In the wake of Labour's landslide victory in the general election, what does it mean for the future of the country? Is Britain moving further to the right? Or is it heading in the opposite direction? In this episode, I explain why.
00:00:30.000Labour's landslide shows Britain is moving right. Yes, really.
00:00:34.780Last Friday, British voters turned sharply against the Tories.
00:00:38.300Left-wing parties now control the overwhelming majority of Parliament,
00:00:42.120collectively holding nearly 500 of the 650 seats in Westminster.
00:00:46.660Labour secured a stunning 421 seats, and Sir Keir Starmer is now our new Prime Minister.
00:00:52.920Meanwhile, the Conservatives secured just 121 seats, the worst result since 1761.
00:00:58.820But what if I told you all of this represents Britain moving further to the right?
00:01:03.600Given the statistics I've just quoted, you might rightly ask what exactly I'm smoking and where you can get some.
00:01:09.540But given that the UK is here to legalise the substances you'd need to smoke to endure what the next five years have in store,
00:01:14.900I assure you that my conclusion is the product of a very sober reality.
00:01:18.840To understand why what I'm saying is not just copium for the masses, bear with me as I explain.
00:01:24.600First, the chronology of the last 14 years of Tory government is best summed up in the words of a now former cabinet minister I spoke to a few months ago.
00:01:32.460Here's how he lamented the never-ending stream of challenges that led to this result.
00:01:37.340We were elected in 2010, he said, and we couldn't do what we wanted because we had to form a coalition with the Lib Dems.
00:01:43.560We won an outright majority in 2015, but by the following year Brexit happened.
00:01:48.320We had another election in 2017 and then another in 2019 to sort that mess out.
00:01:53.400We finally put Brexit to bed with Boris Johnson winning in 2019, and within months, COVID happened.
00:01:58.820We made it through that, just, and the moment we were out of it, Putin invaded Ukraine.
00:03:20.300The Labour Party's total votes declined by around half a million from 2019.
00:03:24.940And remember, they've been in the doldrums for years.
00:03:27.200Their vote share was already extremely low.
00:03:29.580In 2017, the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, lost that election with 40% of the vote.
00:03:36.280So how did the Labour Party secure a stonking majority with just 33.7% of the vote a few days ago?
00:03:42.380The simple fact is, this was not an election they won.
00:03:45.560It was an election the Conservatives lost.
00:03:47.460And a big reason why was that millions of the Conservatives' supporters either did not vote or voted for Reform UK, Nigel Farage's right-wing populist party.
00:03:56.480Reform secured a total of five seats, a significant achievement for a new party in Britain's winner-take-all electoral system.
00:04:03.880Farage's reform secured 4.1 million votes, the overwhelming majority of which came from the Conservatives.
00:04:09.740Combined with millions of Conservative voters staying home, Reform's strong showing led to the Conservative vote share dropping from 43.6% in 2019 to just 23.7% a few days ago.
00:04:22.940Reform's modest number of seats conceals a monumental swing away from the Tories, whose voters decided that the centre-right party was simply not Conservative enough.
00:04:31.700How did reform attract these former Tory voters? By being genuinely right-wing.
00:04:36.780Farage's party called for a freeze on non-essential immigration, immediate action on illegal immigration, pro-business policies, tax cuts to get the economy moving, and an end to the suicidal idea we call net zero,
00:04:48.760whereby we outsource our carbon emissions to other countries so we can pretend to be green while destroying our manufacturing and energy independence.
00:04:56.080The country's not moved to the left. Britain now has more of what it has had for over a decade.
00:05:01.840A government and a parliament that are both significantly to the left of the public.
00:05:05.660It will now be governed by a milquetoast centrist PM, as it was before the election.
00:05:09.620Sir Keir Starmer is not Prime Minister because the British people wanted more illegal immigration, crime, and trans women and women's sports.
00:05:16.640He's Prime Minister because that's exactly what voters got from the Tories, and they wanted to punish them for it.
00:05:22.200The country Starmer's Labour Party has inherited is a mess.
00:05:25.000We have the highest taxes since World War II, our debt is as big as our GDP, tens of thousands of job creators are leaving,
00:05:32.560we have illegal immigration running at tens of thousands of people,
00:05:35.820and an economic system based on importing hundreds of thousands of low-skilled, badly-paid immigrants,
00:05:40.800so we can pretend our economy is growing.
00:05:43.480It's only growing by 0.7% despite these valiant efforts at cooking the books.
00:05:48.100Up to 40% of day-to-day government spending goes on our National Health Service,
00:05:51.880but people are waiting longer and longer to see a doctor.
00:05:55.000We have a housing crisis that locks out several generations from ever buying their own home,
00:06:00.140starting a family, or outrunning inflation.
00:06:02.780Infrastructure that is completely inadequate for our rapidly growing population,