TRIGGERnometry - July 09, 2024


Labour's Landslide Shows Britain is Moving Right. Yes, Really. - Konstantin Kisin

Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Guests
Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Keir Starmer Beautiful Noise Nigel Farage Brexit Jonathan Ashworth Sweet Caroline Suella Braverman Boris Johnson Jeremy Corbyn Jess Phillips Steve Hilton Rory Stewart Tony Blair Liz Truss Lib Dems Putin
Rory Stewart： “We’re Living in a World of Fairy Tales” Lauren Southern： The Internet Breeds Dangerous Ideologies

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

186.2

Word count

1,831

Sentence count

97

Harmful content

Hate speech

5

sentences flagged


Summary

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

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.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.700 Broadway's smash hit, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise, is coming to Toronto.
00:00:06.520 The true story of a kid from Brooklyn destined for something more, featuring all the songs you love,
00:00:11.780 including America, Forever in Blue Jeans, and Sweet Caroline.
00:00:15.780 Like Jersey Boys and Beautiful, the next musical mega hit is here, The Neil Diamond Musical, A Beautiful Noise.
00:00:22.600 Now through June 7th, 2026 at the Princess of Wales Theatre.
00:00:26.800 Get tickets at murbish.com.
00:00:30.000 Labour's landslide shows Britain is moving right. Yes, really.
00:00:34.780 Last Friday, British voters turned sharply against the Tories.
00:00:38.300 Left-wing parties now control the overwhelming majority of Parliament,
00:00:42.120 collectively holding nearly 500 of the 650 seats in Westminster.
00:00:46.660 Labour secured a stunning 421 seats, and Sir Keir Starmer is now our new Prime Minister.
00:00:52.920 Meanwhile, the Conservatives secured just 121 seats, the worst result since 1761.
00:00:58.820 But what if I told you all of this represents Britain moving further to the right?
00:01:03.600 Given the statistics I've just quoted, you might rightly ask what exactly I'm smoking and where you can get some.
00:01:09.540 But 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,
00:01:14.900 I assure you that my conclusion is the product of a very sober reality.
00:01:18.840 To understand why what I'm saying is not just copium for the masses, bear with me as I explain.
00:01:24.600 First, 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.
00:01:32.460 Here's how he lamented the never-ending stream of challenges that led to this result.
00:01:37.340 We 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.
00:01:43.560 We won an outright majority in 2015, but by the following year Brexit happened.
00:01:48.320 We had another election in 2017 and then another in 2019 to sort that mess out.
00:01:53.400 We finally put Brexit to bed with Boris Johnson winning in 2019, and within months, COVID happened.
00:01:58.820 We made it through that, just, and the moment we were out of it, Putin invaded Ukraine.
00:02:03.940 And now, we're out of time.
00:02:05.560 This might sound like excuse-making, on a certain level it is.
00:02:08.820 After all, the Tories failed to deliver on most of their key election promises, like dealing with illegal immigration, 1.00
00:02:14.660 cutting legal immigration to the tens of thousands, it was 685,000 net in 2023, building more homes, and so on.
00:02:22.140 But the minister nonetheless had a point.
00:02:23.700 Yanked from event to event, they simply lacked the bandwidth to transform or even significantly improve the country.
00:02:30.200 This long-running disaster would explain the popularity of the incoming Labour Party, right?
00:02:34.800 Keir Starmer must now be seen as the exciting alternative, poised to take Britain forward into a bright future, right?
00:02:40.720 The British public are surely now lining the streets of London, singing,
00:02:44.080 Things Can Only Get Better, as they did in 1997, the last time the Labour Party threw out the Tories,
00:02:49.660 securing a landslide victory under Tony Blair.
00:02:51.760 If any of these thoughts entered your head, I'm afraid it's now my turn to ask what you are smoking.
00:02:57.080 The newly minted Labour government is one of the least popular new governments in British history,
00:03:01.480 having secured just 33.7% of the vote on what was the second lowest turnout in a century.
00:03:07.120 Total turnout in this election was just 60%.
00:03:09.460 Of the 46.5 million Brits registered to vote, less than 10 million voted for Labour.
00:03:14.760 What's more, Labour actually lost voters from the last election to this one.
00:03:19.220 Yes, you heard me right.
00:03:20.300 The Labour Party's total votes declined by around half a million from 2019.
00:03:24.940 And remember, they've been in the doldrums for years.
00:03:27.200 Their vote share was already extremely low.
00:03:29.580 In 2017, the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, lost that election with 40% of the vote.
00:03:36.280 So how did the Labour Party secure a stonking majority with just 33.7% of the vote a few days ago?
00:03:42.380 The simple fact is, this was not an election they won.
00:03:45.560 It was an election the Conservatives lost.
00:03:47.460 And 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.
00:03:56.480 Reform secured a total of five seats, a significant achievement for a new party in Britain's winner-take-all electoral system.
00:04:03.880 Farage's reform secured 4.1 million votes, the overwhelming majority of which came from the Conservatives.
00:04:09.740 Combined 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.
00:04:22.940 Reform'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.
00:04:31.700 How did reform attract these former Tory voters? By being genuinely right-wing.
00:04:36.780 Farage'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,
00:04:48.760 whereby we outsource our carbon emissions to other countries so we can pretend to be green while destroying our manufacturing and energy independence.
00:04:56.080 The country's not moved to the left. Britain now has more of what it has had for over a decade.
00:05:01.840 A government and a parliament that are both significantly to the left of the public.
00:05:05.660 It will now be governed by a milquetoast centrist PM, as it was before the election.
00:05:09.620 Sir Keir Starmer is not Prime Minister because the British people wanted more illegal immigration, crime, and trans women and women's sports.
00:05:16.640 He's Prime Minister because that's exactly what voters got from the Tories, and they wanted to punish them for it.
00:05:22.200 The country Starmer's Labour Party has inherited is a mess.
00:05:25.000 We have the highest taxes since World War II, our debt is as big as our GDP, tens of thousands of job creators are leaving,
00:05:32.560 we have illegal immigration running at tens of thousands of people,
00:05:35.820 and an economic system based on importing hundreds of thousands of low-skilled, badly-paid immigrants, 0.53
00:05:40.800 so we can pretend our economy is growing.
00:05:43.480 It's only growing by 0.7% despite these valiant efforts at cooking the books.
00:05:48.100 Up to 40% of day-to-day government spending goes on our National Health Service,
00:05:51.880 but people are waiting longer and longer to see a doctor.
00:05:55.000 We have a housing crisis that locks out several generations from ever buying their own home,
00:06:00.140 starting a family, or outrunning inflation.
00:06:02.780 Infrastructure that is completely inadequate for our rapidly growing population,
00:06:06.800 and crumbling as we speak.
00:06:08.300 I wrote the Substack article on which this video is based,
00:06:11.820 on a train that was delayed by an hour due to sheep on the tracks.
00:06:15.420 Seriously.
00:06:16.140 It was a cow yesterday, the conductor informed me, with an unapologetic laugh.
00:06:20.220 So things are not good, but they can get worse, and they will.
00:06:24.060 The Labour Party are about to discover that many of the most pressing problems Britain faces are structural in nature.
00:06:29.860 We have an aging population which not only puts huge pressure on our healthcare system, 0.99
00:06:34.060 but also creates the lethal combination of an economy entirely dependent on immigrant labour, 0.97
00:06:39.440 and a population fed up with mass migration.
00:06:41.820 We've got a civil service that refuses to implement the orders of elected ministers,
00:06:46.240 as recent trigonometry episodes with Steve Hilton, Liz Truss, and Rory Stewart have shown.
00:06:50.660 We've got ourselves into an economic straitjacket,
00:06:52.960 in which investment in infrastructure, house building, and public services is essential,
00:06:57.520 but both taxes and debt are already too high.
00:07:00.500 This is precisely why Starmer followed the Ming-Va's strategy during the election. 0.88
00:07:04.840 He said little and promised even less.
00:07:06.500 It may be that British voters will continue to switch from one ineffectual centrist party to another for decades,
00:07:12.400 as they oversee our country's decline.
00:07:14.320 Or maybe the Conservatives will get the message eventually,
00:07:17.240 and move rightwards to win back the voters they lost to reform.
00:07:20.200 But there is another possibility.
00:07:21.820 If my predictions are correct, and Starmer fails to turn the Titanic around in the next five years,
00:07:26.660 this will present one last chance for reform.
00:07:29.220 Why do I say last?
00:07:30.480 Nigel Farage is a very young 60-year-old, to be sure.
00:07:33.460 But by the end of the next parliament, he'll be 70,
00:07:36.420 and there is nobody in his party or in the broader movement
00:07:39.020 with a name recognition or mass appeal to replace him.
00:07:42.100 I appreciate this makes little sense to the American reader,
00:07:44.820 given the candidates your major parties have gone with,
00:07:47.340 but we're still going with a non-dementia policy on this side of the pond.
00:07:50.700 Having decimated the Conservative Party,
00:07:53.080 Farage now has an opportunity to convert current public sentiment
00:07:56.140 into a lasting political movement
00:07:58.040 that could even replace the Conservatives
00:08:00.240 as Britain's main right-of-centre party by 2029.
00:08:04.120 To seize it, he must first peel off as many genuinely Conservative MPs as he can.
00:08:08.800 If he can persuade people like Sola Braverman and others to jump ship,
00:08:12.480 he will be able to make the credible claim
00:08:14.240 that reform is now the home of the patriotic, pro-business, anti-woke right.
00:08:18.640 Remember, over 70 Conservative MPs fell on their swords before the election.
00:08:23.160 Some of them could be enticed back into politics under the right brand too.
00:08:26.740 Secondly, he must become the leading voice of opposition
00:08:29.560 to the country's leftward drift under Labour.
00:08:31.860 Given that Starmer and his team have been saddled with the same major structural problems
00:08:36.100 their predecessors were unable to overcome,
00:08:38.680 discontent with the establishment is guaranteed to go through the roof over the next five years.
00:08:43.240 If reform can position themselves as the credible alternative,
00:08:46.580 they may be able to become the official opposition by the time the country votes again in 2029.
00:08:51.840 Meanwhile, this election offers another glimpse of Britain's bright future.
00:08:55.400 This is the first time in my lifetime when sectarianism has reared its ugly head in mainland Britain.
00:09:01.560 Five Labour MPs were unseated by independent candidates in constituencies with significant Muslim populations
00:09:07.340 who ran on explicitly pro-Gaza platforms.
00:09:10.620 Other Labour MPs, like Jess Phillips, were heckled by anti-Israel protesters when giving their victory speeches,
00:09:16.260 while Jonathan Ashworth, one of the MPs who lost his seat in this way,
00:09:19.940 was harassed in the street during the course of the campaign.
00:09:22.300 Given the demographic and immigration trends and the aforementioned benefit of geographical concentration,
00:09:28.020 by 2029 we're likely to see a number of seats where only Muslim candidates have any chance of winning.
00:09:33.740 A Muslim Party of Britain may be a not-so-distant reality for the Labour Party
00:09:37.560 and the rest of us to contend with very soon.
00:09:40.400 If you enjoyed these videos, you should know that they're available first on my sub-stack,
00:09:44.600 sometimes weeks or even months ahead of time.
00:09:46.760 Click the link in the description, head on over there now and subscribe.