it didn't uh stop um i mean well people obviously recognize it as a stunt didn't stop
00:15:19.900 beth rigby for essentially campaigning for farage i mean as you can see yeah she's just uh well
00:15:25.300 reform are going to subsidize prices at a petrol station in buxton to promote their proposals cut
00:15:30.620 fuel duty i mean can they even do that i mean i suppose they're even allowed to do that is that
00:15:36.680 not that electioneering in some way paying they actually sell the petrol i mean we're not in an
00:15:41.040 election period but i mean in an election period you can't even buy one of your uh you can't buy
00:15:45.980 perspective constituents a pint or something yeah so you but maybe you're allowed to bribe them when
00:15:52.080 it's not an election i've never checked i guess as far as i'm aware there's no legal action against
00:15:57.120 farage on this yeah so who knows but um but beth reed be there just promoting what he's doing 1.00
00:16:03.480 rather than being critical of it so and she was the one asking the question she wasn't being
00:16:07.280 excessively uh aggressive or probing it was just well you did say this is that correct and farage
00:16:13.800 had a little meltdown over it it's like right okay so there's a lot of stress there in what is now
00:16:20.320 just the official uni party and then you have this that came out reform uk says is very interested
00:16:26.100 in taking mi5 up on its offer to help political parties vet candidates amid fears of hostile
00:16:31.900 states meddling british politics right okay so the problem here is that the moment mi5 say
00:16:40.100 we have a concern about this person this person this person reform instantly have to get rid of
00:16:44.980 them it's hope not hit on steroids yes because otherwise what happens if there's a year later 0.97
00:16:50.000 and something comes up about one of those candidates reform wales leader who was
00:16:54.080 taking money from the russians yeah well not even that i mean i mean if if a headline comes up a
00:16:59.820 year later mi5 advised of dropping this candidate and they didn't they can't take that risk so what
00:17:06.420 they've effectively done is handed the deep state complete carte blanche to edit the reform candidate
00:17:14.940 list and the only people you're going to get through are the people who have the most blandest
00:17:19.720 possible opinions and i remember having this conversation because myself and beau were reform
00:17:23.160 candidates um for a while before we got thrown out for being one inch to the right of nigel 0.99
00:17:27.940 at the time and we met other reform candidates and you know not wanting to be rude about them
00:17:33.640 but most of them are basically empty suits.
00:17:35.900 They're people who have...
00:17:37.040 They're not politicians.
00:17:37.860 Yeah.
00:17:38.220 Well, no, they're not even that.
00:17:39.640 They're just normies who just get all of their opinions
00:17:42.920 from the nightly news.
00:17:44.480 There was not a single thought that they had
00:17:46.700 which was any different to what they had just watched on the TV.
00:17:49.380 I'm sure they're all lovely people, hardworking.
00:17:51.940 Yeah, I'm sure they're fine, but they're normies.
00:17:54.480 And they hadn't thought about anything.
00:17:56.320 A conversation with them is a conversation with the TV.
00:17:59.800 And I think what reform wants is basically bland people
00:18:03.300 for whatever it is um you know let's say they get they get 200 seats they want they want 180 of them
00:18:10.040 to be completely bland and then 20 people at the top who decide everything yeah i mean i didn't
00:18:14.800 include the clip but i was watching um the isle of white rally that they did recently uh lots of
00:18:21.380 great beards right you can just tell it just a sea of white head uh heads and at one point nigel 0.79
00:18:28.560 farage again sounding quite honestly i don't want to say desperate but i haven't got a better word
00:18:34.120 for it he said look there's a sign up sheet at the back go and sign up so you can be you can stand as
00:18:40.240 a candidate for us and you think that with 270 000 members which is what they allegedly have
00:18:45.260 they'll have no shortage of candidates all over the place you think they'll be everywhere it's
00:18:50.380 like right come and sign up so you can be vetted by mi5 to join the insurgent party hope not hate
00:18:55.540 It'll go through your social media.
00:18:57.580 This is not an insurgent party.
00:19:00.060 And let's say you're somebody of real calibre,
00:19:03.100 somebody who's running something important.
00:19:05.080 Are you going to quit that so that you can run for reform
00:19:08.340 and be lobby fodder, get scrutinised by MI5,
00:19:12.520 and if they discover something, they'll open a file on you,
00:19:14.980 and then who knows what problems you have
00:19:16.620 trying to even get through an airport from that point on?
00:19:19.500 Good point.
00:19:20.360 So anyway, I think that we can safely say
00:19:23.220 this is not an outsider party.
00:19:25.160 No.
00:19:25.540 in any in any way shape or form this is more of the same and we see this constantly so the the
00:19:33.520 next thing i want to talk about is faraj on iran because what's interesting about this is how bad
00:19:39.860 his political instincts were so the the fact the second donald trump sent his fleet over to iran
00:19:47.280 and started bombing them uh starmer's response was well we weren't involved and we don't really
00:19:53.580 want to get involved which actually okay that's that's all right i know right yeah like of of all
00:19:59.560 of the decisions starmer has made this is probably the best is he stuck to it because i've been away
00:20:04.940 for this whole thing he has stuck to it okay uh we we haven't got directly involved they've tried
00:20:09.600 they've sent one ship called the dragon but i don't think it's arrived yet because it was probably
00:20:14.200 doesn't work anyway well that that's the problem half of it we've only got about 30 ships half of 0.96
00:20:18.080 them are out of action and we finally got this one off the other day so it's probably not even there
00:20:22.660 yet and it's not going to do a lot and we've been refusing them access to our bases and things like
00:20:26.960 this so it's been okay well that's yeah it's been quite controversial frankly yeah but farage came 0.65
00:20:31.980 out as an iran war hawk this is pathetic why aren't we doing something about this why aren't 0.94
00:20:36.380 we bombing schools in iran yeah i mean literally they bombed a girls school the other day so not 0.92
00:20:41.600 going to age well i don't really want to be involved i've got no particular desire to be in
00:20:46.180 a war with iran why are we two minutes into this we've already found two examples of how labor are
00:20:51.200 the right of reform yeah that's that's a great question i wasn't even trying to make that point
00:20:57.040 um but notice how farage is fully on the neocon plantation here it's just like no this my entire 0.52
00:21:04.880 party is business as usual and when it comes to whatever america and israel are doing in the
00:21:09.920 middle east it's business as usual this is the same yeah it's the same uh philosophy and in some
00:21:17.040 cases the same people who are advocating for iraq or advocating for afghanistan i mean pete
00:21:22.000 hegseth claims to have been a neocon up until 2022 when he had a damascene conversion he was
00:21:28.240 like yeah no i was wrong about all that and now oh actually but not not with iran it's like
00:21:33.360 okay but this is just more of the same uh and what's interesting is the lack of harmony within
00:21:38.880 reform uh because jenry came out and said uh yeah i don't think we should be involved in this
00:21:43.360 actually and he posted a big wall of text on twitter uh saying much the same as he says in
00:21:48.320 this interview and so the question is well why why does farage want to jump in and i think farage
00:21:55.500 basically wants to be buddies with donald trump trump has done this it's unpopular in america
00:22:01.300 uh it's unpopular over here but we'll get to that in a minute and farage jumped at it thinking and
00:22:07.680 this is kemi badenok did exactly the same thing they both were like yes we should absolutely go
00:22:12.360 and help america and around it's like well the world has changed actually and our relationship
00:22:16.380 with america has also changed and this isn't something that's been thought through this has
00:22:21.380 been done quite impulsively there isn't a plan as trump showed he was expecting some sort of
00:22:26.340 organic uprising from the bottom it's like no you make that happen you don't get an organic
00:22:30.540 uprising you have to funnel the weapons organize the militias you know this from your experience
00:22:35.120 in the middle east already well for example syria where it took 13 years to get rid of assad and
00:22:40.820 they thought they could get rid of iran's leadership in a weekend and moreover it's one
00:22:44.720 of their jihadis who's currently in charge of syria now yes so it's like no you know what the
00:22:49.420 process is and you just haven't made any groundwork you've done no preparation this is not going to
00:22:53.780 work and of course at the moment iran and israel and whoever else just firing missiles at each
00:22:57.600 other left right and center it's like right this not brilliant so what if farage jump on it even
00:23:02.260 though this was clearly not going to be a great idea well i think it's because he's trying to be
00:23:06.120 buddy, buddy with Trump. But the thing is, there's a real question about Trump and Farage's
00:23:10.800 relationship. Because, for example, he went over to Mar-a-Lago recently and he was basically snubbed
00:23:17.220 by Trump. Trump was told that, oh, right, Nigel Farage has come to Mar-a-Lago and Trump's like,
00:23:21.800 yeah, I'm not going to bother going. I'm staying in this area. It was only like an hour away as
00:23:25.340 well. So it's not even that far for them to have had this meeting. But this is not the first time
00:23:30.180 Trump has snubbed Nigel Farage. You might remember that Nigel Farage, if I can get rid of that,
00:23:35.480 didn't get an invite to trump's inauguration either and this is kind of striking because i mean we both
00:23:41.460 remember the was it 2016 campaign yeah where he was on the stage with them farage was was was a
00:23:46.820 key element of that because the pitch that that trump was making is look these guys have just had
00:23:51.480 brexit it shows that an outsider insurgent can come along and shake things up and take away the
00:23:56.580 political orthodoxy he was up on stage with trump all the time he literally called him mr brexit
00:24:01.400 yes and and now i mean we we know what elon musk thinks of um of farage and you'll you'll remember
00:24:08.040 in uh 2024 when farage was like i'm not going to campaign for this uh election because i'm going
00:24:15.080 to go over and help trump in america but the thing is there were no tendrils no feelers put out back
00:24:19.560 to him it's like we we're not asking you to come yep you know you're not going to be on stage with
00:24:23.580 trump again and this trump came over the um a little while ago to scotland uh last year in fact
00:24:30.680 and nigel farage didn't go meet him so really he's come to britain and he's not asking to meet with
00:24:36.280 you there is not a relationship here so why did you instantly jump in like donald trump has
00:24:42.860 deliberately called your relationship he has deliberately distanced himself and it honestly
00:24:47.120 looks because you just appear to be more of the same i mean at the inauguration boris johnson got
00:24:52.540 an invite but nigel farage didn't yes and so and i i know people who went to it and one of them told
00:24:59.660 me how they bumped into nigel farage having a smoke outside just on his own because he wasn't
00:25:03.880 invited to this thing it's like right that's that's that's weird anyway so yeah when trump
00:25:09.480 came here he didn't get an invite either anyway getting back to the iran thing uh it looks like
00:25:15.540 we're staying out of it right it looks it looks like we're just mostly staying out i mean america
00:25:19.540 should stay out of it as well but i i honestly don't understand and that's what my segment on
00:25:23.860 the podcast today i don't even understand what the war was for i don't understand how it's america
00:25:28.600 first it seems to be just regime change in iran but without the plan to change the regime well
00:25:34.120 yeah i mean i'm i was actually you know in favor of them black bagging maduro okay that was an
00:25:39.440 effective sensible operation step one it worked yeah it worked it was but it was targeted it had
00:25:44.380 a goal capture maduro put him in jail in america and by the time we knew about it it was done
00:25:48.240 exactly but that can't happen with iran so just bombing it until they submit i mean i don't want
00:25:55.020 get into it yeah but like it doesn't make sense uh starmer just um doesn't seem to be uh interested
00:26:01.380 in being a warthog the the labor government just doesn't seem to be interested in getting into it
00:26:05.680 saying well they've learned from iraq after both trump and blair have said come on you need to get
00:26:10.480 involved well and also the key reason why we voted for for trump in uh well not we but no
00:26:16.260 foreign wars yeah yeah no foreign wars yeah and no forever wars yeah and and it was it was exactly
00:26:22.260 what what starmer is saying here learning the lessons from iraq i mean that's why a lot of
00:26:25.860 maga went for trump it's because of no foreign wars and that's why a lot of maga are currently
00:26:30.800 very annoyed at trump i i understand the iran war only has like a 27 approval rating in america
00:26:36.940 oh it's it's insanely low and you know the fact that he's paler ground with lindsey graham and
00:26:40.860 lindsey graham has got the first direction since the invasion of afghanistan uh you know it shows 1.00
00:26:47.680 that the neocons have managed to get their hooks properly into the trump administration and into
00:26:51.180 trump himself it's such a shame yeah it's a total shame i'm not i'm not for it at all uh anyway who
00:26:56.580 was the first out of the gate to denounce well rupert low oh good i would i didn't check but i
00:27:02.400 thought you know instantly and the thing is at the time the conservatives and farage were you know
00:27:09.580 trump's like right on bombing iran and you could see them all coming okay brilliant can we bade
00:27:13.900 not farage i'd like to i'd like to support donald trump in his war in iran rupert low came out with
00:27:19.020 the right response no no war no strikes no troops you know sanctions pressures whatever is fine but
00:27:24.360 it's not our fight and we don't need to get involved well how does it i mean i i said earlier
00:27:29.240 how does it benefit america and i can't see a reason how it benefits america but it most certainly
00:27:33.440 doesn't benefit us no definitely benefits one country in the middle east though well that is
00:27:38.400 definitely been on their list for a long time yes i mean there's a certain prime minister in the
00:27:42.520 middle east who's been banging this drum for literally decades yeah probably longer but america
00:27:46.920 first is not supposed to mean israel first correct frankly yeah i mean the british public
00:27:52.340 rupert loads is showing his instincts completely aligned with the instincts of the british public
00:27:55.960 on this uh people are not actually in favor of it weirdly enough uh on the 2nd of march you had
00:28:02.100 uh about well 49 of people who were just opposed or strongly opposed uh with about 28 maybe
00:28:10.260 supporting and that's gone down to 25 supporting and more than half of people saying no i'm just
00:28:16.340 not for this. And reform voters themselves seem to be a bit out of step with the rest of the
00:28:22.720 country, frankly, on this one. But yeah, no, the majority position is we don't really want war
00:28:27.820 with Iran. What would it bring? What good would it be? And so Nigel Farage, like he has done on
00:28:33.780 almost every issue you can think, I mean, you recall in the last one of these we did, I pointed
00:28:38.960 out that Nigel Farage in 2024 said we're not taking Tory poison into our party. And now it is
00:28:44.780 the reconstituted Tory party well Nigel Farage has changed his position on that too uh he changed
00:28:51.580 his position on it on utilitarian grounds because we are not able to actually get involved in a
00:28:58.240 foreign war because actually we can't even defend Cyprus which he is correct about that I mean 1.00
00:29:02.840 there's nothing that we can do that America can't already I mean obviously so I mean yeah what's
00:29:08.920 the point but I mean there's just nothing we can do is basically the yes because we've only got
00:29:14.220 i think one aircraft carrier actually in the sea at the moment yes half of our fleet which is very
00:29:18.680 small anyway just a sea worthy the other 15 yeah we're not capable of fighting a long-range war
00:29:25.320 i mean it sounds it sounds like especially from the link you showed earlier that genric had better
00:29:30.060 instincts than farage on this yes and perhaps you know farage just went straight out there with
00:29:35.100 whatever he thought the talking point the mainstream media talking point was and and
00:29:39.020 genric has has managed to talk him around in the background well farage went with the zionist neocon
00:29:44.740 talking point right that was he he was like you know i know that lindsey graham is going to be in
00:29:49.260 favor of this that means theoretically the republican party will be in favor of it that
00:29:53.860 means the conservatives will be in favor of it and i exist in that space in politics therefore
00:29:58.380 i have to be in favor of it but like you say genric had a better instinct but now he's
00:30:02.260 contradicting the boss you know he's you know that's probably going to happen a lot and that's
00:30:06.720 going to lead to problems yes and i i think farage at this point feels vulnerable in that he can't
00:30:12.800 just kick out his best and brightest now so i think he just has to essentially tolerate the
00:30:19.040 fact that jenrich's publicly i mean if he i mean he i mean he's done this his whole career get rid
00:30:23.660 of people and i mean it really hurt him when he did that to rupert lowe because you know his
00:30:29.460 passport he he can't do it to generate now so he he's going to have to tolerate generate being of
00:30:34.700 a younger generation who doesn't just instantly go to whatever the sky news line is yeah i mean
00:30:39.760 jenrik uh has a profile of his own without you know you can say well ben habib rupert low you
00:30:45.680 know they were they were made by farage you could argue that case i'm not saying i agree with it but
00:30:50.080 you could at least argue that case but that's not the case of jenrik he is a former tory after all
00:30:55.100 who's defected after kemi bade not kicked him out because she found a paper that suggested he was
00:31:00.180 planning to defect and so they have made um a sort of strange bedfellows because apparently when when
00:31:06.460 he defected there was no uh talks between him and farage so this is all kind of cobbled together
00:31:10.640 and now they're kind of stuck with each other and so it's it looks vaguely uncomfortable when you
00:31:16.440 see them talking um but as uh will here points out look he's gonna change his position on everything
00:31:22.380 we never said we'd enshrine free speech we never said we conduct mass deportations we never said
00:31:27.520 we'd scrap net zero never said we'd cut foreign aid i never said we'd have accountability for
00:31:31.960 covid jabs or i never said we'd oppose digital id you can expect yeah all of this because farage
00:31:37.380 has always been a man of the moment rather than someone who is following a moral guiding star
00:31:42.420 so you know he never actually firmly commits to a position yeah well i mean as as i've already
00:31:48.180 talked about a couple of times on on this uh episode there's a number of things he said where
00:31:52.920 i was very quickly able to say you know it's not as simple as that because of this this that and
00:31:56.640 that and i mean it seems like every time he encounters one of these he comes out what he
00:32:02.000 thinks the right line is that his sort of silver-haired audience are going to respond to
00:32:06.240 and then somebody comes along and explains it to him and then he sort of backpedals and pretends
00:32:10.360 he never had that position in the first place i mean that's precisely what's happened here
00:32:14.000 well yes in fact if can we get have we got an age breakdown here i bet if there's an age breakdown
00:32:19.460 in here you'll find the boomers i did yes the whole thing almost certainly yeah i mean like
00:32:24.820 the fact that it's reform primarily we think this is a good idea suggests this is a boomer issue
00:32:30.340 as in the less likely you are to be conscripted funnily enough the more in favor you are of um
00:32:35.760 yeah but also it's the the sort of the boomer view you know the cold war view yes we have to
00:32:41.540 be taking out foreign governments who aren't already on side our churchill moment be noble 1.00
00:32:46.780 yeah send the young men off to die in a foreign desert i'm surprised there's not any breakdown 0.93
00:32:52.360 here i wasn't even look i didn't even think about that when i was uh preparing this i think you're
00:32:56.680 you're correct but anyway so he like you're exactly right his instinct is to go in a certain
00:33:03.480 direction but the thing is his instincts have actually been wrong recently and he's made a
00:33:07.720 series of blunders so um let's go on to the polling oh good because the polling is not not
00:33:15.720 superb now um i've been using the uk election data vault pollster ratings uh just to contextualize
00:33:22.920 the polling so as you can see here you've got the a minus grades so you've got you go of opinion
00:33:27.960 ipsos mori north stat observation variant uh then the b my b and b minus you've got delta
00:33:33.640 pole bmg savanta you've got focal data at c and then you've got a bunch of them on d jl partners
00:33:39.880 lord ashcroft at the bottom there yeah lord ashcroft at the very bottom of the deep
00:33:44.200 with a D minus. And so you've got the, and these are, as they tell us, based on the accuracy of
00:33:52.680 their polling. How much does the polling actually represent the final results when the elections
00:33:58.080 are actually held? And so this is something that a lot of people aren't very happy with,
00:34:03.660 because they've noticed that actually, if you look at, for example, there we go, opinion polling,
00:34:11.780 we seem to have passed peak reform yeah so as you can see uh the average opinion polling on
00:34:18.120 electoral calculus uh is um 28 and that's up until very recently so it was early 25 when it
00:34:30.500 really started to turn do you remember when he kicked out low because that was the moment that
00:34:36.160 we were like what yeah let me just because i mean he he i mean he had it all i mean he had
00:34:45.200 he had the he had the mainstream was coming over he had the the feeling in the country
00:34:49.740 i mean he had the online right and then he just did one assassination too many in such a clumsy
00:34:54.660 obvious way i don't even think it's to do that because it was march yeah no i do remember at
00:34:59.520 the time 25 the upswing carried on for a little while and then it started to turn yeah so that
00:35:05.100 that didn't actually affect things um but this so this is basically farage organically failing on
00:35:11.240 his own right so that's electoral calculus coming down to 28 and this is a poll of polls so it's the
00:35:16.040 average of the opinion polls uh the spectator has an average of their opinion polls you can't make
00:35:20.460 these any bigger unfortunately but uh i don't know whether you can see that they're on yeah i can see
00:35:24.840 the trend yeah they're on 28 as well but as you can see from the sort of high of 31 32 something
00:35:30.980 like that down to 28 i mean it's not the most catastrophic collapse but it's not the trend that
00:35:37.420 you're looking for no and looking at the other lines they don't seem to be benefiting from it
00:35:42.340 either no it's not really going anywhere uh the greens are actually on a bit of a downswing
00:35:47.860 recently in the average of the polls there and labor and conservative are both just yesterday's
00:35:53.700 dead dead in the water same with the liberal democrats frankly like the greens you would
00:35:58.320 think would be doing a lot better given how much they stand to actually gain and how much they
00:36:04.360 have actually gained i mean we've gotten them down to by-election and then you've got the
00:36:09.820 political polar polls which is a bit more brutal so for their averaging 25 which is rough i mean
00:36:20.220 this is just i mean when we started doing this they were high 20s and we we kind of assumed from
00:36:24.880 that they'd be pushing into 30 before long yeah i mean you know oh there we go they did brush into
00:36:30.400 the 30s yeah august um and that's the average of 31 so you had outlier polls yeah up 35 percent
00:36:37.480 you had a few that was a bit under but average of 31 there the high point yeah their average is now
00:36:42.720 their previous low their low mark yes exactly and none of the outliers are coming anywhere near
00:36:48.340 what they used to be so i think we can agree there has been an organic downturn and of course
00:36:54.840 this coincides slowly but surely with the more conservatives Nigel Farage accepts into the party
00:37:01.100 let's look at a few um actual polls just to get some honestly it's quite brutal numbers
00:37:05.720 because on five yeah well that hurts when you started on 30 exactly that was 32 down to 27
00:37:13.160 this is from BMG that's a B minus grade on this poll uh not good right that is that is really not
00:37:20.960 good uh the complete opposite direction you want to be going in if you're farage uh the next one
00:37:28.000 is jl partners which is a d plus so not great but uh other at plus eight there so that's a lot for
00:37:35.880 other isn't it yeah it's interesting there's a lot but um but what's interesting here of course
00:37:40.880 is again minus four for reform so significant dip in the polls labor down terribly as well
00:37:48.900 obviously and the greens on 14 so again reflecting i mean that's that's that's what 16 when you start
00:37:56.380 at 30 about that yeah yeah that's a huge swing but reflecting the poll of polls right it's very
00:38:03.440 similar to the rest of the numbers on the polling averages so i'm inclined to believe that there is
00:38:10.100 this kind of decay that is set into the poll numbers for um basically not just reform all of
00:38:16.960 them actually uh the next one here we have is servation where you can see they've got reform
00:38:22.340 on 29 but they're still down again other on nine percent that was one of the top ranked ones wasn't
00:38:27.420 it that was yeah servation are an a minus right uh and so maybe you know this this who knows i
00:38:36.000 think that 12 for the greens is probably the more realistic number actually some of the polls have
00:38:41.240 had the greens in like second or third place which i think is overstating it somewhat but um but
00:38:46.780 again other nine percent that's a that's a lot of other isn't it that's that could do breaking out
00:38:52.680 but like like you were saying the other day um we're witnessing the shattering of the political
00:38:58.960 environment and this can't go on forever and the fact that there's the you know there's not much
00:39:06.000 between any of them at this point so at least any of the main parties so it's like right okay that's
00:39:11.660 Very, very interesting.
00:39:13.140 But the one that's really getting everyone's back up
00:39:15.300 is YouGov pollings.
00:39:17.380 Now, YouGov, A-,
00:39:19.620 in the survey ratings,
00:39:21.660 in the polling ratings,
00:39:23.160 23%.
00:39:24.740 Ooh.
00:39:26.720 Oh, that's not good.
00:39:28.540 Yeah.
00:39:29.520 Really brutal, with no change.
00:39:31.400 So this is held on multiple polls
00:39:33.580 that they've had.
00:39:35.480 And look at the Labour Party, though.
00:39:40.440 17...
00:39:40.760 4th place.
00:39:41.660 that is just what is happening i mean to be fair looking at that list reform conservative greens
00:39:48.860 labor libdom none of them deserve to win no and they're all on about a fifth of the vote none 0.98
00:39:53.760 none of them are going to change anything none of them offer something new for britain it's it's all
00:39:59.060 just whatever we've been doing for the past few years or decades we're going to carry on doing it
00:40:03.540 we're just going to wrap we're just going to wrap it in a different set of rhetoric exactly but the
00:40:08.160 the fundamental premises are anyone is british as long as they have a british passport and
00:40:13.080 we are not going to reduce the size of the state we're not going to bring the
00:40:17.800 arm's length bodies the quangocracy under control we're not going to bring the bank 1.00
00:40:21.760 we're not going to change the system logical taxes exactly right we are literally here to
00:40:26.640 just tinker around the edges as the thing is already set and that's not paying off for any
00:40:31.860 of them really like you get to choose how you dispositionally feel about the rhetoric that
00:40:36.720 comes out of each one but you know that substantively they're all going to provide the
00:40:40.700 same thing uh and this when broken down into the seats is terrible actually so this is that polling
00:40:51.520 modeled out in an election and obviously it comes out to hung parliament uh which is i mean
00:40:57.800 was like absolutely
00:41:00.840 ruined. Remind me, 650 seats
00:41:03.560 so a majority
00:41:04.200 and the Sinn Féin don't send there
00:41:07.260 so it's something like
00:41:08.340 326
00:41:10.440 326 is it? That's what you need
00:41:13.280 That's what you need for a majority government
00:41:15.080 And they're on for
00:41:16.660 They're on for more than
00:41:19.560 100 less than what they need
00:41:20.920 Correct. In fact, even with a coalition
00:41:23.300 with the Conservatives
00:41:24.380 Which they're basically already in because they keep taking their MPs
00:41:27.680 Would only be 323 seats.
00:41:30.480 So you would need reform the Conservatives
00:41:34.980 and presumably all of the Northern Ireland parties,
00:41:39.960 but even then you only just scrape by.
00:41:43.720 So you would need at least an element,
00:41:45.460 you'd need a confidence and supply arrangement
00:41:47.200 with either Lib Dems or Labour.
00:41:49.880 It would be an incredibly fragile thing.
00:41:53.000 Oh, yeah.
00:41:53.460 And of course, the Greens, Labour and Lib Dems,
00:41:56.600 they couldn't form a coalition even if they wanted to uh so there's a shattered country
00:42:02.760 this is just italian politics this is this is nothing gets done the civil servants run everything
00:42:08.400 yeah there's there's no there's no coherent agenda there's no way anything could be fixed
00:42:13.420 and now just to be clear this is the most pessimistic of the polls um there are there
00:42:21.180 are polls where reform gets something like 306 seats so yeah but still so a pact with the
00:42:26.640 conservatives would work they would actually be able to do that but um but what why do we bother
00:42:31.760 having elections if we're just going to end up with tory and labor every single time i mean just
00:42:35.660 just let them do it on a bloody rotor system and save our effort but also i mean go back six months
00:42:41.260 yeah this was all turquoise oh yes this was a sea of teal i remember you showed me the map and it
00:42:47.880 was just turquoise everywhere apart from the odd splodge of yellow and the cities which would still
00:42:52.620 be labor or green yes and so what farage has done here is actually broken the mingvars right yes he
00:42:58.820 has actually failed to maintain what was a commanding position more than 30 percent which
00:43:06.160 is all labor won on in the last election remember yes good point and and less than jeremy corbyn got
00:43:11.960 less than Jeremy Corbyn got to get their 418 seats or whatever it was. Farage was regularly
00:43:17.920 being predicted to get 400 seats. This was an easy government in waiting and he had the swagger
00:43:22.720 to go with it. Well, he made a series of really bad decisions. Well, you showed us a couple of
00:43:26.420 videos. There's no swagger in any of that. Exactly right. He sounds stressed. He sounds
00:43:31.440 like he's a man who realizes the opportunity is sliding through his fingers. And I'm sorry to say
00:43:37.920 but it's nigel farage's decisions that have caused this 100 you didn't need to take in
00:43:43.640 nadim zahawi nadine doris jemrick sweller all the other tories you didn't need to take in the
00:43:49.200 pro-refugee labor counselors or plague um well the ones in the senate senate welsh oh whatever
00:44:00.560 right you didn't need to take in a bunch of tories you didn't need to take tory donors
00:44:05.000 to be your men you to be your funders you didn't need to then come out and give uni party talking
00:44:11.060 points like well we're cutting we're cutting the taxes by not raising them as much as other people
00:44:16.860 are raising them which i don't even know if that's true by the way i didn't even bother checking so
00:44:20.320 who cares and you didn't have to come out in full throat support immediately of the iran war that
00:44:25.080 nobody wants and yet you did all of these things and you've shown people you're not really the
00:44:31.640 alternative that people thought well the thing is he's got the attention on him now because
00:44:35.900 everybody thought yeah he's going to win as our earlier discussions we all thought that he was
00:44:39.900 going to win with a with a landslide which means he gets the attention and when he gets the attention
00:44:45.340 you discover that he's actually not in any way different to what was offered before at all he
00:44:52.080 just sounds like a tory mp uh and so this this is this is pretty awful for reform genuinely awful
00:45:00.020 uh this this is not a government in waiting and so all of that hassle is like remember the other
00:45:05.720 week when he did his uh big event where he's got the the podiums he's like this is gonna be my
00:45:10.180 shadow chancellor it's gonna be my shadow home secretary and it's like okay well it very hillary
00:45:16.740 clinton congratulations to this next president yes right yes it's like okay but it doesn't look
00:45:22.960 like you're gonna get that now no and this isn't the only poll of course that is rather harsh i
00:45:28.460 I mean, there's a Lord Ashcroft poll here that has them on 22%, which is just oof.
00:45:34.780 I know Lord Ashcroft got beaten up, but he was the closest on a previous election.
00:45:41.620 He was the closest on Brexit.
00:45:43.420 That was it, Brexit. 0.52
00:45:44.360 He pretty much nailed Brexit.
00:45:46.180 So, I mean, you know, that ranking of pollsters is a bit, you know, what have you done to me lately?
00:45:52.100 But, you know, ultimately, any of those pollsters could be right, and none of them are good for him.
00:45:57.280 yes that's that's exactly right any any of them could be correct and none of them good for him
00:46:01.540 and so you what's weird about this is like guido forks are like oh yeah why isn't he getting to
00:46:10.520 where we expect him to be in the other polls like well and as i say of the last 10 published
00:46:16.300 westminster intention voting polls you guys average for reform has been 24.8 percent
00:46:21.040 well the average from opinion was 30 percent it was like okay but you gov are hardly um
00:46:29.580 a deeply anti-farage institution i mean their co-founder is in reform yes so the deems of
00:46:38.640 yeah now he doesn't work with you gov now he's actually left it and does other things but the
00:46:44.560 point being you'd think there'd be some sort of you know institutional sympathy for him because
00:46:50.480 mean he was the founder right i mean we're not did they turn i think there was three of them i met
00:46:54.560 them once when they were pitching but yeah there's two others i don't know what happened to them but
00:46:58.040 presumably they're still exactly right and so it you can't be like okay well you gov is producing
00:47:05.200 this statistical outlier out of bias against the party its founder is now in like that just doesn't
00:47:11.300 wash it doesn't in fact i seem to remember that was it all three of them it might have been all
00:47:16.640 three of them were um tory councillors for uh one of the one of the london boroughs which had a had
00:47:24.260 a tory council on it so yeah they're all of the same sort of ideological bent yeah they're they're
00:47:30.120 all um people with inside the westminster consensus yes and it's that's fine i mean obviously that's
00:47:35.960 what you'd expect but you can see this sort of uh cope here you go there's the odd one out well
00:47:41.420 no it's not the odd one out that's the thing there are actually a couple that do say this
00:47:45.260 and this is a problem that they're grappling with is well what if you gov are right because as we
00:47:52.620 saw at the beginning well they get an a minus result that's the best result that's on that
00:47:56.660 pollster rating they're not terrible like you know i don't know what to tell you i i i've thought they
00:48:03.260 were terrible in the past but the longer that i've done this the more i've realized well they're as
00:48:09.120 reliable as any other poll that's the point it's not saying a huge amount but as polls go
00:48:14.720 it's not saying a huge amount but i i think it might be capturing something as with the lord
00:48:19.900 ashcroft one i think it might be capturing a general lack of riz that well the polar pole
00:48:24.800 things that you showed when the trend is the trend and it's down yeah even yeah exactly on all of the
00:48:30.280 uh poles if i can get there yep but yeah all of the polar poles it's just downwards that's a line
00:48:37.340 going down that you could you could ski that yeah yeah yeah yeah you absolutely could and it's not
00:48:42.280 what you want if you're if you're purportedly the government in waiting that's announcing shadow
00:48:46.260 cabinets which i mean like everyone got a nigel ferrari's rear end about that but you're not the 0.90
00:48:51.920 opposition party you can't have a chat okay calm down they are leading the polls you know calm
00:48:56.620 down you know it's fine for them to sort of preemptively say it but it's only fine to preemptively
00:49:01.300 say it if it's actually working yes and i'm not sure that it is uh there was a another poll here
00:49:09.380 that um had restore organically placed at two percent and what was interesting about this
00:49:15.220 when you say organically what you mean is they were not they were not prompted they were not
00:49:19.220 offered with restore they they just made a point of saying no restore rupert lowe's restore britain
00:49:26.020 makes his first appearance in our polling registering two percent in his first outing
00:49:28.760 your party comes in at less than one percent both parties are initially prompted as part of another
00:49:32.680 party or independent candidate response option so you've got a click other than rupert lowe right
00:49:37.620 so yeah there's so the anyone who does anything with the internet will know that the more clicks
00:49:43.680 you have to make the more attrition you get i mean the the entire amazon business model is reducing
00:49:49.400 the number of clicks because it really matters it really matters yes uh so the fact that two percent
00:49:56.520 of them were like yeah no other things so that to to the point where restore restore had to break
00:50:01.640 through is very interesting because this is one that didn't directly prompt for them so we went
00:50:06.200 directly prompted there have been ones where they've been on seven percent six percent much
00:50:09.360 higher yeah much higher but when even when not prompted people like no i'm having that so that's
00:50:14.400 that's interesting not only are they not prompted they're not covered on the mainstream media which
00:50:18.340 is still what most people watch absolutely and nigel france was like well you only you'll be on 0.63
00:50:22.540 one percent it's like well well they've already doubled that yeah exactly they've already beaten
00:50:26.720 that uh and just to just finish off uh what what are the important issues that people are concerned
00:50:31.940 about is it is it iran war at the top no oh right no it's not uh it's immigration the thing that
00:50:38.020 apparently we can't do anything about yeah according to nigel farage himself who says
00:50:41.740 it's impossible according to his latest defection says no actually it's okay to have immigration as
00:50:47.260 long as you get the curry yes um that the one thing that the people british people care about
00:50:52.800 more than anything is the one thing that all of those prompted parties will not give you correct
00:50:58.740 and also the one thing that again he flip-flops on and so you've got and i mean i forgot to bring
00:51:05.800 up for this that the guardian uh published an article about a poll that's been done of reform
00:51:10.380 members and 54 of reform members said that they think that non-white people should essentially
00:51:17.340 be encouraged to leave the country bloody hell that's a lot harsher than even we go yeah exactly
00:51:22.160 i've never said that i'm not i wouldn't advocate for that that's that's a bit bloody far but the
00:51:27.180 point is nigel frage i think is misunderstanding his own base well i i would go further and say
00:51:33.500 that his own base is misunderstanding him well yes there's the there is that the reason why
00:51:38.940 you're still getting whatever it is 22 24 is because that 22 or 24 of people think that he
00:51:46.600 is going to do deportations and a hell of a lot harsher line than even we go on stuff like that
00:51:52.000 yeah and and and when they start and and basically what he needs to do is to not let his own base
00:51:58.940 discover what his policies are because if if if they figure out what he's really about
00:52:05.940 that 22 will go down to like six or seven percent i i completely agree that that is that is Nigel
00:52:12.620 Farage's current key strategy make sure nobody finds out about what i think yes yeah literally
00:52:19.440 whereas Rupert's low strategy is the opposite make sure people find out what I'm about correct
00:52:25.740 so the the I mean defense was 35 percent because it's been in the news right the Iran war but um
00:52:33.660 well I know that it says defense not blowing up schools in the Middle East but yeah sure but like
00:52:38.560 you know the defense of the country is an important issue yes there are these things going on but as
00:52:42.920 you can see like immigration the economy have been pretty collectively tied as being the most
00:52:47.540 important issues and they are deeply tied together of course i mean there's something you can take
00:52:51.820 from that if if you're trying to win power in this country and you had an honest media
00:52:55.940 you would just talk about immigration or deportations and the economy and taxes just
00:53:01.020 all day long that's that's what you would talk about well you tie it together we can deport 0.68
00:53:04.420 people and your wages are going to go up yes that's that's the selling pitch uh but anyway
00:53:09.460 so the point being here um frankly like nigel farage is not the man that his own party think
00:53:16.680 he is he is not going to get any of the things that anyone actually wants done because he's
00:53:22.300 already committed to the uniparty premises of government yep he's not going to fundamentally
00:53:27.660 change the structures of any of these things and i don't even think he's going to win no and and
00:53:33.840 i think that he knows everything you've just said yes and that's why in every video that you've just
00:53:38.800 shown us he's stressed out he's stressed he's rattled he's uncomfortable that is not the the
00:53:44.260 it's not the swagger of a year ago is it you know because that was the thing and that's the that's
00:53:47.900 the thing that really struck stuck in my mind watching that uh the petrol station gimmick it
00:53:53.340 was like wow he he doesn't look confident no and he did look confident there and rightly so yes
00:53:59.980 rightly so like a year ago he looked like he was about to smash the entire thing and it looks like
00:54:05.420 the swamp has basically taken him in yes and made him he's now the horse and never-ending story i 0.99
00:54:11.700 I mean, is he being dragged into the swamp and he's, oh, bugger. 0.83
00:54:15.140 Or it's like the Borg or something from Star Trek. 0.95
00:54:17.540 It's like Locutius of Borg or whatever it is.
00:54:19.680 It's like, oh, right, okay.
00:54:21.340 Right, I get it.
00:54:23.120 This is just more of the same.
00:54:24.440 And I think the gradual, slow, but what appears to be essentially an inexorable decline is locked in now.
00:54:34.140 Because if people, as I personally view, I mean, I don't know what the average person is turning away from reform for, right?
00:54:41.700 Why aren't they impressed with Nigel Farage?
00:54:43.680 Why aren't they supporting him?
00:54:44.840 Well, I think it's because they've listened
00:54:46.380 to what he's actually got to say,
00:54:47.580 and they don't like it.
00:54:48.660 Yeah, and I think a lot of it is
00:54:50.780 they were like, I wanted an outsider.
00:54:52.720 I think a lot of it is,
00:54:53.640 I didn't want Tories or Labour.
00:54:56.220 And I think...
00:54:56.900 That's what it reminds me of.
00:54:59.400 If you go to McDonald's and get a burger
00:55:01.680 and take the meat out,
00:55:04.120 it tastes of nothing, literally nothing.
00:55:07.980 What they do is you could then put
00:55:09.860 whatever sauce and gherkins and cheese
00:55:11.480 on top of it and all the flavor comes from that other stuff i think the reason why reform have
00:55:16.500 worked is because they've allowed their supporters to project onto them what they wanted oh it's
00:55:23.760 different from the uniparty this is what i want that must be what they're about and he's got
00:55:28.860 nowhere to go because he can't always been his rhetoric his rhetoric is always the one of the
00:55:33.160 outsider yes but but he's got absolutely nowhere to go now because he he can't abandon what he
00:55:38.500 what he's actually for because he's boxed in with the people who actually watch this stuff
00:55:43.280 and pay attention and that's where his support's coming from that's where his institutional backing
00:55:47.320 is coming from um but at the same time he he's got to stop people from actually seeing what he's
00:55:53.380 about but you're not going to do that with all of the attention for the period of the next two and
00:55:58.520 a half years but i don't even know if he can do that because he i i like i said that's why he's
00:56:05.720 boxed in yes completely but i think he's also like what he's done is made a series of choices
00:56:13.260 that made the decline inevitable right because he if if he was saying look i'm not labor of the
00:56:18.520 conservatives and we're actually gonna be a patriotic party that's gonna fix this country
00:56:21.260 well now everyone just sees tories yes backers tory donors tory mps tory councillors whatever
00:56:28.360 and the media is treating him like the tories when he comes out with tory rhetoric is well
00:56:33.360 we didn't raise it as much as the Labour Party would have done so you know vote for us I think
00:56:37.400 that what he's done is made essentially a prison for himself yeah he can't go anywhere else now
00:56:41.700 and it's just going to be a slow decline and so the question is when does Nigel Farage pack it in
00:56:47.420 because yes if you know it's it's averaging 25 now what happens when it's averaging 21
00:56:53.760 well I mean the reason why he was out of this for so long the reason why Richard Tice was running
00:56:58.880 it for so long because it wasn't polling anywhere yep and he thought well i'm just going to go and
00:57:03.680 make lots of money being on gb news yep and doing my i'll go to america to help donald trump not
00:57:09.240 that he wanted it um he's always been very fair weather on this stuff he only as you've said he
00:57:14.500 only came back because he was convinced he was going to win and how long is he going to stick
00:57:19.320 around doing this day in day out this stressful job as opposed to making lots of money it's not
00:57:25.980 going to be for that long well that's that's the question and so i think that the the gradual
00:57:29.800 decline will continue from everything that we can see at the moment there's no reason to think
00:57:34.380 the gradual decline won't continue and i think that when he gets i mean imagine if it goes below
00:57:40.300 20 i think he'll just bounce i think he'll just like yep the slightly more funny thing would be
00:57:45.520 what if he bounces and then robert jenrich takes over and then it improves yeah and then yeah
00:57:49.620 exactly will he do the same thing as he did to that guy in clacton will he come back five minutes
00:57:54.460 before the election and boot generic out and say right i'm in again now that's a great question
00:57:58.480 and i guess it'll stand to be stand to be resolved but uh yeah so anyway um
00:58:03.320 reform seems to have just lost their rears